>>2802660 (OP)I lived in Portugal for a year in Lisbon so I'll weigh in.
First, assuming you mean 10k USD/year this isn't a lot of money and will barely get you by so you'd need some kind of local income, but okay lets pass on that for now and say you can afford it.
Portugal has several problems. The housing crisis is worse than anywhere I've seen. My tiny apartment in Lisbon rented for 900 USD/month a few years ago, it was a closet, about 400 square feet, in an old building, with no insulation. The landlord was dying when I left and sold the place for 250k. It sold instantly within one day on the market. This was 2022.
The job market is basically a who-you-know nepotistic slugfest. You get jobs by knowing people and thats it.
Jobs pay nothing, just enough to get by, taxes are absurd. A minimum wage worker pays something like 25% effective tax on their income. I knew people that couldn't afford to travel from Braga to Faro because the train tickets were too much for them, they literally had never seen the other side of their own country.
Nothing gets done. No one works or has any working mindset. People will do anything to get out of work and there's incompetence at every level. Everything takes MONTHS to get done. I met a woman from the UK. She had PR. She said from the day she applied for PR to the day she got her ID card in the mail saying she was a PR was TWO YEARS. And they spelled her name wrong on the card.
Its a retirement home. The country has so many old people when you notice it you'll never un-notice it. It's like living in a retirement home. All voting, planning, thinking centers around these old people and what their needs are.
My personal opinion: the country is quite one dimensional. Beaches and bars and fish, its great. But it gets old. There's two seasons, hot and sunny or cloudy humid and surprisingly cold. It gets old after awhile.
