Ps. You can see our (so far) very thin blog at palmaonfire.com if you wish. Ds.
Love the blog. We've been considering moving away from the Pacific Northwest since the winters are hard on the spouse. A FIRE'd friend moved to Valencia about 3 years ago and is really having a grand old time. We visited them last year and the life there seemed to be pretty nice and inexpensive, compared to the Seattle area. We FIRE'd last year after my startup got sold. Probably in the Fat FIRE zone. Assume that we'd learn Spanish before moving, of course. So:
1) Did you have issues with making friends? We're pretty hardcore hikers and backpackers. Are there groups that we could join?
2) Do you guys still have your investments in Sweden and draw $ out of it? I'd prefer to keep my $ in the US for better market returns. Yeah, I'll cough up Spanish taxes.
3) Were there any "I wished I'd known that" insights you had?
thanks
e
Thank you, that makes us very happy! We try to post something every week now, hopefully interesting to aspiring expats. :-)
We where also considering Valencia for quite some time. Its a wonderful city, next to the Mediterranean, beautiful old town, awesome parks in the drained canal etc. Its definitely more Spanish than Palma which consists of 20% foreigners.
1. No and the Spanish are quite open and social people. They are definitely more like US people than Swedes from a social perspective and thats all positive! Depending on where you go you might have smaller or larger expat-communities. You might not move to Spain to hang around with Americans and other expats, but those communities are insanely easy to get into. Everyone has left family and friends back home and are open and interested in getting to know new people.
Hiking is probably bigger on Mallorca than Valencia but i honestly have no idea how big the community is in Valencia. Its a big city so most likely quite big! :-)
2. Yes, most of the stash in Sweden -
https://palmaonfire.com/blog/2020/01/dissecting-the-butterfly/ The taxes aren't that bad and there are "solutions" around them like certain types of Endowment Ensurances that are tax exempted. Which brings me to the my next thought, you should use a financial advisor. If you are a FAT FIRE you might get hit by wealth tax that really hurts. You are allowed to have 700k € per person and withdrawal of 300k€ for the house. In reality you and your partner can have 1400k€ in investments together and 300k€ in the home before wealth tax kicks in.
3. Not many, we did some homework before the move. But got two good advices before which I find true now. 1 - If you want an easy relocation sell everything at "home" and cut old connections. If you don't you have a lot more paperwork and agency leg work ahead of you. 2 - The spanish administration is slow, incoherent and hugely irritating. Prepare yourself ahead with tons of patience and try and accept that it is what it is. Wrote some here:
https://palmaonfire.com/blog/2019/09/adapt-or-perish/One thing that i wish a did earlier rather than later was to take help from an Gestoria. It removes some of the pains dealing with the Government administration.
Kind regards,
Mr Snow