What I Wish I’d Known Before Moving to Lisbon With Kids

Nobody tells you the truth about moving abroad with children. They tell you it will be character-building. They tell you the kids will pick up the language faster than you. They tell you it will bring the family closer together. All of this is true. None of it prepares you for the morning your seven-year-old is crying in a school bathroom because she cannot understand what the teacher is saying, and you are twenty minutes away with no car and a phone plan that does not work yet.

We moved to Lisbon in 2019 with two kids, a shipping container of furniture, and what I can only describe as confident ignorance. We had done research. We had spreadsheets. We had a folder on my laptop called “The Plan” that I look at now the way you look at a photograph of yourself in a haircut you thought was a good idea.

We landed in Campo de Ourique. Good neighborhood. Quiet, residential, tree-lined streets, a market on Tuesdays, the kind of place where people actually know their neighbors. We did one thing right. Here is what we got wrong.

We Did Not Sort the Schools Before We Landed

Portugal’s public school system is free and perfectly functional. It is also taught entirely in Portuguese, which our kids did not speak. This is not a surprise. What was a surprise was how fast we needed to make a decision and how little time we had to make it.

International schools in Lisbon are good. They are also expensive and have waitlists. The Carlucci American International School costs around €16,000 per year per child. St. Julian’s in Carcavelos, which is the school most American families eventually land on, runs about €14,000 and fills up fast. We got lucky with a mid-range private school in the neighborhood that had an English stream, but we nearly did not. Three weeks before arrival we were making calls with no guarantee of a spot.

The lesson: sort the school before you book flights, not after. Talk to families already in Lisbon on InterNations or the Lisbon Expat Facebook groups before you decide on a neighborhood, because in Lisbon the neighborhood and the school are the same decision. Cascais, thirty kilometers west of the city, has King’s College and St. Julian’s and is where most British and American families end up for exactly that reason.

The First-Year Budget Was Wrong By About Thirty Percent

We used Numbeo to budget. Numbeo is accurate about ongoing costs: groceries, transport, eating out. It does not capture the cost of setting up a life from scratch. The apartment deposit was three months rent. We needed furniture gaps filled. Our American appliances did not work on European voltage. The school required a registration fee plus a non-refundable assessment session plus a meal plan plus transport. Each one of those was a line item we had not planned for.

A family moving to Lisbon should budget their first year at roughly thirty percent more than their steady-state monthly cost suggests. This is not pessimism. It is the arithmetic of starting over.

Lisbon itself is not cheap the way it was in 2015. A two-bedroom apartment in Campo de Ourique or Estrela runs €1,800 to €2,400 per month now. Parque das Nações, the modern riverside neighborhood in the east, is slightly lower and has good international schools nearby. The Algarve is cheaper if you can work remotely and do not need to be in the city, but that is a different life.

Your Kids Will Be Fine. You Will Take Longer.

This one stings a little but it is true. Kids adapt. They complain, they resist, they will absolutely tell you this was a terrible idea, and then six months later they have friends, they know the neighborhood, and they cannot quite remember the name of their teacher back in Ohio.

Adults are slower. Adults have identity wrapped up in being competent, in knowing how things work, in not needing to ask for help. Moving abroad strips all of that away on day one. In Lisbon you will not know if you are reading the pharmacy sign right. You will not know why the landlord is upset about something that seems reasonable to you. You will stand in a checkout line and not understand whether the cashier asked you a question or made a statement.

The fastest cure for this is finding people who are six months further along than you. They remember what confused them. They will tell you things nobody writes down. Most neighborhoods with any expat density have regular meetups. We found our footing through a group that met Thursday evenings near Principe Real. It made the first winter survivable.

Healthcare Is Not Automatic

Portugal’s public health system, the SNS, covers residents. Getting registered with a local health center takes time, and the wait for a specialist appointment can be long. Many expat families carry international health insurance for the first year while they establish residency and get registered.

Dental care is mostly private in Portugal, even for residents. A routine checkup and clean runs €60 to €100 at a Lisbon clinic, which is reasonable. More complex work, crowns, implants, or cosmetic treatment, costs close to Western European rates. Many expats in Lisbon make a habit of handling bigger dental work in a lower-cost country when the bill starts to climb. That is a topic for another post.

For insurance, Cigna Global and Allianz Care are the two most commonly used options among American expat families in Portugal. Neither is cheap. Both are considerably cheaper than one uninsured hospital visit.

We would do it again. We have done it again, twice, in different countries since. But we would show up with less confidence and more information, which is a trade I will take every single time.

More on what those first five years actually looked like in the next post.

— Phil