What a journey to living our dream!
By Margaret Inglesant
Hopefully this blog will show you dreams can come true; inspire you to believe in your dreams; turn them into an achievable plan, whatever the challenges you face. Go for it!
I’ve never been someone who fears a challenge. To me a challenge is an opportunity to be overcome and something that motivates me. I have lived a life of creating challenges, and making changes, to live a better life.
When I sat on a beach with my husband Martin, in 2016, turning our long term dreams into a plan to relocate to Portugal, little did either of us imagine what a challenge it would become in 2020.
We planned to make our permanent move on 1st June 2020. Over the next 3 years we worked fairly smoothly through our plan and moved ever closer to achieving our dream. Our plans were tweaked and honed, but the biggest change was our budget and house ownership plans.
While viewing houses, we agreed to view something at double our budget!!!!
And as a result, in December 2019, we downsized in the U.K. and upsized in Portugal. We sold our family home and bought a 2 bed flat in the U.K. to rent out. In Portugal, we sold our much loved apartment and bought a 6 bed villa in need of a bit of a TLC. We’ve had to tweak our financial plans, but it’s exciting too, as we plan to rent out some of the rooms on a B&B basis and I plan to develop my Coaching business, running Coaching retreats.
In 2018, I’d bitten the bullet and taken Voluntary Redundancy from a stressful job, that I no longer enjoyed. Working long hours, although over 4 days, I’d battled too hard, for too long, with my employer, to work more flexibly, that I ended up feeling undervalued and disillusioned. Several years earlier I’d set up Inspire UK as a side hustle and I’d always planned someday to work as a Coach, which is my passion. Redundancy payments gave us a financial cushion for the rest of the year. But business didn’t develop as quickly as I’d hoped, my lovely Mum passed away just a few weeks after I left my job and I decided to give myself a break for a few months, which ended up being pretty much the whole year.
Through 2019 I worked hard, networking, trying to develop my business and things were starting to look more promising, gaining clients and new prospects for 2020.
In Jan 2020, we decided to push our final moving date back a month or so and instead planned several visits to Portugal, during Spring 2020, to get everything ready. This meant living in our tiny flat for maybe 6/7 weeks longer, but it also meant we’d get to see our daughters, and grandchildren, for a little while longer.
In February, things were moving along nicely. The majority of our furniture and belongings were shipped out, so we were living with limited clothes and personal things. We flew to Portugal for a week, officially became Portuguese residents and secured our tax status ready for when we made our move. We started to plan the work needed on the house.
And then POW we were blindsided!
In March 2020, like everyone else when Covid hit, our future became uncertain. The biggest downside of this was that we couldn’t have that extra time with our daughters and grandchildren.
My Coaching business fell off a cliff, as my clients tightened their belts. For the next few months I gave free coaching to people who needed it, but couldn’t afford it, and I ran free Zoom sessions to help keep others motivated. By June I decided to sit my business to one side, while I focused on our move.
We’d booked flights to go to Portugal in April and June, which obviously were cancelled. As summer loomed we had no idea when we could move. All our summer clothes and shoes had left the country. Luckily, we had nowhere to go, so didn’t need to buy too much extra. We found it really difficult not having a garden, living in such a cramped space, and perversely knowing we had such a large house thousands of miles away, empty and deteriorating, desperately needing TLC.
We needed to be bold!
With Brexit, legislation and residency changes looming, we set our moving date for mid October.
Our second shipment of furniture was sent at the end of August. With a brief reprieve from lockdown, we managed to get to Portugal for 2 weeks to receive our shipment and get workmen organised with work, before autumn started. Then, two days before we left back for the U.K., Portugal was taken off the travel corridor which meant we had to quarantine for 14 days, once again leaving us less time to see our family.
Not to be beaten, we used the time to get our flat ready for rental and found some lovely tenants. We learnt about how to become landlords and the legislation surrounding this. We shipped out the last of our belongings and moved in with our daughter, her partner and our granddaughter, in Cayton, for a few days before we left.
And then Covid threw us yet another curveball!
The hardest part of the move, by far, was our leaving date. We had planned to spend our last days in the U.K. with our other daughter and her family in West Yorkshire, but Covid had struck in their household. We still had to drive to their house, as she was buying our car. Saying goodbye to our daughter, son-in-law and two grandsons, through a window, was heartbreaking. It was so lovely to see them, but we were distraught that we couldn’t spend some time with them, nor of course hug them.
Fast forward to 2021…..
We’ve now lived in Portugal for 4 and a half months and, like the U.K. ,we’ve spent most of that in lockdown. Life in Portugal is a much slower and more laid back way of life. Imagine the Spanish mañana mentality and then double it! But this is one of the reasons we came here, we love it!.
We have managed to get some of the major works on the villa completed and more. Work has been tiresomely slow and drawn out, due to tradesmen not turning up; not enough of them; not having the materials or because of the unusually bad weather we’ve had this winter. The villa wasn’t just lacking in TLC, parts had been left in quite a bad state, just camouflaged, and in some areas was really quite dangerous. This has caused additional work, and cost, but we’re working our way through it. Positively, lockdown is giving us the chance to get on with work, without other normal distractions, such as going to the beach, restaurants, bars, shopping etc., so it’s keeping us focused.
What I really have found difficult to cope with is the lack of communication. In the U.K. we are so polite and reply to people, even if it’s a late response we still do it.. Here I’ve found very few people acknowledge emails, messages or phone calls and fewer respond to questions. This doesn’t always mean they’re not dealing with it, just they’re not telling you. They don’t like to tell you bad news, so then just don’t communicate. I’m sure it’s not the whole of the population who behave like this, but, so far, I haven’t met many that don’t. I’m still waiting on a phone call from an engineer arranged in August!
Unexpectedly, I find myself having to deal with behaviour that women in the UK faced 40 years ago. It’s definitely still a man’s world here, especially, it seems, with the older generation. I speak Portuguese, so it’s been me dealing with most of the trades and services and it’s clear that some of the older men really feel uncomfortable dealing with “the woman of the house”. We had conversations with one ‘professional’, where I was asking most of the questions and he answered my husband and ignored me! At times I feel like I’ve gone back to the 1980’s in the North East Even my bank card is in my husbands name! Thankfully, times are changing and the younger generation seem more enlightened.
And what does the future hold?
We hope to have some rooms in Villa Azul ready to rent out this summer and I’m now working back on developing Inspire. 2022 will hopefully be the time to start running Coaching retreats at Villa Azul, bringing in other professionals too, to run their retreats. We might even be persuaded to rent out the whole villa from time to time while we have a holiday….…
You can keep up to date with our progress on the villa by following us www.facebook.com/VillaAzulAlvisquer
If you have dreams that you’d like to turn into a plan and need some help with this then contact me about my Coaching Services, that’s exactly what I do. I help people achieve outcomes, whether that’s for Professional or Personal Development.
You can find out more details about Inspire here www.inspire-uk.com or just pop me an email coaching@inspire-uk.com or give me a call 07985635291
If you’re starting to think of a safe summer holiday abroad, once flight paths open, where’s there’s miles of sandy beaches, fabulous restaurants and of course glorious sunshine then get in touch. We’d love to have you stay with us at Villa Azul..
And if you’re a professional interested in hosting Coaching Retreats then get in touch soon.