Hi! I have my D7 visa and am moving to Portugal soon from the U.S. I can’t find a clear answer about whether I can ship my belongings over before I get my residence card or not. I’ve gotten conflicting information from different shipping companies. The baggage certificate form on the consulate’s website seems to indicate that a visa is enough but I really need a definitive answer. Does anyone know for sure? Thanks for any help you can give me.
I am not aware, nor experienced the requirement of needing your residency card before you can ship your belongings to Portugal. When we moved to Porto in March 2023, we shipped our crate using YouPakWeShip and completed the shipping arrangements before we even had our visa. Our belongings arrived to our apartment in Porto about 3 weeks before we had to return to the USA (May 2023) to have our Visas placed in our passports. This was three years ago. Many things have changed on both sides of the Atlantic, so my advice would be to gain guidance from a reliable immigration agency which has been “on top” of the various changes.
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We, also, shipped our goods long before acquiring a residency card. As a matter of fact, I still haven’t had a residency interview with AIMA. We also used UPack/WeShip. It worked for us as all goods enter Europe through Rotterdam and eliminate much of the red tape by not entering through Portugal. Household goods/personal items are exempt from taxes within your first year of arrival. In addition, UPack provides door-to-door delivery of goods. We’ve been living in Portugal since October, 2023, without a residency card. As always, though, verify this is still the case.
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Wow! Thanks for sharing your experience with me! You’re the first person I’ve heard from who did things this way.
This is super helpful. Thank you. We’ve been considering going this direction, but it means bringing much less stuff. I’ve learned that they ship crates through Rotterdam, but containers through Portugal. We were planning to ship our stuff in a shipping container, but maybe it’s time to rethink that. I’m sorry it’s taking you so long to get your AIMA appointment. When we got our visas, they gave us appointments, although they’re scheduled weirdly. Our appointments are on the same day, at about the same time, but in three different locations. Oh well.
We also had dates with AIMA but our passports containing our visas and dates were lost by FedEx when returning them to us. We end up having to get new passports and visas … without AIMA interview dates.
We ended up using three “crates” but wished we’d brought more. Aside from the packing trama the shipping went very smoothly. We looked at the container shipping but decided it was much more hassle for us