To sell up and move to Spain ?

[MijasMaddie]

Hi MN’s!

I’ve nc! So in a nutshell.. I’ve got two DC (sons) 8yrs and 10yrs. DH is 13 years older than me. (I’m mid thirties he’s late 40s)

He works in financial sales and I’m a small business owner (pet care/boarding).

We have a home in a lovely place on the outskirts of London. BUT we are struggling to live!

My DH has unfortunately been out of work/made redundant SO many times! We’ve been together 13 years and it seems every 2/3 years he is out of work.

A couple of years ago he had to ‘leave’ instead of being pushed and was out of work nearly a whole year! This has put us in such a bad financial situation.

We now pay the mortgage and the bills but we have hardly anything to live on. The mortgage and outgoings are huge.

Credit cards maxed out. I’m in touch with debt companies etc only so much can be done!

Life is a hamster wheel and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul etc..

AIBU to sell up and move to Spain? We attended Spanish lessons (myself, DH, DC) but stopped a couple of years ago! So we are no way fluent!

I have no money nor does DH but we have money in our home. After selling our home we could have enough to buy a three bed apartment in Southern Spain (ideally Calahonda area).

DH is saying he’ll have to stay here and rent a room outskirts of London to work his job in the city etc.

I could get rid of my debts and this misarable life but I will also have burnt all bridges to ever be able to come back.

My youngest is 8 and a young sweet 8. He’d be happy and make friends anywhere. But my eldest is 10 going on Kevin the Teenager! I’d have to put them through Spanish state school (also thinking of doing Cambridge p/t home school modules) if he hated it then he’ll hate me!!

Pros - I’d have the debts and financial burdens weighing me down gone. I’d be living in a sunny climate.
I am qualified in beauty industry, massage, animal pet training care..

Cons- what if it all goes wrong?

I’ve wanted to move to Southern Spain since 2013. I love it there. I fully appreciate living there is different to a holiday.

Only other option is to sell this house and rent there for a year (?)

Are kids that are about to turn 9 and 11 too old to be put in a Spanish state school?

I cannot go on like this 😑 too over drawn too broke. Don’t know how I’ll afford food for this week!

The thought of selling up and being able to buy a spacious penthouse in Spain has never been so tempting.

Ps. I have experience in beauty, make up, massage in case you wondered what I’d do over there. Also a very experienced animal carer.

• also Brexit is a factor but as it stands I know I can still go there ...

Please give me some advice (shake some sense into me!) thank you! X

Is she though? ''vu'' to relocate from one european country to another. where's your sense of adventure.

Families arrive in my country (Ireland from Latvia, Albania, Muldova) every day of the week and they make it work. They figure it out. They need to get PPS numbers and establish their habitual domicile before they qualify for any assistance but they manage it.

Nobody expects a relocation to be easy. They want to know if it would be worth it in the end surely! Sometimes you just want to talk about it with other people who've gone through it or are thinking about going through it.

Posting a thread doesn't equal = I'm too stupid to realise that it won't be a walk in the park but so often it's taken to mean that.

Like, if I ring an estate agent, before I did that I'd be obsessively looking at the map of the area, the transport routes, the average prices, all of the vocabulary I'd require to articulate myself in Spanish as I prefer to do that. You can research everything on line but it's nice to talk about it sometimes.

My friend relocated out to almeria and made it work. She could never have bought a house at home and it was important to her to have her own place and she has made her money go a lot further in her town house in a village in spain. She has done bits and pieces (won't say what exactly but feel free to pm @mijasmaddie ) and as a single woman with no other salary coming in she just had the roof over her head and she earned money and learnt spanish and made friends. But when you own your house outright the demands on you are a lot less.

Marina - thank you 😊

Cois- thank you for that post! And would love to pm you if ok.. thank you again 💖

CoisNaFarraige ?

That sounds like a sales pitch

Yeah, don’t get sucked into MLM by pm OP.

I've no idea what MLM is so it wasn't me suggesting it!? Are you confusing me with another poster.

What I said is a harsh reality. The bulk of what we earn usually goes on mortgage. So it's hardly a sales pitch to say ''own your own home outright so that you don't need to earn as much as you would if you have a big mortgage''.

But I assume people think things through before doing them. Starting a thread on mumsnet represents the most embryonic phase of an idea really.

as a single woman with no other salary coming in she just had the roof over her head So how did she get residency and a NIE if she had no job contract and no savings to show she could support herself? All this anecdata, if you don't meet residency requirements it's not gonna happen, sorry. If you do, well then, I still think it's more sensible to move within the UK than to uproot your entire life to a country where you don't even speak the langauge.

I don't know but she managed it. I'll ask her if you like! I'm going to whatsapp her now. She is Irish though. But that didn't always make things easier I know. Only now. Hang on.

It doesn't really matter if she's Irish, all EU citizens are subject to the same residency requirements.

Could you move to a cheaper area in the UK?

She got the number through the Spanish embassy in Dublin before she went. That was before 2012 though.

It is a process but I'm looking at the DFA website now (which will apply to you too if you're going with an Irish passport OP) and it's a process but it's not insurmountable if you can support yourself.

dfa.ie has translations of all the relevant websites on need OP! But by the time you're doing this you'll be able for the written spanish. spanish so easy compared to Irish, I never had any problem learning spanish thanks to Irish

There are British people living in Spain you know.

@golondrina, I did say that my friend was able to buy a town house outright! So I never peddled a rags to riches in the sunshine anecdote.
Ok gotta go out now. Heaven ONLY knows how all the other UK citizens in Spain figured this out! Cos apparently it's impossible

Cois - I don't really think the immigrating to Ireland analogy works with the OP's situation. For a start she is looking at going to a country with loads of seasonal low paid jobs and loads of over qualified citizens who can't get jobs. Ireland and the UK don't have 30% unemployment like Spain. Most people who come to the UK and Ireland have at least a workable understanding of English or very good English.

Oh FFS. Oh course it's not impossible, but in the OP's specific circumstances and at this specific moment in time it is a straight-up bad idea.

Jessie snd Pelirico - no way was Cois doing a ‘sales pitch’ or MLM pyramid stuff! Reason she told me to inbox her is that she (understandably ) didn’t want to tell the world above personal info etc!

Had some really great advice from Cois (thank you again) and of course everyone else.

Rather than being told I can’t do it and it’s ‘just a dream’ by a few people I’m going to be positive and take ‘baby steps’

Re uploaded Duolingo to listen to while I take the dogs for a walk (dogs look a me like what is she saying now 😁)

Found a great fun programme in Spanish on Netflix (subtitles too!) thanks for recommendation Cois! 😊💃

And getting appt with an embassy for an EU passport.

Thank you again x

Preparation is key for ever decision !
Worth pursuing it before ruling it out!

Friend did this a few years ago. Not because she had money issues but because she wanted a change and moving house in the UK was not going to cut it.

She sold up everything (house, furniture, car etc) and packed kids and the belongings she wanted to keep in a van and drove to Dover with not a clue of where they were going.

Stayed in a few places for a week or 2 before moving on because they didn’t feel right

She stopped off in a Spanish seaside resort and immediately felt at home.

Within 10 days she had rented a house, got the kids in the local school and found a job and booked them all on Spanish lessons.

She didn’t speak a word of Spanish when she started her job.

Now they live over looking the Med. If anything the rest of her family are thinking seriously of joining her.

For some I know who swap the UK for a sunnier climate if the first place they go to doesn’t work out they go to another country and another till they feel settled.

None I know return to the UK willingly

Oliver’s mummy- she sounds amazing. Brave lady! So glad it worked out for her and her children x

Sense of adventure is all very well if you don't have kids or know that you can get a good or better job elsewhere. In the UK at least you have the welfare system, in Spain it's not very generous and only temporary and you have to have worked to receive it.

Spain is hard for non wealthy people. I have lots of degree qualified bilingual Spanish people who struggle to find or maintain jobs and salaries aren't great. There are huge amounts of native level bilinguals in the Costa del sol.

Going there based on your circumstances op would be mad and you risk sinking the equity you have built up into living costs and then having to return with nothing.

At the moment you have enough equity to relocate in the UK and still be able to either find a job or be self employed. I know noone here who can't find a job if they want. Cost of living isn't high and tax credits help if your income is low. It is a much easier life here.

Just be aware that globally, we're now overdue a recession. Germany and France are now in industrial recession, Italy is likely to be there in the next quarter, and their debt issue is legally unresolvable under current EU law - but will be coming up again in the Autumn. France is currently six times as exposed to Italian debt as it was to Greek debt in 2008. Spain's youth unemployment is on a par with parts of North Africa, and though their level of indebtedness has improved, they will still be hard-hit by a European or global recession, despite small increases in some areas of the economy.

Even without your debt issues, I wouldn't have this as a short-term goal: with them, it would be insanity, OP.

Sorry to be blunt, but not being able to get residency and an NIE might be the best thing to happen for your family: consider it as a long-term plan, whilst you are getting fluent in Spanish and the children are finishing school,but accept that right now, it is just a fantasy.

It's obvious the OP doesn't want to be told the realities and only wants to be told she will soon be happily sipping Sangria in the sun.

Best to ignore the fact that you can't speak Spanish, will have to leave your husband behind in London, unemployment rate is 14.5% in Spain (3.9 in UK), double that and more for youth unemployment, not forgetting the summer influx all taking jobs in the bars/hotels, your DC will have a tough time initially in school, if you ever decided to come back selling a property could take forever or you sell at a loss and then discover you can't afford to buy in the UK. To top it all off, please read and re-read Hefzi's post.

Buena suerte

My dad lives in Spain and is very happy there - however he also owns a house in the UK and is a pensioner. Personally I would be looking at a cheaper area of the UK - I live in a town on the main London line, quite a few people commute, which would be an option for your husbands job, and you can buy a terrace house for 100k, so you could pay off your debts. Also in the countryside so lots of dog owners and doggy daycare/kennels/grooming is big business.

OP - I just don't get why you wont make a five year/long term plan that includes getting your finances in order, getting some savings and then looking to go.

Learning the language - yes good idea. getting passport sorted - again yes good idea.

But fundamentally you are going to need either a job that can support you and your children or enough money to survive without for a while. However much you don't want to address these, these are the Critical success factors for your move.

If you want this to just stay as a dream then carry on as you propose to. If you actually want to make a reality then start considering the other ideas in relation to moving somewhere cheaper and starting to save. don't be one of those people who throws it all in the air, drags the kids abroad and 2 years later pitches back to the UK with even less money and disillusionment than now.

One of my cousins has behaved like this - a series of "must do" dreams in relation to starting a new company, moving to different countries etc etc. No proper preparation each time and lots of family input to try and support but just not concentrating on what was needed to make each venture a success. He is now in his late 60's penniless and living back with his parents.

what you are proposing at the moment is all good but if you don't start doing something financially based then all you are doing is rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic.

I do wonder from your posts whether your current financial situation is due to the same edge tinkering that you are doing with your dream.

You can do it now. or you can plan and do it successfully. its going to be up to you.

In the UK at least you have the welfare system

If that helped the op then I don’t think she would be moving.

From my limited understanding if you can prove you have lived in Spain for I think 3 months you can go to the local town hall and get your documents.

I saw a programme last year where 2 guys who ran a business in Spain decided to get their residency sorted after Brexit as they didn’t want to be flung out of the country. They took along a Spanish speaking lawyer and all their proof that they had been there for the required time and got the ball rolling.

Hefzi it sounds like leaving the EU has come at the right time for the UK.

I know people who have moved across Europe and haven’t been able to speak a word of the language before arriving and getting a job. I really don’t think the ability to speak Spanish fluently should hold op back.

She can always set up her own business whilst learning the language.

I think what we have is a person who is drowning in debt who cannot see a way out and this is a solution that looks appealing.

Op has equity in her property and a dh who can still work and bring in a salary that isn’t gobbled up by debt repayments. She can house her children in a much cheaper area having paid off her debts and regardless of the winter months being slightly colder the sky will be blue and not that awful depressing grey that brings most people down.

To everything else there is a solution.

I do wonder from your posts whether your current financial situation is due to the same edge tinkering that you are doing with your dream

Op said her dh has been made redundant a few times and has struggled to get a job.

From someone who has been in ops position and has had the 5 year plan blow up spectacularly several times in our face I would throw caution to the wind and go.

The latest incident means Dp and I will never move abroad together.

We look back at life and wish we had moved as things most likely would have turned out an awful lot better than they have.

If we hadn’t been in the UK, Dp would have gone to a private dr who would have sent him for tests when Dp started to become ill 9 months before his eventual diagnosis by the NHS who had consistently brushed him off at every doctors appointments.
Dp is now terminally ill and we cannot move. We are stuck just waiting for the inevitable.

If we had gone when we first wanted to and instead of being cautious and planning everything who knows with different food, more sunshine and lighter evenings to go out for a run or walk Dp might not be ill today.