If you are seriously considering moving to Spain to stay, heres a great little article you might want to scan thorugh and think about….

At first sight the title of my book may seem a little odd? Well you might think it’s easy to move to Spain; just book a flight, and find somewhere to stay; the rest will sort itself out. “We just need to get there” and start to enjoy the new life in the Sun Right?

Wrong.

Sorry but a lot of us that escape in search of the “Dream”, find it all goes wrong and they struggle like crazy to get everything in place, but in the end they return back home, with lost dreams, big debts, and having to start all over again.It doesn’t have to be like that if you plan a ahead…Did you know that every year more than 191,000 Britons emigrated but in the same year 105,000 returned having failed to make their dream work?

How to Successfully Move to Spain and Stay

Tags: spain, moving,

Here’s an article on the housing scandal in Marbella from spanishpropertyinsight.com
Tax catch-22
To kick off my dispatches, a catch-22 tax situation that appears to be affecting buyers in some areas.

As you may know, the property market in Marbella has been in the doldrums for a number of years. As a result market prices are back where they were 3 or more years ago, even if official figures suggest that prices have been steadily rising, albeit at a lower rate than before. Official figures are notoriously unreliable, and everyone knows that they overstate prices.

The scandal is that tax officials in Marbella appear to have started fining buyers for under-declaring (paying part of the price under the table in cash) even if they haven’t. If the tax office thinks that the declared price is too low, they fine the buyer. So if you do everything by the book, declare the full price, and pay all your taxes, you might still be fined. All that matters is the price the tax authorities believe you should have paid, which might well be above the price you actually pay. A classic catch-22: whatever you do, you can’t win. Heaven help you if you find a real bargain.

Property Dispatches » Blog Archive » Tax catch-22

Tags: house, price, marbella

A private lady at propertyinsight.com discusses his story on buying property in Spain:

This is rather a pet hate for me. When I first came to Spain, 13 years ago in February 08, the law was the same as now - everyone working has to be registered, even the lowliest self employed.

You had to pay tax and more importantly IVA (vat) at 16% of ALL your income, there was and still is no mimimum exemption threshold level like the UK.Which of course is a big shock when you first move here and are scratching to make a living. My husband and I took ‘advice’ and were told to be careful if advertising etc as the authorities were likely to call you, book you and then serve you with a denouncia when you turned up to your appointment! In those days, Sur in English was the main english paper and there were hardy any adverts for services or entertainers etc so it was easy for the authorities to find you.

Of course it was rather easy to tell if they did call you as their heavy spanish accent rather gave the game away! But needless to say people were getting caught and fined.However, the fine was 5000 pesetas (as I recall) which in old good money was around 4000 sterling. Quite hefty, but then again we worked out if we got away with it for 6 months, then anything else earned was a bonus!

Property Dispatches » Blog Archive » Unregistered Businesses

Tags: spanish, property,

The credit crunch and the Spanish property marketThe credit crunch is going to take its toll on the Spanish property business. One high profile developer, Llanera (till recently sponsors of Charlton Athletic) has already gone under, but we ain’t seen nothing yet. Every day you hear another expert say everything is fine, all is well, prices won’t fall, this is just a return to normality, a soft landing , indeed a privilege and pleasure to experience, but it sounds increasingly panicky to me.

I’m expecting significant price falls in quite a few areas, and some big casualties in the next year as companies with high overheads and/or high gearing run out of cash. Plenty of developers will be fine, but plenty won’t. Expect a fair number of half-finished building sites to litter the coast for a few years yet.Why my pessimism?

Consider this:
The Spanish construction boom, now ending, was so monstrous there’s just no way it could ever end sweetly, even without the credit crunch. Several years of 800,000 housing starts per annum, 18.5% of GDP going to housing / construction, pouring 66% more cement than Germany (whose economy is 3 times larger), and building 25% of all new homes in the EU last year, means the Spanish economy has become a real estate junkie. The only known cure for junkies is cold turkey, and that’s never pleasant.

Artricle from Spanihspropertyinsight.com
Property Dispatches » Blog Archive » The credit crunch and the Spanish property market

Tags: spanish, property,