Part 1: Why We’re Even Considering Residency — and Why We May Be Doing This the Hard Way

We didn’t arrive in Albania with a firm plan to apply for residency.

We arrived the same way we’ve arrived everywhere else over the past couple of years: with time, curiosity, and a habit of staying long enough for the romance to wear off and the reality to show up.

At this point, we are not residents.
We are not immigration experts.
We are not selling a solution.

What we are doing is trying to understand is what it actually looks like for a retired American couple (we’re going to use ‘American’ here to refer to people whose primary citizenship in the the United States of America) to apply for Albanian residency without hiring a lawyer or facilitator.

We’ve been surprised by how difficult it’s been to find clear, experience-based information that explains the process without sales pitches, or secondhand assumptions.

This series documents our approach to learning about how to apply for residency in Albania as pensioners, starting with why residency even entered our conversations, why we’re approaching it as DIYers stepping through the process ourselves, and what we’ve learned so far.

For clarity: in this series, we are specifically exploring the retirement (pensioner) path to residency in Albania.
We are not applying under business, investor, real estate ownership, employment, or digital nomad categories, and we are not evaluating those routes here.

Why Residency Is Even on Our Radar

If you’re new here, a little backstory will help explain how Albania quietly became more than just another stop on our travels.

In late 2022, we made the decision to choose a different future without fully knowing what it would look like.

We knew we wanted to move out of the USA but didn’t know which country. (We also learned that we probably wouldn’t qualify for residency in most of the places we wanted to explore. )

So throughout 2023, we sold, donated, and gave away nearly everything we’d accumulated over 40 years, then set out in November to test-drive a fully nomadic life – living abroad, on a budget, one country at a time.

Ironically (as I sit here writing about this process in December 2025) it was December of 2022 that we first contemplated and made the decision to become nomads… go figure…)

Our early plan was straightforward: stay 30 to 90 days at a time in places with comfortable weather, manageable humidity, and a cost of living that wouldn’t chew through our savings.

We’re retired, not independently wealthy, and while Social Security is in our future, the short term is funded by savings – so affordability matters, but so does comfort.

Albania first landed on our radar for purely practical reasons. As U.S. passport holders, we can stay up to 365 days without a visa, and the cost of living – especially housing – fit comfortably within our budget. Bonus: quick trips to the rest of Europe would be affordable.

What surprised us was how quickly Albania felt like home. (It’s a vibe thing – hard to explain)

Only after living here for seven-ish months and settling into routines, moving between cities, did we realize that settling down doesn’t have to mean staying put year-round.

Could we establish a home base and continue to travel?

After all, if we love a place but don’t love it’s weather year round, we can simply leave during those months and travel elsewhere (right?!)

That shift – from “fully nomadic” to “mobile with a base” – is when the question of how to apply for residency in Albania started to feel relevant.

At that point, practical questions naturally followed:

• Do we like it enough to live here?
• How stable do we want our housing to be?
• What changes if we want to lease longer-term?
• What happens if healthcare, utilities, or local systems become part of daily life?

It’s something we’re considering, not something we’ve decided we need. But understanding the process feels like the responsible place to start.

Why We’re Doing This Without a Lawyer or Facilitator

We are DIYers. We’ve taken a DIY approach to most aspects of our life — not because we think we know better than everyone else, but because understanding “how to” and how systems work has been fundamental in everything we do.

Long before we became nomads, we were DiYers… remodeling, building things, learning how to do stuff, etc. Over the past couple of years, we’ve handled our own housing searches, healthcare logistics, banking, transportation, and day-to-day living in countries where we don’t speak the language fluently. We research, we read original sources, we ask questions, and we double-check assumptions before handing decisions (or money) to someone else.

Residency felt like an extension of that same mindset.

We’re not opposed to professional help, and we’re not ruling it out. But before we consider hiring a lawyer or facilitator, we wanted to understand what the official process actually looks like, what is required, and where the real complexity lie — as opposed to what sounds complicated from the outside.

As retired Americans with time, patience, and a willingness to read legal documents, it felt reasonable to first see how far we could get on our own.

That decision has already revealed something important: clear, experience-based information about applying for Albanian residency independently is surprisingly hard to find. Which is part of why we decided to document what we’re learning as we go.

Again, this isn’t about avoiding professional help. It’s about understanding the system well enough to know when help is useful — and when it isn’t.

So we started where anyone can start:

• Reading immigration laws (in English and Albanian)
• Downloading official checklists and PDFs
• Using Google Translate where necessary
• Opening the e-Albania application portal and seeing what it actually asks — and how it behaves

That alone has been more illuminating — and more confusing — than expected.

What This Series Is — and What It Isn’t

This series is:

• A record of our research process in how to apply for residency in Albania as retirees.
• A documentation of what we see, read, and test
• An attempt to add clarity where there’s been very little

It is not:

• Legal advice
• A promise of outcome
• A shortcut
• A substitute for professional help if you choose to use it

Rules change.
Interpretations vary.
Local discretion exists.

When we don’t know something, we’ll say so. When we’re interpreting rather than stating fact, we’ll be clear about that too.

In the next part, we’ll talk about what happens when we started researching how to apply for Albanian residency.