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Just read the thread from beginning to end,
thanks Orca for your intimate and enlightening comments.. and i hope all is well with you and Mrs

I just did the same thing. Slow Friday in Cape Town..

Wow, what a roller coaster this year has been for you guys 
All the best for that full recovery!

Orca, when the chips are down how do you cope? I hope for you that mrs's health improves

Quote from: bw on October 24, 2017, 03:32:50 pm

Orca, when the chips are down how do you cope? I hope for you that mrs's health improves

I'm not at all religious but I prayed for the first time in my adult life as did a hundred friends and family. I also thought I was like a cowboy as they only cry when their horse dies. I shed some tears with our girls when things looked dire and this made us stronger as a family and we can beat all odds together.

This is all behind us now and at the rate of her recovery she would be back to normal in a month. 

Hi Orca - glad to see your wife's health is improving - all strength to her and you and the family in this difficult recovery process

Orca your story is inspiring and just shows that when you find yourself in a position against all the odds there is still hope and being positive is the way to go! Great stuff and I hope all continues well in her recovery.

I've always had an affiliation with Spain as I've been all over the country mainly when in my 20's and living in the UK it was easy to get there for holidays but Portugal sounds very interesting and must admit somewhere like Porto would appeal to me and be good to get a cost of living scenario what are rental prices like? Any info would be great!

Go well 

I forgot about yozzi's question as to expenses so here goes:

I pay €375 for a fully furnished 2 bed flat and it is modern.

My rent plus utilities plus TV, unlimited internet and food amounts to €580 pm. This does not include entertainment as it differs with lifestyle.
A car is not needed here as public transport is great.

I forgot about yozzi's question as to expenses so here goes:

I pay €375 for a fully furnished 2 bed flat and it is modern.

My rent plus utilities plus TV, unlimited internet and food amounts to €580 pm. This does not include entertainment as it differs with lifestyle.
A car is not needed here as public transport is great.

Thanks Orca and that rental is excellent nearly 3 times cheaper than a 2 bed, 2 bath apartment close to the beach here in Blouberg and not furnished either! So all in all that's a really cheap cost of living

Hi Orca, I've been trying to work out how to receive your posts to my email but I'm too doff!!  Please help . tx rond

I don't think it can be done and I don't post much anymore as we are pretty much house bound with my wife's feeding tube. I have to give her 150 ml water every hour as she tends to get it into her lungs if drinking orally.

Radiation and chemo therapy does get rid of cancer but not the cancer stem cells. They can remain in remission for many years and to keep it in remission I have to pump soup into her with lots of cayenne pepper, turmeric and cumin. She can eat bland food as her taste buds are overly sensitive.

She has picked up 11kg since leaving hospital and climbs 83 stairs down the flat and back up unaided every day. This is a great improvement as she could not lift herself up 1 step unaided 2 months ago.

Learned one very expensive lesson with emigrating. Get a good chartered accountant that does cross border tax and emigration in SA and one in your new country. I have been through 5 accountants and a tax lawyer. The tax lawyer here in Portugal got me sorted.

I went cheap and hired independent tax accountants. The first one was a cross border chartered accountant registered with SAIT and SARS. He did my 2014 tax. We left in June 2014. He assured me that once I have officially emigrated via SARS and SARB then no Exit Tax or further CGT is payable. WRONG or perhaps he was referring to the Exit Tax for the rich like Mark Shuttleworth who had to pay 10% Exit Tax.

There is a difference between Exit Tax and Departure Tax. Departure Tax is CGT that you pay when you emigrate and all your investments are "Deemed as sold" on the day of emigration and bought at the same price the day after. This readjusts your base cost to a "clean slate" in your new country for tax purposes.

Your accountant will file your tax for the FULL year for the year of your departure and it will include the "deemed sale". You will pay your normal tax plus the CGT on the deemed sale up to the date of departure. The rest you will pay according to the DTA. 

Once this is done you can close your SA tax books via a procedure that I can explain in another post.

Preamble done.
So we arrived here in June 2014 and hired a cross border charted accountant in Lisbon who studied at WITS and worked for PwC SA. He assured me that if I apply for the Non Habitual Residency regime I will not pay tax for 10 years. Once again.....WRONG. CGT is excluded from this regime.

Not knowing that it is excluded I sold my winning stock CML and made well over R1m gain and was hit with a whopping tax bill. Tax on share gains is a fixed rate of 28% here and is a separate tax.

Tax in Portugal does not follow the 183 day rule but you are taxed from the date of intention to stay like a rental agreement even if it is signed on the last day of the tax year you will be taxed for the full year.   

As I am a freeloader and a cheapskate I researched and sent emails to every tax website I came across to get me out of this shite.

The only one to answer was a tax lawyer in Portugal. What he stated is very important. LOOK AT THE DTA.
The DTA between SA and PT clearly states that CGT from shares is only payable to the country where one is resident.
As you cannot be tax resident in two countries at the same time my deemed sale took place in SA and I was not yet resident in PT. So the CGT from the deemed sale will be taxed at a much lower 13% in SA compared to 28% here.

This will save me over R300k. So do your homework before you leave.