Tax in Spain

[David Walland]

My wife and I are hoping to move to Spain next year. We will be looking at houses we have short-listed, mainly in the Pinoso area, in October. We are both pensioners with UK and Danish pensions plus my University pension.
Moving to Spain will reduce our income stream and we were hoping to run occasional workshops/masterclasses (all found) during spring and autumn to make up for this (my wife is a Glass Artist with an International reputation). What we need is advice, especially about the "self-employed" national insurance/tax (or whatever) and we would appreciate advice on an English-speaking tax expert in the Pinoso area who charges by the hour, if anyone can recommend one. We have no problem with paying taxes but if we have to pay throughout the year when running courses only part of the year, this will make the whole idea uneconomical. Since we're currently 66 and 69 we are not about to run them continuously.

While we are learning Spanish, my experience with learning Danish tells me that unscrambling foreign tax rules takes years of fluency in the language and black magic...
We certainly won't be fluent by October!

Regards

David Walland

[etf]

Hi David,

You may find PWC's Spanish tax guide a useful starting point:

http://www.pwc.com/us/en/hr-internation ... html#Spain

KR

etf

[David Walland]

Thanks for the link. I'm just printing it out to see if our wacky lifestyle is included in/derivable from any of the information. I suspect that only a local expert used to dealing with somewhat way-out people will be able to properly advise us. Once I have the data printed out, I should be able to actually get information out of it, if it's there. I don't know whether it's my age or what but I can't easily follow complex information on electronic media.

David Walland

[David Walland]

This PWC document is not really relevant for us, as we're both over 65 and not intending to be employed in Spain, except in a limited self-employed sense, as follows.

Basically my wife, a Glass Artist (with an International reputation), has mastered a number of techniques which are of interest to other artists. It occurs to us that running courses and master-classes in these, where we provide accomodation and food etc as part of the course, could potentially replace the income stream of my current half-time post (having an artist in the family is like having your own private black hole to throw money down and the money must be there to throw down it). I am *very* not a tax person, we are currently working to learn Spanish (not such a massive undertaking when one has already learnt another language to fluency but it does take time!) but are not going to be fluent enough for some considerable time to talk tax affairs in Spanish. Hence my question here where there may be a chance of finding someone who understands Spanish tax and is as fluent in English as my wife.

In Spain apart from the potential idea of running classes (probably a max of 10 weeks per year, if they happen), our income streams will be:

My USS pension,
My UK State Pension
My fractional Danish State Pension

and

My Wife's fractional UK State Pension,
My wife's fractional Danish State Pension (we're still waiting to find out how much this will be!)

Currently I am 69 and she is 66. I am a UK citizen and she is a Danish citizen.

If there's anyone out there prepared to assist us to understand our crazy affairs in a Spanish context and get a reasonable idea of approximately what it is likely to cost us and what allowances we might be able use, we'd be very grateful for any help we can get. We intend to use a local expert when we move to Spain - we can make enough mess of English self-assessment that we have no intention of trying to DIY it in Spain.

The urgency for us is that the "Brexit" vote has been seen by many to "authorise" racism and racist behaviour in the UK. I don't believe for one moment it will get better. We have a met number of expat EU citizens in Spain who speak highly of the local Spaniards in the areas where they live, and we feel that we are more likely to have a more peaceful old age there than here in the UK, especially when the total impossibility of leaving the EU in the way far too many UK citizens wish becomes obvious.

Regards

David Walland