We are Ian and Fabrizio,
We are a couple,
Fabrizio is originally from Rome and lived in London from 1997
Ian from Birmingham and moved to London in the late 80s…
We are former Londoners living in Lisbon since 2018…
But why?
In 2017, we were happily living in South London, in a great apartment.
However, neither of us are old, but then we were not young either.
We realised that within the next 20 years, we would be retired…
Neither of us wanted to get old in the first place for sure…😊
But surely neither of us wanted to get old in London….
So we started to think of a long term plan for retirement, which would involve a move, and lay the groundwork for our departure.
We decided to look around and invest in another property so that we at least had a foot on the property ladder.
But, with the decision not to stay in London, where…?
We are both from urban areas so it clearly had to be a city, and so that was our initial focus.
We then ruled out most of the Northern European cities, and for family reasons, did not want to move outside of Europe in general.
In recent years we have lived very close to “Little Portugal” in SW London, and this had led to several visits to Portugal during 2010’s.
We had come to love Lisbon and found it a lively place, and so we thought… maybe a small apartment that we could rent out either short or long term could be the key, as like most cities, prices were on the rise.
Of course, there was a reality that started to creep in at this point.
If we rented this new property out, what do we do if anything happens?
We know no one, and we have little knowledge of the local market, there is the language barrier, etc.
One day we woke up to a moment when we said
“We have lived 20 - 30 years in London, why wait to get old? Why not go now “…
Yes, we have had the dream of retiring, but what about making the change when we are still fit and healthy to enjoy it.
We came to the conclusion that we were realistically sitting down and planning a future when the only way to make things happen was to transform the planning into action and the future into a present...
Surely all was helped by the fact that we both worked remotely, therefore we could take our jobs with us wherever we were.
This started an unstoppable chain of events.
Few years on from that decision, we are here. We have been out of London for more than 3 years, and living in Lisbon.
We are more serene, we have more friends, a great apartment in the centre of town, a more humane lifestyle and an overall better quality of life.
We know that it has not been easy, there are difficult challenges out there to be faced but we have faced many challenges already and things are getting easier.
Discoveries about ourselves as human beings and about our surroundings are a daily dynamic, not a day passes by without a new challenge that leads to a resolution that makes us grow.
The routines have transformed into a journey of discoveries, we became more empowered by it all.
we often drive to the beach after our working day and talk about it all, and we can barely believe to our present reality
We learned how to be more grateful towards what our destiny is giving us by taking action towards changing it...
We barely look back, because we are often too excited about what is ahead...