SLIGHTLY over dramatic.
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We have indeed chosen the cultural heritage / arts path, although I find it difficult to recommend a non-refundable GV option nowadaysā¦at least a house can be resold and a fund can be divested from!
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Yeah, thatās a good point! You might lose some time and transaction costs, but itās indeed less risky from that perspective.
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Donāt forget the imga fund Thomas.
My lawyer is in the same boat as the rest of them, donāt worry since youāre already applied and especially donāt worry because I invested in a fund
She also says itās likely Costa is basically grandstanding and it wonāt go anywhere. Weāll see
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This last minute rush to apply for the program now isnāt helpful to anyone already approved. It is just adding fuel to the fire. Of course, people always want what they canāt have so the rush to apply is to be expected, but quite dumb. Costa announced in November the program was endingā¦where were those people then? I know the lawyers and promoters are saying anyone who applies now is fine. Maybe, or maybe not. It certainly smells of opportunism. I canāt say I blame someone from applying but I would not want to be in that position right now.
As for the āmore housingā plan, I hope it works. But where is the government going to find the money and workers to restore hundreds of ruins into livable housing units. At least with the inflow of GV money there was plenty of money to keep those processes going. It seems a much smarter approach to this would have been to mandate that any future GV funds MUST be strictly for low-income housing meeting the āmore housingā requirements. Instead of vilifying people who love Portugal and want to make Portugal better, why not use them as a resource?
In my local newspaper there were 3 articles today about how a certain group of people were mistreated by another group. This identify politics warfare is so unhealthy. The United States politicians have mastered the art of identity politics and look where it is leading the US.
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Yeah, it would be a great idea to redesign the program in a way where the GV applicants were contributing to a solution to the housing problem, not being part of it. At the end of the day I suspect the total closure of the program had little to do with housing.
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Good points abcā¦
This next link will probably provide some āfactory/building site fodderā but for the life of me it seems nuts - just going to add to the housing shortages/create more slums/add more tagging & graffiti/depress wages:
Portugal to grant "protection status" to immigrants - The Portugal News
But of course, one could probably guess in which direction most of these new burghers will vote, and what their skill levels will be ā¦
Overall, there seems to be no āmaster-planā - just short-term/knee jerk political opportunismā¦
I wonder if the recent addition of online / easy renewals is a longer term part of the plan to phase out the GV. Requires very little human resources, just a website that accepts large payments every couple of years. Then the government can say, look, we are already winding it down!
Perhaps online renewals will stick around until everyone in the program āages outā via permanent residency or citizenshipā¦
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I hope so ohbee, at least we might then get back ātowardsā the promised 5 years to citizenship spielā¦
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True enough. Easy EU citizenship without real residence is potentially also likely to die. That was also something an outlier and Iāve been a shade concerned about that as well. That said, I suspect that throttling GV will serve the purpose at least for a while. But really, for many people, PR may well be good enough to purpose. It just depends on your purpose. On the whole Iāve been lowering my sights cross the board.
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@tkrunning, thanks for sharing! We were initially planning to purchase a house but due to the time constraints are now looking onto Mercan Groupās and other companiesā projects. How reliable are they? Do we have anybody in this community who invested with them and got approved for GV? Does it make sense to use their in0house legal services (anyhow independent will their legal opinion be?)? If anybody can share their experience with Mercan projects, that would be great!
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If you want a quick and easy investment that is transparent, open ended, and low fee, check out the IMGA aƧƵes fund
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Itās super common in the US and other countries to say there is no housing shortage, and to essentially scapegoat investors. Gee, I wonder why people are investing in a good with inelastic+growing demand with a legal supply limit
As Iāve said before, an actual solution to this is to make it easy to build new housing. It seems a very questionable investment due to laws preventing construction and also laws preventing you from making a profit on your constructed building. So of course not much is built.
The govāt announcing it wants to cut red tape is good news, but from the other side of the language barrier itās hard to tell how serious they are.
As for labor to work on repairs/etc, plenty of immigrants happy to do the work Iām sure.
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For those that have applied, does the apostilled FBI Background Check have to be submitted with the initial application? Just trying to think through the timing here.
If you were equipped to make your investment today (so you already have Tax IDs and a Bank account) in an effort to attempt to get an application in before the law changes (whether that is on March 16, March 30, or much later), then it sounds like the FBI Background check apostille could be the killer as Monument Visa is showing that it will take 6-8 weeks turnaround. So, if that document is necessary to submit the application with the hopes of being āgrandfathered in,ā then it is virtually impossible for any US Citizen to submit the GV application before March 30.
Is this logic correct?
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Yes, apostilled FBI background check is required to apply afaik
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In the reading tea-leaves department, the local newspapers are loaded with articles, from the PT POVā¦
here and here to point at a couple. Note, these may well be behind paywalls, and yes, require one to read PT (or - pro-tip - cut & paste PT text into linguee.pt and get a reasonable translation - or use chatgpt to translate)
Point being that this may help understand things from the localās POV. Not that this helps the GV crowd (and my guess is weāre all painted with a broad brush) but may help understand what the government is/not doing. Likewise, seeing articles about Chega (far right party in PT) arguing for cultural literacy tests for immigrants, it helps to give a sense of the forces at play that the government is trying to balance.
FWIW and yours in frustration,
Lou
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I think so, but donāt quote me.
I only had to do 350k EUR when I applied in 21, so I suspect 500k is correct now. Ask a lawyer
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Monument/DoS may be moving a bit quicker these days. Mine took exactly six weeks from fingerprints to docs in hand on 9 Feb, and someone else in these forums recently reported a four week turnaround.
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BPI Portugal is an alternative for non-US persons. They were super efficient when I made my investment. YMMV
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