Dh wants to buy a holiday home. AIBU to think it's an awful idea?

[flametrees]

Dh wants to buy a holiday home in a location we visit every year. At least once with kids and once alone.
We also visit other places though.
I cannot see any advantages to owning a holiday home there. Property is expensive for what you get.
We will have maintenance costs. The worry that it will be broken into when we are not there etc
Plus I think he will never want to visit anywhere else if he buys a holiday home there. While I enjoy the location it isn't somewhere I want to limit my entire future holidays to.

AIBU to think buying a holiday home is a really bad idea?

It's really not easy to just 'buy a home in Spain' any more.

I live here with a Spanish DH and DD and I know.

You will need Spanish wills firstly, the forms you have to fill in are non ending, the inheritance tax is incredibly complicated, you will need a certain amount in a bank here and to get an NIE number, you will need private health insurance, no WAY you will get it free if not Spanish, this country is not cheap as people seem to think it is.

You WILL be robbed, sorry but you will if you are not here permanently. You will have a nightmare of repairs and land taxes etc, it will cost 1,000's a year.

You will get shafted by 'property management companies'

Who even knows about Brexit?

I am fine luckily as I live here with Spanish family. You will find it a dreadful headache and a money pit. Everything will be a pain in the arse to sort out. Impossible from afar.

I presume your DH is completely fluent in Spanish? If not it is a ridiculous concept. Spain is not letting people come here willy nilly any more. Not at all.

I speak fluent Spanish, but no way I could live here without a Spanish child and a Spanish DH.

But if they're not trying to be resident it's not as complex. My brother had a flat here in Spain for about ten years but was non resident.

The income requirements are for residency.

Declaring tax is a right faff though.

Oh and YES! to the PP, all 'management companies' use the properties if they know the property is empty! I was so shocked.

Whatever he does, a pool will be out of the question. Maintaining a pool is a weekly task.

BTW you would have to put it in both your names, I won't go into it, but if it is just his name, you will owe 100,000's in tax if he dies before you.

But you need an NIE, I didn't mention residency! You will need a bank account, you will need to be registered at the town hall etc.

The laws have changed in the past 5 years.

OP It is worth wondering what is motivating him. Rather than a concrete desire to own a house in this particular region because he really likes it and thinks his family will like it etc what you might be seeing is his own sense of inferiority playing out, even if subconsciously, because work colleagues/university friends etc have more conspicuous wealth and material success than he has. For some people, being able to casually drop eg a second home into a conversation is very important to their sense of status and self worth.

I'd just say that if he continues bullying you about this and other major financial decisions, plus MAKING said financial decisions against your wishes, you'll start thinking that the best way to get a say in how your JOINT finances are spent would be to divorce him and actually get (probably more than half) of them in your own bank account.

Ah ok, fair enough. My brother bought his flat in 2006 I think and
sold it (at a loss) a couple of years ago. When he bought it he got a NIE pretty easily as a non resident.

Bird I agree and you are correct, an NIE is relatively easy, you can even do it from England (Spanish embassy) I believe.

The wills, the bank account, the funds, the registering the …

It goes on and on. Just to register for electicity will take a fair while.

And for goodness sake, the inheritance tax! What ever you do!

Also, honestly OP please, in 2006 yolu got free health care.

NO WAY YOU GET IT NOW.

DC breaks a leg, you are talking a lot of money to get them home.

If Spain insists you pay it there, you won’t have to pay it again in the U.K.although you will have to declare it in both countries.

Sorry to bang on about tax on rental income, but as a non resident you do have to pay it in Spain, and it's 19% for EU countries, 24% for non EU. Something to think about post Brexit.

And as far as I know it's 3 monthly declarations, whether you've earned any rental income in that period or not. It's a faff even if you are fluent. Without being fluent it's something else you need to pay someone to do for you.

My experience of my brother having the flat here in Spain (about an hour from where I live in Spain) was that although it was nice to have somewhere to get away to, it soon got boring always going to the same place but you felt you couldn't justify going somewhere else.

Also, you get there and there's always something that needs sorting and you have to clean it all each time. I much prefer now's he's sold it to go somewhere else and pay for the end of holiday cleaning and just do a quick wipe round, sweep etc.

The places we choose are generally higher spec too, whereas the flat needed upkeep and so on.

My DB and DSIL have a holiday home in France and it does seem like hard work. A lot of time spent on maintenance when they are there and the challenge of sorting out problems remotely when they are not, plus they do acknowledge that they sometimes feel they are missing out on trying other destinations. They do seem happy and relaxed when they are there though. Gut feeling for me would be a “no” though, I don’t like going into properties when they have been empty for a while and I wouldn’t want to hire it out, I like to know I have freedom and options, I worry I’d get bored or it wouldn’t feel enough like a holiday.

The best holiday home story I know of is where a holiday home was bought about 20 or 30 miles from the regular home. They used it loads because they could just go there for a weekend or even a day trip. As their children grew up, moved away and got families of their own, it became a place where they would go on holidays and it get used for family get togethers as well. People thought they were mad buying a holiday house so close to home!

I would love this! Can’t you agree to get somewhere you both like?

We got a holiday home years ago (our 4 DC are now adults) but decided against buying abroad because of the cost of flights and high service/maintenance charges on most developments. Our house costs about the same to run annually as a two week family holiday in a decent resort.

Being in this country meant that we could use the house at weekends and didn't have to stay for weeks if the weather wasn't great, we could just come home. Its probably worth remembering that older teenaged kids really aren't interested in holidays with the parents - if you stay in the UK they can go alone. Our DC and GC now use the house more than we do.

That's reasonably common here in Dublin Sara107. I know a lot of people who have a holiday house or mobile home in Wicklow or Wexford. My friend has one and she can make it back to her house in about 35 minutes at low traffic times, so she nips home every few days to do laundry etc. It also means that she can spend the whole summer down there (beside a beach) with the DC and her husband can commute to work daily.

If you're not both in agreement then its it's a good idea. There is the running costs and especially if it's in not a cheap area the cost of buying and the cost of maintenance and language barrier(you need a basic knowledge at least although maybe not as much in Spain depending where you're buying)but if you want to tie yourself to that place fine but if not then no it's not a good idea on that score either not forgetting brexit uncertainty too.
We had a holiday house then an appartment for 16 years and we did go frequently to the house and twice a year then to the appartment but I have no regrets about any of it,wish we had kept the appartment for a bit longer than we did and it is easier to have an appartment than a house when it comes to low maintenance if you don't mind paying a service charge and only having a balcony but at least you can just lock up and leave each time and only doing minimal cleaning etc compared to a house with land. You have to be sure about it 100% because of the costs and tying yourself to a place.

Oh just to add we never rented either out although family and friends did stay at the house but we never charged them rent or anything and it was rarely anyone did stay. I've no idea about Spain though, it was France where we were.

We looked at buying a small flat in a ski resort (mountain biking, walking and kayaking in the summer). It was in 2016 and Brexit made it too much of an uncertainty though. I loved the idea of keeping all our holiday stuff there and just pitching up, unladen.

We bought a touring caravan instead, and have travelled through Britain and France in it (including to that ski resort!). It’s always trip ready , so we hook up and go, and it’s great for our DD, who has issues around change, to have her own bedroom full of her stuff.

I couldn’t do it without DH though, as towing doesn’t phase him at all.

*faze, not phase!

YANBU to feel this way, the question is have you explained all of this to him?

Also, he can want anything he likes but it should be a joint decision. Remind him of this and put your foot down as necessary.

There's no way my DH would be buying anything of this magnitude without my say so.

He is trying to park you. You need to know why.

I have a holiday home in Hampshire. I love it. We live in London so it’s a treat to have a big house and garden that we couldn’t afford in our part of London and I will have a small pension but my husband who is the main earner is self employed doesn’t have a pension so this, or our London home will eventually be part of our pension when it’s sold. I go down all summer for the whole 8 weeks with the kids. Also Easter, we have foreign holidays in June and October, sometimes December. DH comes for a few days each week when I’m there, we also do a few weekends now that the kids are older. We’ve had it for 14 years and I have close friends there now. I LOVE my holiday home.

As well as all the other downsides, in Spain he can forget about any capital growth in the next 20/30 years or more, even if property looks very cheap from a UK perspective.

A lot of people paid a lot of money for villas and apartments prior to the crash, who have probably lost over half their investment because the property was never worth anywhere near what they paid and there's a huge oversupply for both sales and rentals in some areas.