He could have done his D7 alone. Here’s why he didn’t.

Daniel’s D7 visa application was one of the most thorough we’ve seen: about 500 pages, with a summary sheet on top of every section.

He took it to his visa appointment in Cairo in March 2026. The visa was approved in June, and by late July he, his wife and their cat were living in Porto.

Daniel isn’t his real name. He was happy to tell us his story but asked us to keep his identity private, so we’ve changed his name and left out anything that could identify him.

Cesar, who managed his case, told him on our call that he was one of the most organised clients he’d worked with. That’s why his answer to the obvious question is worth hearing. Why would someone that thorough hire anyone at all?

Portugal said yes

Portugal wasn’t Daniel’s first attempt. He had applied for talent visas in two other European countries, and both turned him down.

He took it as a lesson. “Being rejected from both programmes led me to be really diligent with the requirements,” he said. From then on he checked every requirement himself.

The rejections also settled the question of where. Daniel describes the choice as having two sides, the practical and the emotional. Even if Sweden had offered him an easy route, he said, he wouldn’t have been excited to live there. The south of Europe was different. “It’s the feeling you get in Greece or Italy or Spain. You get the same exact feeling here in Portugal,” he said. For him it comes down to the culture and the people. Walking down a street in the south of Europe feels different from walking down one in the north.

Why a very organised person still wanted help

Daniel found us online. He started small, with Portuguese tax numbers (NIFs) and a bank account for him and his wife, and was happy with how fast they came through. A few months later he came back for the visa itself.

He’s honest that he thought about doing it alone, and that part of him would have liked to keep the money. But the questions never stopped coming. “There are a million questions, and AI doesn’t solve it,” he said. “In fact, it can sometimes make your life harder, because it’s just wrong.”

He still uses AI. For a file like his, though, he wanted a person: someone who is both a lawyer and has done this many times, so they know how the system really works. For him that was Mariana, our immigration lawyer. “It was a good call,” he said. “It was very helpful to get her input on all kinds of details.”

Five bank accounts and a summary sheet

The ideal D7 applicant, as Daniel puts it, is a pensioner. The same amount lands in the same account every month, and the story is obvious to anyone reading it.

His wasn’t like that. His passive income comes from investments, and the money moved through five or six different accounts. “Whoever’s looking at this, if they’re not trained, will either be suspicious or confused,” he said.

So he and Mariana built a system. Every section of his file got a one-page summary sheet on top, explaining what the reader was about to see and how it connected to the rest. Mariana also advised him to keep more in his Portuguese account than the minimum, so no one reviewing it would have any reason to doubt it.

The smaller problems kept coming too:

• His FBI background check came back with a typo in his name. It was never reissued. He dealt with it by flagging it up front, with an explanation letter from the service that handled the check.
• Portugal likes documents that are signed and stamped. Printouts from US online banking aren’t, so he got formal letters from his bank and his broker instead.
• He paid $250 for his tax records from the IRS in the official form, even though he could have printed the same numbers at home.
• Our team spotted a mistake in his lease before the appointment and got it corrected. “How could I know that?” he said.

“If I had to do all of those things on my own, I would be second-guessing myself all the time, on every single detail,” he said.

“There are a million questions, and AI doesn’t solve it.”

The appointment in Cairo

Getting an appointment took months. The booking site kept showing no available slots, well into January.

When the day came, the 500-page file caused a problem of its own. “I think I was overwhelming to them,” Daniel said. The staff had limits on how much they could scan, and nobody could tell him what would happen to the rest. One staff member didn’t accept that his brokerage tax documents and his IRS documents belonged together. He didn’t argue.

He’s careful to be fair about it. “They weren’t rude,” he said. “But they were uninformed and untrained. That was very clear.” To him the real problem is the system, not the people in it. You hand over your documents and hear nothing, with no timeline and no updates. “It’s just a black hole.”

The embassy held his passport and his wife’s for more than three months. He had paid to have the passports delivered, and they never were. In the end he collected them himself. The visa was approved on 29 June, 106 days after the appointment.

Porto, with a cat

There’s no direct flight from Cairo to Portugal, so they flew through Germany with their cat. The first EU airport is where the pet checks happen: the papers, the microchip, the stamp. Next on the list is a European pet passport from a vet in Porto.

The cat had already shaped the flat hunt. Daniel flew to Porto in February to see places, and a lot of landlords refused pets outright. The advice he got was practical. If the contract doesn’t say “no pets” anywhere, you can move in with one, as long as you pay for any damage.

He found a place, and settling in has been relatively easy. “The first four or five days were tough,” he said. After that, Porto was an easy place to settle into, easier than Egypt and easier than other parts of Europe he knows. He says he already feels a sense of community there.

What he’d tell the next person

We asked Daniel what he wished he’d known at the start. He didn’t hold back, which we appreciated.

Not every document he needed was clear at the start. Some, like the letter from his US bank, only came up along the way, and finding out late caused a lot of stress. He’d have liked a master plan up front. That’s fair, and it’s what we’re working on now: a document plan that clients get when they start, built from cases like his.

His advice to anyone starting a D7 is the same thing that got him through it. Use expert help, but don’t hand over your thinking. “You know your situation better than anyone,” he said. “Go through every requirement and every potential problem up front.”

And on the help itself: “It was a lot of work on my side. But you made it much, much easier, because there’s an expert you’re working with. Every time I asked a question, I got a detailed reply.”

“Daniel” is a pseudonym, used at the client’s request. Images are illustrative. His quotes are lightly edited for clarity. Every application is different, and consulate requirements and timelines change. Novomove is a relocation technology platform that coordinates licensed Portuguese lawyers, not a law firm.