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exists because most information about moving abroad is written by people selling a €5,000 service, and much of it is out of date.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 or places, ever. Every testimonial and interview is a real, named person or it does not appear. No AI-generated “residents,” no synthetic imagery passed off as a real street. Photographs are either ours or credited Creative Commons work by a named photographer — see our photo policy.
• 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 check the number against its primary source, publish the date we did it, and say so plainly when something is still desk-verified rather than walked.

Photo policy

Photographs on this site are one of two things, and we label which:

• Ours — shot on a field visit, dated, and captioned as ours.
• Credited Creative Commons — work by a named photographer, used under a licence that permits commercial use and adaptation (CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC0 or public domain — never NC or ND), sourced through Openverse. Every one carries the photographer, the licence and a link back, directly under the image.

What we never publish is AI-generated imagery presented as a real place, or stock photography dressed up as our own reporting. Until our field days are done, most images here are the second kind, and every caption says so. When we replace one with our own photograph, the caption changes with it.