Life in Cartagena

It has recently become necessary for foreigners to declare any overseas holdings in cash, property or goods with a value of over 50,000€. This has caused a bit of a stir amongst some of our compatriots. I was checking to make sure that there wasn't any small print which affected Maggie or me. The stories of problems of interpretation, using the form etc. were legion. Recently I completed my annual tax return. I was happy to do so because this year I got a rebate. Whilst I was in financial mode I sifted through a few of the expat websites to check that my Teachers Pension, a government pension, as distinct from the state pension, was not eligible for Spanish tax as it has to be taxed at source in the UK. No problem. I seem to be perfectly legal. As I read I realised that lots of Britons who are living on their UK state pension here in Spain want to be squeaky clean and declare their pensions to the Spanish tax people. As the amounts they get are covered by the Spanish tax...

Spain isn't one of those places where you need to add a folded banknote to oil the wheels of each and every transaction. It's an orderly, organised and well administered European country. That doesn't mean to say that there are not plenty of dodgy deals producing lots of dodgy money. There must be someone out there whose house deeds show what they actually paid for their house but there won't be many. The usual routine is that the buyer and seller agree both a price and what percentage of that price will show up on the deeds and transaction documents. The rest is handed over in cash. This is usually done in a back room of the notary's office. The notary turns a blind eye. Spain is an expensive place to contract employees because the "national insurance" is so high. One way around that is for employers to pay some of the contract as cash in hand so they are able to show a lower salary on the official contract. That way the employee gets the protection...

I managed to download my draft tax return the other day. Today, with the help of Google and the WordReference dictionary, I made sure that I understood it. Good news, they are going to give me most of my tax back because my wage is so low. Hang on, is that good news? Anyway I went through the tax return line by line. Fortunately mine is very simple. By an agreement between the tax people in the UK and the tax people here I pay UK tax on my pension. That leaves my Spanish tax return just about my earnings here. I pay tax on my salary every month and, at the end of the tax year, in December, they do the sums to see whether I owe them money or whether they owe me money. There are two main types of tax allowance on my salary. The first is a lump sum. This is a disregard of a part of my earnings based on a reasonably complicated formula which gives more back to poor people than it does to rich people. The maximum disregard is just over 4,000€ and the minimum 2,650€. The interestin...

It's that time of year again. Tax time. First day. The Revenue start to send out letters and SMS messages to people to tell them how they can get hold of their draft tax statement. The draft tells you what the tax people think you've paid, what you should have paid and how much they owe you or you owe them. The draft is available online. I heard on the radio that the website had collapsed under the strain of the thousands of people trying to check. A couple of hours later I was trying to get on the website to have a look myself. The particular pages had a message along the lines of "We're a bit pushed at the moment, please try again in an hour or so." It's about eight hours later now, around midnight. The website has the same message. Down for the majority of the working day then. Apparently the system was designed to deal with 100 transactions per second, clicking on a link for instance being a transaction. They had something like 5,600 transactions p...