Of course if you moved a couple years earlier and got NHR your pension tax would be 0%.
Worth taking into account when listening to people who moved earlier describe how ācheapā Portugal is. Their situation is no longer reproducible.
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Yes, less tax would be nice. But it is still cheap all the same. You can buy two big fresh fish and a decent bottle of white for a few Euros and enjoy them on your patio. You can sit in a pleasant bar and drink spirits all night and not worry about the bill. Your money does go a very long way. Looking at value for money i dont begrudge the tax.
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Personally, I am three years, four months since submitting my GV application and investment. No residence card. No idea when itās coming.
And from reading the stories of others and browsing the PGV / ARI timeline tracker on this website, Iām actually one of the lucky ones because my application has progressed through more stages than most others in my Dec 2021 cohort.
Before investing EUR 500,000, itās worth at least reading about the experiences of the dissatisfied customers of the same program on this thread:
Personally, if I could go back in time, I wouldnāt invest in PGV, and if I could pull my money out now and receive my original investment back, I would. Instead, I would invest in programs that have a clearer path and higher probability to yield results, and avoid like the plague any program with excessively high visibility, popularity, or political exposure. This means avoiding not just PGV, but also Malta MEIN (which yesterday got shot down by ECJ), Greece GV, Malaysia MM2H, etc.
These less-visible programs may require slightly more initial effort from the applicant, but the reward is smoother processing and much lower risk of delays or program reversal. Just as in most European cities, the area immediately surrounding the main train station is one of the least pleasant parts of town, but if you make the effort to walk outside of that area, youāre immediately rewarded, so also with migration programs, if you make slightly more effort to avoid the āeasy wayā or the crowded gate, your life gets much better.
BTW, although this is anecdotal, a friend in the D7 program mentioned that its physical presence requirements are actually rather flexible if you can prove you have a business to run outside Portugal, so that may be worth checking.
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Iāve also seen people in the Americans and Friends PT page saying it was very loosely enforced during Covid, but is more strictly enforced now, soā¦
My friend is in the D7 program now and has been saying that this year. Perhaps the right documentation and reasoning is needed.
Did you friend actually get the advanced permission from AIMA to stay out longer, or just saying itās possible in theory?
He is a D7 holder who is currently spending half the year outside PT. I thought it was strange, but he said he got permission and that the requirements were flexible for business owners.
Half a year outside is one thing, but enough time outside to avoid tax residency (like GV allows) seems harder to pull offā¦
Appreciate your comment and I really feel your frustration.
It is really difficult to realise how brutal & time-consuming the process is unless we are actually in it. One thing to keep in mind: āgrass looks greener on the other sideāā¦
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I hear the same story from lots of peopleāBrazilians, South Asians, etc. A lot of the people that came on MI.
Anecdotally Iām also hearing a lot more complaints during this recent immigration wave about people not trying to integrate or respect Portuguese values at all than what Iāve heard in the past. From this perspective it could almost be seen as a positive thing that those unwilling to integrate eventually moves on to other countries.
This is still entirely true, however.
This statement aged like milk 
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Maltaās program is so lucrative for the state, especially compared to the small population it supports, they will find a way to fix it. Maybe theyāll add a citizenship test, increase the duration until citizenship is awarded, increase the time-in-country to something similar to New Zealandās updated program, maybe even make it cheaper to compensate for the new requirements (please!), but no way Malta doesnāt continue to have a program.
Simple hack: allow all Malta residents to apply for naturalization after just 1 year. But, the processing time for citizenship is 15 years. You may pay $650k to expedite the process 
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For certain the time frame was not clear in his head.
However, how many discussions have we had here about people not realizing how long this takes? What is a kid from Brazil going to know about the truth? The thing is, the truth doesnāt matter; he was acting on his beliefs not truth, and that action has consequences, and thatās what weāre talking about here, the knock-on consequences of a bunch of people not having any clue about the truth.
This really is the fix across the board, because itās what the EU is fundamentally objecting to, IMO. Citizenship is supposed to mean something. There is a shared european consciousness, and the idea is to become a part of it to at least some extent. Real boots-on-ground is one test, learning a language is another, learning history is another. The point I think is that you have to try, make a real effort, not just write a check. Look at the amount of time people here are spending learning Portuguese. Itās non-zero effort, and itās difficult not to learn at least a little about the culture and such in the process.
Iām not saying that money isnāt involved, but it needs to be just one piece. Governments and special interests care about the money. People care about the other bits. It should involve both.
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That is a highly charitable interpretation of the EUās intentions.
The EU has continued to bang the drum of ācriminalsā as a supposed serious threat posed by investment migration programs despite the thorough background checks conducted by all such programs with EU accesss in recent years (with the possible exception of Vanuatu). Anyone involved in investment migration, including those in Brussels making such claims, knows that ācriminalā is a false charge.
Why would they continue to make obviously false claims? Simply put, itās xenophobia. Right-wing EU xenophobes know that the majority (by numbers) of applicants to investment migration pathways are Chinese, South Asians, Africans, Russians, and now also Americans. These are exactly the kinds of immigrants by whom such xenophobes fear being outnumbered and subsumed. With such immigrants, there is perceived to be both a difference in values and often a difference in physical appearance.
But this is the quiet part; it does not sound nice to non-right-wingers to say this plainly out loud, so for cover, the right wing recruits the left wing, to whom āsolidarityā demands preserving the rights of deserving locals from āexploitationā by international capitalists. Now that there are fewer voices than anytime in recent history from the center to counter the right and left wing narratives, the EU government is increasingly captured by extreme sentiments.
Bottom line, they donāt want this type of immigration, and they especially donāt want these types of immigrants to be able to skip to the front of the line.
My prediction is, Malta will try to reboot their program with reasonable accommodations for both investment migrants and the EU position, but the EU will either continue to pursue Malta via ECJ lawsuits or other pressure tactics until the program is no longer attractive to investors or a more convenient political scapegoat is identified ā Portugal Golden Visa, perhaps?