Reading · Expat in Portugal

In January of this year, I wrote a post called AIMA Confused, which recounted the experiences of a number of friends who had attempted to renew their residency cards in late 2025. In February, I provided updated advice, with the assistance of Relocate to Portugal (RTP). We began navigating the system ourselves in April. Today, I will let you know what we did and how it is going.

Okay, I’ll admit it. We are wimps … or I should say I am a wimp. Generally speaking, banking, finances, and residency issues are my responsibility for our household. And while I pretty much handle most of the banking and financial issues on my own1, I rely on Relocate to Portugal when it comes to residency. It was relatively easy 3 years ago. We checked a box on the SEF website and waited for our cards. But, of course, things are a bit “tighter” now, and having heard the challenges friends had encountered, I didn’t even think about doing it on our own. Instead, we called Nilse!

Nilse explained the process RTP uses to assist clients with renewing residency permits. RTP offers several options, from a phone call and documentation on what you need to “do it yourself”2 to a full-blown “make it so Danno” approach. We chose the latter. While I am happy to discuss the process they use with you one-on-one,3 today, let me share the list of documents we needed to retrieve so Nilse could “make it so”:

First, we needed to address everything that had changed since our last renewal. In our case, this included address change, addition of SNS number and SSN to our card, as well as my new passport number. I provided all these details to Nilse, and one by one, she submitted the changes to AIMA. As the AIMA system received this data, it verified the information by sending a code to our email. This meant that we needed to be available to receive the code and then immediately provide that code to Nilse. (I want to personally thank the creators of smartphones and WhatsApp, as we were able to complete this process while walking to the beach!) While our cards do not expire until 4 August, we completed this process in April.

If you hate paperwork as much as I do, this qualifies as “heavy lifting”.4

Also in April, we collected the documentation required and uploaded it to the system RTP has created. As we own our home, this included:

Photo of the front and back of residency cards
Proof that we own our home, including a document called the Declaraçao de Alojamento (which RTP provided), which we needed to sign, a Certidão from Finanças, which I think showed we paid our taxes, the Caderneta Predial Urbana (also from the Finanças website), which basically describes your house, our deed, and a copy of a utility bill.
To satisfy the proof of income requirement, we provided my Social Security statement from the IRS.gov site and a copy of Denise’s military pension statement. 3 months of bank statements would also be required … but I waited to download these until the day we submitted the paperwork.

As we have private health insurance, in addition to a screenshot of our information on the SNS website, we included a copy of our private insurance.
The most annoying part was providing every f$%king page of our passports. First, our HP scanner has a mind of its own, and you can’t autofeed 50 pages (most of which are blank) of a US Passport. Of course, AIMA has a size limit, so at first I reduced the quality of the image to save space. But that became unreadable. So after several failed attempts, I scanned every f$%king page, and Nilse compressed the file.
There was a document Nilse provided that we needed to sign and scan, authorizing Portugal to do a criminal background check.
And finally, we included a copy of our CIPLE certificates in hopes that we could apply for Permanent Residency at some point in time.5

On 5 May, the portal became available for August renewals. However, at that time, we were in Egypt, and it did not allow us to register on the portal from outside the country. However, Nilse was in Portugal … God bless her.

Shortly after our return, we received an email from AIMA instructing us to make a payment. We did that immediately! We then got an email explaining we could now upload the required documents. We (yes, Nilse was a big part of the we) uploaded all the documents to the AIMA website. Within hours, we received another email confirming their receipt. The email included a QR code, which provided a 6-month extension of our cards. (I guess we should assume the card won’t arrive before 4 August.)

On 15 May, we received an email from AIMA explaining that they had received all the documents. At that time, Nilse estimated that an “approval” email would follow in 4-8 weeks and then the cards 4 weeks later. We are closing in on 8 weeks and nada. Through a text exchange with Nilse (I apologise for texting her while she was on vacation … I honestly did not know), I learned that the more recent experience is 60-90 days to get the “approval” email.

So it seems clear we won’t get the card before the current one expires. Of course, we have travel planned in late August. Concerned that we might receive an envelope from CTT that requires our signature in our absence, I have paid a local attorney to create the Portuguese equivalent of a Power of Attorney. If CTT attempts to deliver the cards while we are gone, our dog-sitter will take the form CTT leaves to Linen Ana at the store on the corner. With the POA in hand, she can retrieve the cards before they are sent back to the dreaded black hole.

So what do you think? Have things gotten better? I realize many do this on their own6. Did you? Let me know in the comments below.

AIMA Wondering

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