Is this a good time to move to Portugal

Hi @milkshakesbore0b,

The world as it is now, I don't think any place is stable... Portugal's main problem today is housing. Rental and purchase prices are very high in the main cities. The problem has been made worse at pos pandemic by the rise in Euribor interest rates and the short supply of houses on the market to meet demand. There are some protests, but far fewer than in your country France. There is a large community of French people, both pensioners and families. There are also some strikes by public school teachers. But if you choose private schools, you won't have this problem.

Regards

@johnnyPT many thanks for your reply !

i completely agree, the world has changed.

i anticipate things to hopefully get better if the housing is the main issue and given that people are leaving Portugal (as I heard).

also the fact that NHR is ending soon should regulate the influx. unless I am missing something.

thanks again !

    Hi @milkshakesbore0b,
The world as it is now, I don't think any place is stable... Portugal's main problem today is housing. Rental and purchase prices are very high in the main cities. The problem has been made worse at pos pandemic by the rise in Euribor interest rates and the short supply of houses on the market to meet demand. There are some protests, but far fewer than in your country France. There is a large community of French people, both pensioners and families. There are also some strikes by public school teachers. But if you choose private schools, you won't have this problem.

Regards
   

    -@JohnnyPT

I agree with Johnny,

All European countries are stable enough, they are not going to go bankrupt. But there are issues all over the place with a shortage of housing and with that rents are high. Look at the UK, Germany, and Austria for example.

Yes, it seems that NHR is coming to an end. We just don't know when and if ??.... I don't think even if PM knows that for sure... of if it was just a hardly thought phrase thanks to 8 years of his government... ...

@SimCityAT thanks !

@milkshakesbore0b

Depends where you're moving from

Quality of education: my daughters have been in public schools for almost 2 years here. Bullying, almost no homework (grades 3-4 and 4-5), disinterested teachers (not covering the curriculum, browsing on their phones during classes while kids make paper planes), disinterested or lazy kids, teachers giving the correct answers at tests to their pupils (I guess to show how good the results are, therefore how well they teach), strikes after strikes...

We only understood how bad public schools are when one of my daughters switched to a private one this year (the younger one will switch next year too). Now everything's again the way we felt it should be: real homework (and a lot of it!), real tests, no strikes, and they're finally really learning something.

Quality of healthcare: family doctors and specialists who are not able to figure correct diagnosis or necessary investigations (fortunately I was a physician myself for 35 years and I was able to gently and respectfully ask whether or not they think it could be this or that diagnosis and whether or not they think one test or another would be necessary - and only after seeing that they were not even considering very obvious - to me at least - issues), horrible waiting times for anything (naive me, and I thought Canada was bad!!!), from family doctor consultations (> 2 months) to surgery (waiting for urological surgery for 7 months now, and my place on the waiting list has essentially been unchanged for at least the last 3 months, varying somewhere between 91st and 105th - last week I was 92nd, this week 97th), strikes of course... In the end I understood that my turn for surgery will probably never come, so we applied for private health insurance, which at least means a wait time of no more than a year. It was one of our biggest mistakes that we didn't do that from the beginning, because so many were praising the Portuguese healthcare system. I guess they forgot to mention it was the private one...

Don't misunderstand me, there are enough good things about Portugal too - and that's why we're still here and we'll continue to be here at least for the near future - but public education and healthcare are not among them.

So there's my two cents here regarding your main points (education and healthcare). You can decide for yourself...

Yes, public education and public health have worsened substantially in recent years. Especially given the large number of immigrants/expats, currently +1 million, who have contributed nothing to the public system, and who want to benefit from public services. Ten years ago these services were much better... This is also happening in the UK, Germany,..

Public school teachers are misbehaving and their demands may be valid, but the forms of struggle are reprehensible. All because of a new teachers' labour union that uses radical methods...

Public health is experiencing a wage problem, which is leading doctors to prefer the private sector. Not even the majority of portuguese wait for surgeries in the public sector, only those who really can't afford it. And more than half already have health insurance.

@ctomac thanks for sharing your experience and sorry about all this.

so if we choose private schools and healthcare I suppose we should be fine ?

I am talking about Porto specifically.

In the news this weekend, I read that in 2023 - already - Portugal processed 300,000 immigrations.  (That seems like such an absurdly high number that I tried to find the article to double check it, but can't.)  The country isn't that big, to absorb that amount without fairly severe consequences.  Most of them, by far, are from Brazil, but also a big surge this year from Ukraine, and many from UK.  WIth population growth, a percent or two makes the difference between healthy growth and catastrophe.  Housing, other resources that can't be quickly augmented to meet needs.

I'm sure that isn't the only thing that contributes to cost of living problems for health care and education workers.  Yes, they're striking.  And they're quitting.  I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the details, but occasionally will see reports of hospitals, maternity wards etc. that have to close for staffing shortages.  When cost of living gets bad ... I don't know, are there a lot of examples out there when it has gotten better?

And back to immigration - they have 347,000 immigration cases pending.  What to do?  A mountan of work that they couldn't possibly dispose of in any kind of short term, so ... in classic top management style, they decided "let's have a re-org!"  I reckon that's going to mean a short term collapse of whatever feeble efforts they've been making.

If you really feel like Portugal is where you belong, I guess it's a good time to come.  If it's just a practical choice of good public services, it does make sense to have some second thoughts.

@donn25 many thanks for these relevant details.

I am not sure neither about the situation in Portugal. My intention isnt to use the public services either. if anything I would be paying taxes and social security contributions but will use the private sector for both education and healthcare. I am considering Portugal because of the quality of the private education and healthcare mainly for my son. At least my impression of it when I visited the schools and the hospitals. I am based in malta and here the overall quality is very low.

I guess maybe another question would be : where would you go if not Portugal ?

very good education and healthcare in a country that doesnt tax you up to 50 per cent is the question ?

As the economy takes its toll on the public services, it's bound to affect the private sector too.  I'm not saying things are a shambles here, it just may not be as ideal as it may have looked even a year ago.

Private schools and health services in Portugal have good / very good / excellent quality services.

Regarding public schools, we need to understand the following. There are public primary and secondary schools with more than 30 different nationalities (in Lisbon there is a primary school with +70 different nationalities), many of these children don't even understand/speak Portuguese. How can we demand excellent teaching with dedication and homework from children who belong to very different social backgrounds, many of them with enormous difficulties at home, immigrant parents, unemployed, with problems of all kinds, many of these children don't even have breakfast at home?.. "Our" realities are not the realities of others... and at public services we can find all of them.

Unfortunately there is differentiation in teaching. It shouldn't be, but it is. The demands of private and public education are different. I know what I'm talking about, I always studied in public schools, the teachers had different demands, but those were different times. It wasn't the reality as it is today.

@milkshakesbore0b

You should be OK with private schools and health insurance.

Access to private schools is not easy, mind you! We, for example, were initially hoping to enrol both girls in the French School in Porto, but they did not have place for them. So we went with a private Portuguese school (which just happens to have been the best in Portugal last year) where the fees are reasonable and teaching very good.

Health insurance is also not so expensive (that was one of the reasons for us to leave Canada - one of the three countries in the world where private healthcare is forbidden by law! The other two are Cuba and North Korea - Canada is in great company there).

    Private schools and health services in Portugal have good / very good / excellent quality services.
Regarding public schools, we need to understand the following. There are public primary and secondary schools with more than 30 different nationalities (in Lisbon there is a primary school with +70 different nationalities), many of these children don't even understand/speak Portuguese. How can we demand excellent teaching with dedication and homework from children who belong to very different social backgrounds, many of them with enormous difficulties at home, immigrant parents, unemployed, with problems of all kinds, many of these children don't even have breakfast at home?.. "Our" realities are not the realities of others... and at public services we can find all of them.

Unfortunately there is differentiation in teaching. It shouldn't be, but it is. The demands of private and public education are different. I know what I'm talking about, I always studied in public schools, the teachers had different demands, but those were different times. It wasn't the reality as it is today.
   

    -@JohnnyPT

I don't quite agree with the excuses you try to find above for public education.

Firstly, kids learn a language very quickly - my daughters were almost fluent after less than 6 months. Their vocabulary may not have been as rich as the locals' but they didn't require the teacher to speak to them in any language other than Portuguese.

Secondly, blaming teachers' indolence on difficulties with language or breakfast is false. The situation is exactly the same, for example, in Canada, where there are a lot more immigrants per population than in Portugal. In the end each class has a very small number of immigrant children, who, like I already said above, catch the language superfast.

So those are not really valid arguments to justify poor public education. It's more related to poor income and lack of hope - something like people used to say many years ago in Romania: "they make believe they pay us, we make believe we work".

    Yes, public education and public health have worsened substantially in recent years. Especially given the large number of immigrants/expats, currently +1 million, who have contributed nothing to the public system, and who want to benefit from public services. Ten years ago these services were much better... This is also happening in the UK, Germany,..
   

    -@JohnnyPT

That, too, is not entirely true. Lots of immigrants actually pay taxes (including our family - we did pay taxes in 2022, we do pay VAT, etc.) So it is not true that we, or others, do not contribute anything.

Thank you so much to all, this is very enriching to exchangw views and is definitely helpful for me as I am trying to make the best decision for my family's future.