A research project · Sintra, Portugal
I'm writing it now, and I need to hear from people who have actually done this.
There's a chapter of this book I've deliberately left unfinished.
It's the one about what the first two years actually feel like — the stretch somewhere after month seven when the admin stops being charming, your Portuguese is good enough for a transaction and nowhere near good enough for a friendship, and the people you've met are lovely and none of them knew you before.
I could have written it. I've made this move myself and I know the shape of it. But I'd have been writing it as a straight man who arrived with a family, about an experience I haven't had, in a book whose whole argument is that being seen accurately matters.
So I left the texture out, and I'm asking for it instead.
A book for LGBTQ+ Americans moving to Portugal — the financial and practical layer that the existing material doesn't reach.
Most of what's been written on this subject stops at is it safe? There are good articles about Portugal's legal protections, its Pride marches, its ranking on various indices. There is almost nothing about what happens to a beneficiary designation you made in 2006, or how Portuguese inheritance law treats a chosen family, or what health insurance actually costs at sixty-eight, or who will be treated as your spouse in a care home in twenty years.
Those are the questions I get asked in my practice. They're the ones the book is about.
It'll be published the way my last one was, and it will be sold. I say that here rather than three screens down, because you're about to decide whether to spend twenty minutes on a stranger's project and you should know what the project is. If you answer the survey, the book is yours — I'll email you a PDF copy when it's finished, whether or not you'd buy it otherwise. There'll also be a free planning checklist, not behind anything, for people who want the practical layer without buying a book.
I'm Mark Moberg. I'm a cross-border financial planner based in Sintra, and I've spent twenty-five years doing this work — the last stretch of it almost entirely on the US–Portugal corridor. Tax sequencing, estate planning across two legal systems, retirement income, the D7. I hold the CFP® and CBDA® designations, and I wrote The Life Arbitrage, which is about why financially prepared people don't act on the life they say they want.
My family and I made this move ourselves, from Florida. I did the AIMA queues, learned the language badly, and went through the stretch in the second year that nobody warns you about.
As I said at the top: I'm not a member of your community. What I have instead is narrow and specific — what happens to a financial life when it crosses this particular border, and twenty-five years of watching people decide whether to cross it. Where the book needs something other than that, I'd rather ask the people who know, quote them, and say plainly where my own competence ends than write it from imagination.
That's what this page is for.
Which one depends on where you are. Both are anonymous, and both let you decide afterwards whether anything you wrote can be quoted.
How you decided, what you were afraid of, what turned out to be true, how you found your people, what the money actually looked like, and what you'd tell the next person.
There's an optional section on the financial side. It's the part nobody asks about and it's the part I most need.
Start Survey AWhat's drawing you, what's in the way, what you've been able to find out and what you haven't.
If you've been researching this for three years and still haven't moved, you are exactly the person I want to hear from.
Start Survey BNot vaguely. These are the specific places where the manuscript currently has a gap that I cannot fill from my own desk, and where your answers go directly.
They're anonymous unless you choose otherwise. I don't ask for your name. There's an optional email box at the very end, after everything else, and nothing before it.
You decide whether you can be quoted, and how. There's a question near the end with four options, from quote anything anonymously to please don't quote me at all. Whatever you pick is what I do.
You can mark any single answer [private] if you want it to inform my thinking but never appear anywhere.
If you leave an email, it's attached to your answers. That's how forms work, and I'd rather say so than imply otherwise. If you want to be completely anonymous, skip that box — and if you'd still like the PDF, email me separately at mark@greenoceanglobal.net and your survey stays unlinked.
Nothing here goes to a mailing list. There are two tick boxes at the end: one for the PDF of the book, one if you'd be open to a longer conversation. That's all they do.
I'm not collecting clients. I do this for a living and some readers will eventually become clients — I'd be lying if I said otherwise, and you'd be right not to trust me if I did. But this isn't a lead form, there's no follow-up sequence, and nobody from my firm will contact you because you answered it.
So you're selling this.
Yes. It's a book and it'll be priced like one. Answer the survey and you get a copy — that's the exchange, and I'd rather put it in plain words than let you find it out at the till. The planning checklist will be free to anyone who wants it, survey or no survey.
Is this going to be another "Portugal is a gay paradise" piece?
No. There's a chapter in it about the three bills the Portuguese parliament advanced in March, what they would do, and what the checks on them actually are. A book that reassures you about a country without mentioning what you can find in ten seconds yourself isn't worth anyone's money.
Why should I give a financial planner my financial information?
You shouldn't, and I'm not asking for it. The money section asks what surprised you, what cost more than you expected, what you wish you'd known — patterns and ranges, not balance sheets. Skip it entirely if you'd rather; the rest of the survey still helps.
I moved and it didn't work out. Is that useful?
More useful than anything else I could receive. If you came back, or nearly did, or found it lonelier than you were promised — please tell me. That's the account the book is missing.
I'm trans. Is this book actually for me?
There's a section of the survey specifically for trans and non-binary respondents, and it asks about documents, banks and AIMA rather than about your body or your healthcare — because the paperwork is the part I can write about competently and the rest isn't mine to narrate. If I can't do that chapter properly, I'll say so in the book and point readers somewhere better.
If you'd like to share this with your members, I'd be glad of it — and I'd rather you read it first than take my word for it.
Two things worth being straightforward about. This is a commercial book, not a free resource — but anyone who helps with it gets a PDF copy of the finished book at no cost, and the companion planning checklist will be free to anyone at all. And there's a chapter on the March 2026 bills and where they stand, because a book that skipped that wouldn't deserve your members' attention.
Email me at mark@greenoceanglobal.net and I'll send you the full question list before you decide. Happy to change anything that lands wrong, and happy to credit your organisation in the acknowledgements if you'd like that.