Applying for “beckham-tax” (Royal Decree 687/2005) status

If you’ve lived outside Spain for more than 10 years (even if you are Spanish) and you are moving to Spain for work, you may qualify for the special regime 24% tax rate for 6 years.

You need to act fast, since you only have 6 months from the day you register as a resident to apply, and they are pretty strict about enforcing this.

First thing you need is a letter from new your employer’s HR director stating these four important points:

1a: Que D. MAX MUSTERMANN con NIE numero X0123456 y domicilio en [where you live] está prestando sus servicios en GRAN EMPRESA S.R.L. desde el día 1 de Abril del 2010 como empleado par cuenta ajena con contrato de trabajo ordinario por tiempo indefinido.

2a: Que la dirección del centro de trabajo en el que D. MAX MUSTERMANN presta sus servicios es en [address of your office].

3a: Que el trabajo de D. MAX MUSTERMANN se realiza en territorio español.

4a: Que D. MAX MUSTERMANN está cotizando a la Seguridad Social española siendo la fecha de 1 de Abril del 2010.

Now fill out a Modelo 149 and take this together with your letter, NIE papers and passport to the big tax building in Plaza Doctor Letamendi. Go to the third floor and ask for the extranjero desk. They will take your forms (ask them to look them over to make sure there are no obvious mistakes) and put them in the queue to be processed.

Technically the law says they should get back to you in 10 days, but in reality, it may take as much as 6 months. Ask them which month they are currently processing to get an idea of how long it takes.

If all went well, a letter should arrive about six month later either at your employer or at your home (to us we got one of each). This letter proves your status and you can give a copy to your bank and employer to allow them to give you this special status.

Remember that the status is not tied to your job. If you take another job, you get to keep your status.

Once your six years are over, you might consider moving to Holland, where there’s a 30% tax ruling for expats.

Getting a drivers license for Spain for Americans

Like many people who have moved here, I’ve been happily driving on my American license for the last two years.

I finally decided to do something about my situation after I realized that if I ever got into an accident, I could be in serious trouble with the law. For normal traffic stops, the police usually ignores you if you can convince them you are just visiting.

My first finding was that although you can drive with a US license for six months, you cannot convert it to a Spanish one.

Luckily I happen to be a citizen of a nearby European country that does allow for conversions and my sister happens to live there. So I registered for residence using her address and immediately applied for my converted license.

Today the letter arrived from my sister with a brand new EU license.

Normally non-EU converted licenses carry a code 70 on the bottom indicating the original country before the conversion. A license with a code 70 USA is NOT valid in Spain and the Spanish will generally refuse to convert it to a Spanish license. Luckily for me, they forgot to put this code on the license, so now I am home free.

Next step is that I have to register my license with Traffico and then I have to get the medical exam. There’s some debate about whether foreign residents need to do the medical exam, but in the case of an accident, the lawyer from the other party could argue that you are not legally permitted to drive in Spain and thus automatically at fault.

After this, I will attempt to get myself added to the insurance policy. We’ll see whether I find someone that recognizes my pre-EU driving record.

And then I’ll be legal! Yippee!

Plumbing in Spain

Someone we knows has an apartment that is suffering from leaky plumbing. These kind of things tend to be expensive in Europe since ripping apart cement walls is expensive.

The first challenge was getting an assessor to actually come and look at the damage. I guess the company figured that if they never send an assessor, then they don't need to pay.

Finally they lost patience and called a plumber to get an estimate. The plumber told them that the assessor always underestimate the cost and the insurance ends up covering very little of the damage. Then he offered to do it on the weekend get a 15% discount from not paying IVA... oh joy.

Natural births in Spain

Interesting thing I learned today is that if you want to do a natural birth (non-induced, non-c section, non-epidural, etc), stay away from the private medical system.

In the US, doctors generally work in teams, so if your birth takes 20 hours, then you might have a different doctor for the birth than your usual one. Usually they try to introduce you to the other doctors in the practice during the pregnancy so that the doctor doing the birth isn't a complete stranger.

Here, private doctors don't work in teams, so unless the doctor wants to stick around for 20 hours (unlikely), it's going to be wham-bam thank you ma'am, slap the baby on the butt and I'm out of here. The Spanish populace has been trained to think that this is a good thing, since it allows you to schedule your birth, make sure the grandparents are taking care of the kids, etc.

The other problem is that doctors in the private system in Spain sometimes have an inferiority complex (the really good doctors passed the exams for the public system, and do private work on the side), and thus can be extremely arrogant. Mention the public system and you are liable to get a half hour lecture on how crappy it is and how all their equipment is inferior, etc.

The real believers (mostly Germans here it seems) in natural birth do it at home, which seems a bit risky to me.

Anyway, you've been warned.

Catalan and parking fines

Article 138 of the traffic act mandates that written directions of traffic signs be written at a minimum in Castilian.

Las indicaciones escritas que se incluyan o acompañen a los paneles de señalización de las vías públicas, e inscripciones, figurarán en idioma castellano y, además, en la lengua oficial de la comunidad autónoma reconocida en el respectivo estatuto de autonomía, cuando la señal esté ubicada en el ámbito territorial de dicha comunidad.

The information written to include or accompany the marking of roads, and inscriptions, shall appear in Castilian and also in the official language of the autonomous community according to the statute of autonomy, when the sign is located in the territory of that community.

According to the right wing newspaper ABC (which always writes these kind of stories in a very gloating tone), Barcelona city council is annulling any fines that are appealed for linguistic reasons. (I assume this is to avoid losing in court and establishing a precedent)

This is especially handy in downtown Sant Cugat, since this means I no longer have to worry about getting tickets with my shortcuts through no entry "excepte veïns" zones.

Private school life insurance scam

We asked the school the other day what this mysterious €20 life insurance charge was for on our monthly bill. It turns out that the school decided to opt-in all the families into a policy and charge the parents for it (and never explain it or tell us what the benefits are, etc).

What exactly do you receive for this? If the father (for €10 per child per month) or either (for €18 a month) dies, then they will pay the tuition for the rest of the year. That's it.

Want to know what a complete rip off this is? For $8.22 per month, I can buy a $100,000 10 year term life back in the US, which should be enough to keep the kids in a good school until they graduate, and still have a bit left over for college.

Adventures in ink-refilling

I had the bad luck this weekend that my printer ran out of ink while printing the pictures for my son's homework assignment. Being a Sunday, buying a new cartridge was out of the question. (Maremagnum is the only mall I know that's open on Sundays but doesn't have any tech stores).

In the US, I would ask the neighbors, but given that our current relationship is still stuck at the "acknowledge existence if we accidentally run into each other" stage, it didn't feel appropriate.

First thing I tried was to resuscitate an old HP printer I had in the garage, but due to having been off for two years it decided that the (newly unwrapped)ink cartridges had expired and were no longer good. I popped out the battery that powers the internal clock, giving the printer amnesia and thinking it was the year 2000. Then it complained that the scanner was broken and wouldn't start up, so I disassembled the scanner, cleaned it, put it back together and... still the same error.

Then I remembered that I had an old Becker color ink refilling kit lying around that I had never tried out. It was for a different brand of printer, but I was desperate.

It came with:

• A metal pokey-thing for making a hole in the cartridge
  
• Three bottles of color ink
  
• Three syringes for inject the ink into the hole
  
• A set of rubber gloves
  

It was surprisingly easy, and my son's homework assignment was saved.

From now on, I'm buying my ink by the liter.

Don't make me fix those blinds!

I've been fighting with our landlord about fixing the electric rolling blinds that keep detaching themselves and getting stuck.

After "fixing" it for the third time, the latest excuse is that the blinds breaking are normal wear and tear and not something he is responsible for fixing.

"So are you giving me permission to get them fixed then?"

"Of course"

Muhahaha...

So now, thanks to two tubes of epoxy, some wire and a couple old shoelaces, those blinds are never going to get stuck again.

Ha! That'll teach 'em.

(Still waiting for a response about the beetle problem. Luckily they don't seem to like IKEA furniture particle-board.)

Our electric rates go up

We got a wonderful letter from our electric company. It read something along the lines of:

Due to the establishment of the free market for electricity, we will be raising your rates. If you do nothing, we will automatically enroll you into the “tariff of last resort” and increase your rate each month until we reach the maximum rate allowed by law. You are free to change to another company.

“Free market” in Spain seems to mean “free to rip you off as much as possible” as opposed to “increased competition leading to lower prices”.

We phoned around a couple of the companies that could now take our business. The way it seems to work is that electricity is now sold by marketing companies, rather than by the distributer. Exactly what value these marketers add isn't clear to me.

One of the things that determines your rate is the peak kw that your house can consume, which is limited by the amps of the main breaker.

Naturally, the owner of our house had installed an industrial strength circuit breaker, but had told the electric company he had installed the smallest rated one. What are the consequences for having a circuit breaker with the wrong rating? Well, they might inspect you, and then raise your rates. Is there a fine? No. I’m not quite getting the downside...

Me vs the water company

Sorea is the water provider in Sant Cugat. We never really thought much about them, until we got a panicked phone call from the company that manages the place we rent.

“Have you paid your water bill recently?”

“I don’t know. We gave you our bank account number, should be automatic, right?”

“Sorea made a mistake when they set up your new neighbor's water account last year. Your neighbor’s bank account has been paying for your water, and since no one paid the neighbor’s account, they cut off the neighbor’s water.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Can you give your neighbor 1100 euros for the money they paid into your account?”

“What?!”

“Sorea won’t restore the neighbor’s water until the account is paid for, and she doesn’t have the money to pay her bill twice.”

“But Sorea made a mistake, shouldn’t they fix it?”

“They said their computer system doesn’t let them transfer payments between accounts.”

“Look, this is stupid. If I give my neighbor (who we dislike quite a bit since their dogs crap all over the place) 1100 euros, what guarantee do I have that they will pay their bill with the money? It’s not like they will give me a receipt. How about Sorea refunds the neighbor, and then we both pay our respective bills?"

“Sorea isn’t going to like this. You should have been checking to make sure that you were paying your bill.”

“But they never sent me a bill, they sent my bill to the neighbors! As far as I’m concerned it’s not my problem. Sorea has my bank account details and can charge me what I owe. I’m not going to waste my time trying to fix a problem that Sorea is perfectly capable of fixing on their own.”

We will see how showdown ends...

ADSL in Sant Cugat

When we moved here, we did the normal thing and got the Telefonica ADSL connection. Unfortunately due to various factors, the best we could get was 3 megabits (or megas as they call them here).

Since then, I've invested quite a bit of time trying to find faster alternatives (no luck so far). Here are the results:

• Sant Cugat has ONE ADSL Telefonica exchange, located near the monastery. The length of the wire from the exchange to your house will limit your maximum speed:
  
  
  
• All ADSL providers use the same wires and switching station (and they also use Telefonica technicians to set up the connection).
  
• Be extra nice to your Telefonica technician. They have amazing powers that may require a little bit of monatery encouragement.
  
• I wasted 80 euros on JazzTel, who absolutely promised me that they would be able to get 20 megabits (those smooth talking Argentinians... should have suspected something). I was so excited until I looked at my router and saw that I was still getting 3 megabits. I phoned them to complain and they just said "Well, we said up to 20 megas, so you can't complain."
  
• The normal Telefonica router absolutely sucks. Complain and get them to send you a better one.
  
• Telefonica was going to deploy a trial Fibre-To-The-Home in Sant Cugat, but never got around to deploying it due to the crisis. Their web site thinks that they actually deployed it, but it lies.
  
• Your house may have bad wiring that limits your connection speed. If you can, go to your neighbor's house and try to find out their line attenuation. If it is significantly better than yours (the lower the better), then you probably have bad wiring.
  

My most expensive free gift

My company Christmas present arrived today. It was a cute little solar panel that you can plug into your mobile phone to charge it.

Unfortunately, the person in charge of sending the gift to Spain had this weird idea that you should actually be truthful on the customs declaration, and wrote "electronics" with value of $5 on the form.

Big mistake.

Spanish customs charged 0.50 euros in customs plus a 20 euro "processing fee".

Just put "other" as the description with a value of $1. Works much better.

Nonperformance incentive pay

Employment law in Spain is a case study in good intentions gone bad. What began as measures to protect employees have turned harmful as everyone figured out how to game the system. The finiquito is a great example of this. If you are a full employee and your company decides that they no longer need you, they generally have to pay you 1.5 months of salary per year worked to avoid legal trouble. If you leave on your own, you get nothing.

Given how costly it is to lay people off, most young people work on one year contracts (which is renewed one year, then bye-bye). The end result is that the population on average has less job security than in many countries that have lower protections.

Since I’ve been at the same company about 17 years, I would get an insane amount of money if my company laid me off. Enough to get me wondering about how hard I should really be working.

Needless to say, the phrase "you can't fire me, I quit!" is not often heard in Spain.

Your first mistake was trying to follow the law

Pretty amazing story those homes being torn down in Almeria.

So only 11 building licenses were issued in Albox since 2001 (of which 8 were invalidated after the houses were built), but if you look at Google maps, it's obvious that much much more has been built since then. For real amusement, compare the satellite view to the catastral records.

Guess who gets screwed when the government decides to make a point about urban sprawl? The people who built illegally? Nope. The poor suckers who actually made the effort to build their house legally.

Something to keep in mind when living in societies that are not law and order oriented. By creating a paper trail, you make it easier for the government to pick on you. Thus the consequences of completely ignoring the law are often less severe than the consequences of following the law incorrectly (no points awarded for effort).

Renting a place in Sant Cugat

Places in Sant Cugat are still totally overpriced compared to what you can find by renting. Remember that listed rents are "suggested" and you are expected to negotiate the price down.

Due to overly friendly tenant laws, you will be expected to make a deposit of several (3-6) months rent (there's also some kind of bank escrow thing you can do, but its usually more pain than its worth). The reason behind this is that it can take up to 6 months to kick out a non-paying tenant. If you work for a big company, getting a letter saying how important you are sometimes helps lower the amount.

Something to remember: if you haven't made a deposit for the place, it's not yours! Most likely the agent is trying to shop it around to other people and get a better price. So if you find a better place in the meanwhile, don't worry about blowing off a previous place.

If you use an agent, it will cost you one months rent in fees, so you might be better off looking in Tot Sant Cugat (a little free red magazine that's always laying around somewhere).

If you think your rent is a rip-off, then just phone your landlord and say that you are moving unless they lower the rent. It's really that easy.

Severance in Spain

Spain has very strict employee protection laws. This means

1) Lots of strikes. Last year the truckers went on strike and shut down the country. Gas stations were empty, store shelves bare.

2) It sucks to be young, because no one will hire you full time (it seems like half the country works on temporary contracts)

3) Everyone is in a union

Since I work with computers, I'm in the metalworkers union. Is silicon a metal? They get 0.1% of my salary for doing nothing. Thanks.

If you get laid-off (as a full time employee), you get a severance package consisting of a minimum of 45 days of salary per year worked up to 3.5 years pay (many companies give more), unless you are fired. You REALLY have to try to get fired. There was a recent court case that decided that even swearing publicly at your boss was insufficient grounds for firing.

The Spanish legal system arrived at this 45 day payoff somewhat indirectly. Termination without cause used to be arbitrated in court, with a maximum penalty of 45 days of pay per year worked. A small rule change allowed companies to just pay the 45 days without going through the hassle of the court system.

If you come here from abroad via an intra-company transfer, remember to get a rider attached to your employment contract stating that they recognize your time abroad as part of your employment history.

This also means that if you've worked somewhere for a while, you don't want to leave (and potentially lose a huge amount of severence?).

There is some legal gray area concerning whether performance based stock grants count as part the salary for severence purposes. Companies now try to protect themselves by refusing to providing any written justification for stock grants.