What bureaucracy?

So we’ve been living in Spain for four and half months and I must confess that I’d intended writing journal entries more frequently but the truth is that we’ve been having too much fun and there has been a lot to do.  

It’s the end of August and the weather has finally turned a bit cooler, indeed its raining and cloudy today.  It was 38 degrees for most of July and so much of our time was spent alternately lounging by the pool and jumping in to cool off.  Some days it got too hot to sit outside and on those days we closed all the shutters, put the fans on and even had the occasional siesta when it was really hot.  

We’ve achieved quite a lot in spite of the almost constant sun worship.  We managed to get our Spanish residency permits sorted within about 12 weeks of moving here, arguably having already registered as self employed (or autonomo as its known) helped.  We felt it was important to get residency sorted, particularly in light of the imminent UK exit from the EU.  We paid a solicitor (or gestor) to help us with all of this, he set us up as self employed and sorted out the residency permit application.  While it is possible to do all of this yourself we felt that our ridiculously poor Spanish language skills would make it very difficult, in the end it cost us 400 euros for the two of us which I felt was money well spent.  

We also managed to buy a car.  We’d read loads of stuff on the web about the bureaucracy involved in buying a car in Spain and certainly you have to have some paperwork in place; you need an NIE number and also you need to sign for padron at the local town hall (or at least that’s what we were told).  We bought our car from a reputable dealer and they dealt with everything else.  After all we’d heard about buying a car we were pleasantly surprised.  One difference is the insurance, you pay to insure the car not the driver…

Because we’re registered as autonomo and running our own business we pay the Spanish equivalent of national insurance.  This gives us access to the Spanish health service and also the potential for a pension in Spain.  In Spain they have a sensible approach to encouraging new businesses with the NI payments staged over 2 years, at the moment we pay around 50 euros a month this will increase eventually to the full payment which is around 200 euros a month.  Given that health insurance was going to cost 120 euros a month we feel this is a pretty good deal.