My theory is that automatic renewal is here to stay. SEF is overburdened even with automatic renewal, so it would be self destructive of them to force manual renewals again.
Not that SEF is above it, but I am going to assume they like having less work to do rather than more, for the same amount of renewal fees.
I was in love with Portugal, but I can clearly see that I am not welcome. With a heavy heart I pulled out my investments and it has given me some peace of mind. I hope you guys succeed in your quest. Itâs just too much for me and Iâm not willing to live with additional uncertainty for another 5+ years.
How did you pull out? I assume you werenât in a private fund?
I was reflecting on my Portugal experience (both GV and the rest of it) just the other day.
I think Portugal has a special purpose in this worldâŠ
I feel itâs a country that tests people in a certain way, and not everyone would pass this test.
If newcomers react in a certain way they get too nervous, anxious and pull out.
But if they âpassâ this test, they break through to a previously unknown level of serenity. They learn to take the delays and uncertainties with a chilled and relaxed attitude that they never knew could be possible in such circumstancesâŠ
They just getting us used to the âna proxima semanaâ mindset early on.
Like your comments very much!
It kind of sounds like youâre describing the island from LOST.
Ravi, you took a good decision. Some of us didnât know much about the whole process. We therefore went blindly and we are facing the reality. I will wish to back off for another program but it appears late since I have already committed some resource for that
The latest info I have seen (from my attorney and from my GV fund managers) indicates that we will indeed be converted to the D2. Exact mechanism or timing not yet finalized, but will likely happen in coordination with visa approvals/renewals.
I feel your pain. The other day I was reminiscing about how all these countries that exploit us immigrants. EB5, Portugal golden visa etc. These are life savings for us trying to get us and our kids to a better place, but they treat us like some tzars who have no care for the money.
These governments could have safe guarded the investments, by adding time limits, make investments depended on getting the golden visa or some insurance for the investments, but they let us deal with shady immigration consultants, careless lawyers, dishonest investment companies instead.
Oh the cruelty of extending the lock in period for everyone by a fund company. Real estate would have been the best investment, as look back now. There is no dependency on any institution to get your money back. Coincidentally that is the only investment that the government blocked.
Such cavalier attitude towards us. No plan on how people in each stage will be dealt with( applied, Pre approved, final approval, card issued, etc). No plan on how D2 conversion will be done. At least, they could have made a rule forcing all the investments companies to break the lock in, since they are applying retroactive changes.
Everyone shouting , âthe golden visa is going to close, get in immediatelyâ. I feel sorry for people who run head first without knowing what they are getting into.
Treating people from different countries differently. Chinese, Russians etc. If they had no hand in atrocities committed by their country, why would you penalise them? Just make your process better. They might just be trying to run away from the exact tyrants that Portugal is trying to penalise.
If it was not for a friend, i would have done the same mistake of investing in something else. At that time, I wanted stability so badly, I didnât think about adverse consequences, delays, changing mind and a lot of the things that unfolded in the past 2 years.
I wish I could something for the plight of economic immigrants. We are not running from a conflict, we are just looking for better life, stability and future and these countries treat us like insects.
Portugal broke a promise, I donât see how it can be trusted anymore. If they can do this, which I never thought a country could do, they can do anything.
they could provide insurance for your investment
Bro
Cmon
Fundamentally misunderstanding the point of the golden visa
Let me clarify. Iâm not referring to market risk here. Itâs institutional risk
Among other things, youâre just completely misunderstanding the structure of the program. The government has no say in the various investments you couldâve chosen
Your claim then that real estate was the best investment you could have made instead is just goofy
Like yes Portugal has handled the golden visa badly on their end but itâs not their fault you or other people pick bad investments that are hard to get out of.
There are a lot of valid complaints about Portugal, but I donât think this is one of them. They didnât âletâ you do this, you chose to do it. It isnât their job to police the internet and shutdown immigration consultant websites, nor to ensure lawyers do a perfect job.
But I absolutely share your complaints about all of these things. It is quite a racket and everybody is siphoning money off of GV applicants, for questionable returns.
I would disagree, this should be the job of a govt.Canada already does it https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigration-citizenship-representative/choose/authorized.html. Even this doesnât prevent all misinformation, but keeps it to minimum.
If a govt doesnât do this job, there is no way that an individual investor would know every intricacies of the system. https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2017-87
@ravi has a point in that there should be better process for vetting and rooting out bad or corrupt professionals. I think having an approved provider list and a way to file complaints against bad behavior would be nice, but should not be a substitute for oneâs own due diligence. Itâs not exactly a panacea for all the problems of the GV.
Please understand first of all, that I do have sympathy for your plight. It does truly suck.
This is a topic I have addressed multiple times before, maybe it is time to do so again. This isnât meant as a slap-down or any such - itâs just a view from the other side. I doubt it will make you feel better, but itâs not meant to - itâs meant as a cautionary tale. In an ideal world, @tkrunning would take something like this and post it right on the top of his guides to PGV etc. Granted I have not read half the material so maybe it is there.
I think this is the key point here. These programs are encouragements for people to take risks in investing in the country. Not programs to assist foreigners to migrate - only their money. Otherwise why the minimal stay requirements in the first place?
Of COURSE thatâs not what got marketed by the various immigration firms. But thatâs what they are, under the hood. See later on about false advertising.
Generally, I doubt that any government has even thought about any of your concerns in creating these programs. Economic migration, life savings? I donât think that was ever the target market. The target market was indeed those with lots of money and capable of making investments that involve risk.
10 years ago, investing in Portugal was a significant risk, even for real estate investments. Who knew if theyâd be worth anything at all later on? Even now. If you wander around Portugal, you can see these huge looming half-finished projects which are monuments to people who lost a lot of money and will probably never get it back. One of them is literally on the shore of Lagos, one of the hottest places to build now. As of last year, it was still there. It has 3-4 different faded signs on it announcing âsoon to be completed !â. The grave of 10s of millions of euros. Unless you put boots on ground and investigated your real estate, you were gambling. You were probably still gambling, you just had a better idea of the odds.
I hope to get my money back. The odds seem decent. I donât assume it though.
Things might be different now - but you still cannot mistake Portugal for Germany or the US. Investing in Portugal IS still a risk. Consider the risks you have taken with the government itself. Membership of the EU is no guarantee of good and efficient and non-corrupt government. Ask anyone in, say, Greece or Bulgaria. And there are still plenty of ways to lose everything.
And let us remember, to the average Portuguese citizen making EUR 1000-1200/mo, anyone whoâs scraped together EUR350k is rich as heck. Losing all your money just means youâre back to where they are now. How much sympathy can you expect?
Even on this board I see many many people like you investing their life savings into these programs. I want to scream at the top of my lungs âYOU ARE TAKING INCREDIBLE RISKS!!! DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO!!!â or something like that but it seems like a pointless exercise. 
These are the risks of private equity investment. This is true of everyone in every private equity fund everywhere. It doesnât matter that you are a citizen of the rich country - you take the same risks. And if you read this board, you find that lots of citizens of rich countries have made the same mistake as you - assuming that a private equity investment plays by the same rules as a listed investment. It doesnât. The risks are huge, and you are to great extent at the mercy of the management company.
Of course, how are you to know that. Who was going to tell you? A bunch of us in the earlier tranches of NG struggled for a long time doing investigations into these funds and how they work and figuring out what the risks were. It was a massive slog. We only had each other. And we started with at least base knowledge about investing in markets and first world legal structures.
That isnât really an option, at least in any way that would help you. These companies/etc will generally have committed the funds to some investment/activity, which is now depending on the money. Say, they started a building project. Or invested in a startup. The money is as gone from them as it is for you. How can they give it back? So even if the government tells the fund to break the lock-in, then what? You are no better off. Obviously this is situation-dependent on the fund but this will be true of most cases. And you cannot assume that the fund managers are huge money-bags with the money laying around to give back out of their own pockets. And if they are, you can also assume that they have enough money to lobby to avoid that outcome.
I do despise this. I despise a lot of the marketing around these programs, much of which makes it sound like some guaranteed path to citizenship when it is not at all. I have written about this extensively here. Alas, bad advertising exists the world over, rich country and poor. Advertising that is not truthful, or at least very incomplete. I too feel sorry for those captured by it. I can vaguely understand how painful it is to be duped. I will say âvaguelyâ because I also freely admit that the overall-life-cost to me of being duped is very, very, very low by comparison.
I am guessing that the reality of your situation is that you have taken many significant risks to accumulate enough money to attempt an âescapeâ (for lack of a better word). I can understand your hope for a lower risk escape. Alas, you have to keep taking risks, gambling with your life, however sucky that might be. I am sorry.
Quite possibly true - though I donât really know that it has yet, it has just been amazingly inefficient (even by Portuguese standards, though someone applying for a driverâs license or utente might disagree), in turmoil (read the news though, the PS is a hot mess), and incredibly unclear, unless you consider âa safe, reliable pathâ to be something that was promised - which the government never really did so much, only the advertisers did. (Some will disagree with this last.)
Alas, youâve learned a hard lesson. Or at least the beginnings of one. It sucks.
It would be nice if the government were more efficient and did more to protect investors and make the GV program run efficiently. There are certainly many things it could do. However, it doesnât. It canât manage to do any number of other things efficiently either. I donât think anyone there even expects it to - just ask the person standing in line waiting for the cashier to check out the person in front of them, who has decided it would be a good time to take a few minutes to chat with the elderly person who is living alone now and could use a friendly face and a bit of cheer (true story from AFIP). So we can rail against it all we want⊠and nothing will change.
I would note that Canadaâs motivations are explicitly different. They WANT people to move there. They have to motivate people to move there - itâs cold and snowy and much of it is pretty empty and itâs not exactly a major destination for immigration. They have a specific interest in that experience being good.
Also, Canada is well-governed, on the whole. That doesnât describe most countries.
Besides, Canadians are just generally nice people.
Agree strongly with all of this, well put
The craziest thing is ravi was invested in IMGA, which is doing great, and had already completed biometrics in a non-lisbon office! I donât understand bowing out after the majority of the wait is over.