Our method — published, so you can hold us to it

This site exists because most information about moving abroad is written by people selling a €5,000 service, and much of it is out of date. These are the rules we operate under. They are not marketing; they are testable.

The rules

• Primary sources only for load-bearing numbers. Thresholds, tax rates, deadlines and legal requirements are cited to the Diário da República, AIMA, Portal das Finanças, the IRS, the SSA, or the treaty text — not to other blogs.
• Every page carries a “last verified” date. Automated monitoring watches the underlying sources daily; when one changes, the affected pages are flagged and corrected, and the correction is dated.
• We publish the downsides. Portugal ended its pension tax break. Citizenship takes 10 years now. Winters are cold and damp in unheated housing. If a fact makes the move less attractive, it stays on the page.
• AI is used, and disclosed. Research monitoring and first drafts use AI systems. Every published number is checked against its primary source, and pages covering tax or immigration are reviewed by a licensed professional before we treat them as final. Pages still awaiting that review say so at the top.
• No fabricated people, ever. Every testimonial, interview and photo on this site is a real, named person or it does not appear. No AI-generated “residents,” no synthetic footage presented as real places.
• Money, disclosed per page. We earn referral fees from some services we link to — always disclosed next to the link, never hidden in a footer. See how we make money. We do not accept commissions tied to investment products, including Golden Visa funds, under any structure.
• Corrections are public. When we get something wrong, the fix is dated on the page, not silently edited.

Who is behind this

Honestly Abroad was founded in 2026 by Maxim, a Dutch entrepreneur living and running businesses in Portugal, working with an AI-assisted research pipeline and — as the site grows — named, credentialed reviewers: a US expat-tax professional for IRS and treaty pages, and a Portuguese advogado for immigration pages. We are not lawyers, accountants, or immigration consultants, and we do not give individual advice. What we do is go to the place, check the number, photograph the receipt, and publish the date we did it.