7 Biggest Challenges of Moving to Spain

hey spain lovers so moving to spain is full of a lot of challenges there are legal challenges emotional challenges family challenges and today we're going to cover seven of the biggest challenges that people face or expect to face when they move to spain so as you may know yoli and i have recently launched our eight week online move to spain masterclass this is a master class and an online course that's going to give you the the tools the knowledge the road map to really make your move to spain successful and set up your ideal life here and by the time this video is released we're actually already running the first intake of the course which is completely sold out and as preparation for this wonderful master class we ask you guys what the biggest challenges are for you know when it comes to moving to spain and we got so many responses 300 of them yeah and while 300 is too many so we're not gonna be covering all of them but we're going to cover seven of the biggies the ones that consistently showed up in there and we're gonna make sure that all of that is pretty clear and before we dive in if you want to take this course in the future click the link in the description below so you can get on the the wait list of people for future intakes all right should we dive into the seven problems concerns challenges of moving to spain let's do it right let's go so number one where are you gonna live in spain this is obviously a big challenge you have to figure out and overcome because where you live will really set up how much you enjoy your experience here it really is critical so what we've found is people generally gravitate to four different areas of spain i think the most obvious one is under lucia you know when people think of life in spain they think of a lot of the imagery of andalusia they think of the weather and so we're seeing a lot of people who want to move to malaga that province within the andalusia comunidad i can't blame you guys yeah i mean it is a beautiful place and malik is great because the costa del sol for example has great infrastructure it's a beautiful part of spain you've got the mediterranean right there but what we are also seeing is more people starting to say well maybe i want to move to the costa de la luz which is over to the west and is a little more a little less built up you'll be more around more spaniards rather than a population of people that are spaniards and people who have moved to spain as well so i think a little bit more undiscovered in the sense it's around the khadith area we're seeing that as well and i would also say the second area is is valencia valencia is really huge and i think what we're seeing is a lot of people are starting to think that maybe instead of barcelona they would move to valencia it might be a more livable place you know there's concerns in barcelona with just the cost of living being expensive valencia is cheaper and the other thing that you're going to find is barcelona is if you're in the center obviously it's a really touristy city so valencia is maybe a little cheaper more manageable warmer in the winter because it's further south so we're seeing that as well in valencia i mean in preparing this i was looking at valencia's like i want to move to valencia oh really make paella militia sorry see you see around there i guess don't worry madrid is also on the list it is madrid and barcelona madrid and barcelona are also on the list and people tend to go and uh kind of group those together because they want to be in a big bustling city so it's sort of deciding between those two we dive in the course and really look at the differences between those two and i think the last one which is interesting there was more people than i expected who want to move to northern spain what we call green spain galicia asturias paisbasco the basque country quite a few what number of people talk about san sebastian they've been they've had great food it's a beautiful town expensive up there uh in san sebastian yeah but great wallet yeah totally so for many people this is about how long they can stretch their retirement money right so it's very very important to know to have a really good idea about the cost of living in spain so it's gonna depend on your lifestyle but also in the region where you're gonna live so most expensive regions are for example the basque country madrid catalonia is pretty expensive as well cheapest regions are extra madura and castillo more or less and then there is other areas that are also cheaper not the cheapest but cheaper say malaga valencia asturias galicia those are more affordables now there is this website called numbero and it's pretty helpful when it comes to figuring out what your cost of living is going to be so it allows you to go in there and do a comparison between the place where you live in the united states or the united kingdom or wherever you are and the place that you are looking at or considering and even also comparing cities within spain see what is cheaper and what's more expensive i did find it a little bit wonky so we have developed our own cost of living tool which is pretty which is the course it's pretty cool yeah so we decided for the master class and it has a bunch of fireballs of course so for us for my treat a couple living in madrid with our lifestyle eye catch which is neither very rich neither very poor i'm between 2500 with a mortgage with a 1 000 euro mortgage paying there every month that's not bad two and a half thousand euros to live in with a mortgage in madrid and you can think that's one of the most expensive exactly always bear in mind that android is one of the most expensive places to live in in spain so number three another bunch of comments we got from people is that they're overwhelmed by the paperwork that they're going to need to apply for their visa now if you don't live in the eu already you will need to apply for a visa to move to spain one of the most common ones that we see from people say the united states or australia new zealand uk is the non-lucrative visa which is a visa that you have to show that you have a certain amount of funds available to support your life in spain and you can't work while you're in spain but here's the trap or the tricky area the law that creates this non-lucrative visa is you know it's one law it says one thing but when you want to get it you have to apply to the consulate where you live you know there's a few in canada there's a few in australia there's probably one or two in new zealand but there's many united states for example and some in the uk and when you apply to that those consulates they apply the law in different ways so if you're applying to the chicago consulate sometimes very different you know the the chicago concert might have one type of requirements the los angeles one slightly different i mean all around the same kind of idea but quite important differences so one of the key things with the non-lucrative visa is that you have to show that you have all these funds you know either savings or income although that's a bit fuzzy that you can support your life here and here's the thing the law says how much you need per person and per additional people in your family however for example the washington dc concierge actually requires less than the law and they actually don't even write that on properly on the requirements they figure you don't need to know anyway they change the requirements and also they don't explain the requirements you really have to dig in there and that's what we do in the course is we really go and look at the different variables here and so that's one of the challenges the other one is how you make up that income you know ideally it's savings or it can be retirement money there are some consulates that will allow passive income remember you're not allowed to work on that visa but they'll allow you know maybe you have a blog or something like that but others will not allow that at all so positively earned exactly yeah passively earned money it is feasible it's a bit of a pipe dream but less work than than active income and just getting on top of all the paperwork is really hard when you submit your application to the consulate there's certain key documents that can be no older than 90 days old from the date of application so you really have to hustle in that three-month period to get all this you know criminal background check together so we go through all this in the course but i understand that's really overwhelming for people and the key is to be organized to know what you need and be really organized checklists checklists right so the next challenge is the real estate process and of course it can be very very daunting to buy a house in a country that is not yours and first of all you need to know that you guys as future residents of spain you can buy a home you can even buy a home not being a resident in spain one of the things that people find very confusing is the whole fees so taxes and fees that you're going to be paying on top of the purchase price so this is usually between 10 and 15 of the purchase price but it depends on whether you got a real estate agent involved or whether you got a lawyer involved so all of these variables are always there also the region changes and whether it's new or or second hand so depending on the region you're going to be paying more or less taxes and yeah depending on whether it's new or not it's going to have a different kind of tax and a different percentage so all of those things need to be taken into account as well another question that we got a lot is real estate agents what's the deal in spain now you have the barrio real estate agents the ones that you find around the corner there see one there and i mean those ones sometimes well most of the time they come attached to the really cool house that you sell only the alistar and that you want to buy and they man they are attached to it and there's no way to get rid of them so i'd say that the big problem with this kind of agents is that they don't really have a huge percentage of properties of the market they just have a small corner so you're like well i'm interested in like a first floor with a ratha with an outside area they're gonna show you maybe two so there's another kind of agent that is the agent that is specialized in people that are moving to spain so of course they will speak english and a lot of the time they will act as a buyer's agent so they will have access to the whole market and they will have a really wide range of properties to show you according to the briefing that you have given them which is very very handy now the real estate agent fees are all over the place it varies regionally whether it's the seller that pays the fee or whether it's the seller and the buyer that pay the the fee so a little bit uh tricky there but uh you'll you'll get there so a lot of people also wrote to us and said that they were a little overwhelmed by the idea of how they could work in spain now in the course we don't cover precisely how to get a job because that's a whole other process but we do cover the work visas that are available and how you might be able to achieve them and some of the most common ones there's the entrepreneurs visa the self-employment visa and there's also getting a work permit by virtue of being sponsored by a company but those are actually quite challenging ones to do for the entrepreneur visa for example you actually really have to be doing a startup or something quite similar they invented the wheel guys pretty much and only if it's an app and then the self-employment visa if you're applying for that you have to show a business plan and then for the getting a work visa to be sponsored by a company that job or the role you're going to do has to be on a skills shortage list so those are quite limited but there are other routes another route for example is to get the golden visa this is the one where you buy property worth 500 000 euros or more in spain that gives you a work visa but i realize that for a lot for most people that is you know out of your reach but there is another way is if you come on a non-lucrative visa remember that's the really common one and you can't work on that visa but after a year on that visa you can transition to a self-employment visa or to a work visa working for a company and those transitions are easier than if you had applied for those self-employment or work visas from your home country in the first place there's also the student visa although that is a longer path because you have to be on that student visa you can work at the same time although only about 20 hours a week and you have to be on it for three years before you can transition to kind of a full work visa and study you have to study that's true if you want to go you don't want to go back to school that's a that's a bad idea yeah i hope that they loosen these up in the future and allow people to work remote in spain and pay taxes and and i think there's a lot of people who want to do that because they're location independent particularly after covert but right now it's still a little narrow in that area okay and connected to working and the whole idea of money are taxes now i just a little pet peeve here i get very annoyed when people complain about taxes i love paying taxes because it's taxes that great create the great health care that you know is looking after our baby it pays for the road out there so i'm going to push back against the whole anti-tax thing i love paying taxes there you go you know what you said anyway taxes but what i don't like about taxes they're very complicated to figure out and so when it comes to the world of taxes here in spain you have to really do your homework before you move here and for a lot of people who are retired and moving here taxes are important because you've got to figure out how long is that pool of money that retirement money going to last or how far is it going to go really important now people freak out a lot when they see higher income tax rates in spain but some of the tax experts i've spoken to have said and although this will vary had said for some of their cases some of their clients they find that the total tax they end up paying is actually quite similar to their home country it's just the mix and the concepts are a little bit different so we cover those in the course we go over the different concepts and and and how they kind of work but one of the key things is if you're in spain for 183 days in a calendar year you're going to become a tax resident and what that means is it doesn't assume you have to pay taxes in spain and back home but you're gonna have to file potentially in both places particularly if you're from the usa because the usa along with eritrea are the only two countries in the world that if you're a citizen of that country you're paying taxes lifelong taxpayer i don't pay tax in new zealand i'm no longer a tax resident in new zealand that stopped a long time ago but for the us and the era trans that really they hold on to you as i say there are double taxation agreements so you shouldn't be double taxing but you will have to pay more you'll be double filing double filing exactly here's the thing sometimes i think people think that oh look i'm just going to move to spain and if i earn some money in canada or in the united states i'll pay that money there in those taxes there and i'll pay any money i earn in spain in spain no no no if you're a tax rise in spain you pay tax on your worldwide income so you really need to figure it out so you need to understand the broad concepts but then you've got to talk to a tax advisor if you're concerned about this because if you just leave it then you might be you know happy as larry living in spain and three years later you get an email you're gonna knock knocks tax company and said hey our country's shared data and they saw that you haven't been paying tax so yakasha so you've got to be a little bit careful about that about the tax thing so i love tax i go with access new t-shirt i love text next one is concerns about language now you have done all your paperwork your visa you have your dream home everything is perfect now in your taxes paying your taxes now you need to live in spain so wow do i need to learn the language how am i going to learn the language will will i get by without knowing a lot of spanish at first now of course there are areas with the large english-speaking communities but if you really want to integrate and that's what most people want you need to learn the language and don't leave it until the last minute i would just start as soon as you make the decision of living in spain start learning it because it will really pay off you need to just kind of start building your base and then once you're here of course you will be able to absorb it much faster right yeah i think some people think that one of the biggest challenges is going to be like the visa and figuring out the text and they kind of leave the language thing of like of course when i'm in spain i'll learn spanish yeah but yeah i mean that's you know the better you can have your spanish by the time you get here yeah you're just gonna have a kind of a richer experience yeah you gotta get in there yeah a lot of people are very interested in moving to the really authentic place where there is no english spoken and while that can be really fulfilling and awesome it can also be very very challenging so if you're like aiming for a kind of place like that really work in your spanish you got to work on that spanish and your thick local regional accents so james wrote a fantastic blog post about how to learn spanish i will link to it below make sure now just in case this wasn't hard enough there are several regions in spain that have i called visual language so apart from spanish you are going to have valenciano or catalan or basque or gallero for example so how present are these languages it's going to vary from region to region i would say that you're going to see way more catalan in catalonia obviously but way more catalan then you will see gallego for example in galicia that is a little bit kind of a lesser known so we've only scratched the surface in this video we cover so much more in the master class and if you're interested in getting on the list for a future intake click the link in the description down below can't wait to be your instructor about how to move to spain and also click the playlist that's appearing up here so you can explore more videos and watch more videos with us about kind of life in spain moving to spain the whole kit and caboodle all right hasta luego everyone ciao

Channel: Spain Revealed

Views: 168,830

Keywords: james black spain, james blake spain, yoly james, spain revealed, yoly spain, spain couple, spain guide, yolly james, yoli james, spain move, move to Spain, Spain challenges

Id: mFfWNJBHD2g

Length: 16min 55sec (1015 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021