A cashless society

Going into a bank in Spain is often the proverbial pain in whatchamacallit. I don't have to do it often. Cash comes from holes in the wall and most things get dealt with on cards or online. If I do have to go into a bank I always think it looks as though the clerks have never dealt with this particular procedure before. It's all a bit slow, a bit ponderous and there are always multiple documents to be signed.

We have a few banks in Pinoso but there isn't a branch of my bank, the Santander. There is an office with a big sign outside that says Santander and I once foolishly supposed that I could go there to pay in money. I can't. A bit like the wrong type of snow, on the railway, I have the wrong sort of account. It was originally opened with a bank that was later absorbed by the Santander. The name of the account has changed at least four times since then but, apparently, it still bears some Mark of Cain which makes it inferior to a proper Santander account. Whatever reason the man in the office in Pinoso cannot put folding money into my account. I have had trouble with the other banks too. They simply don't offer services to other bank's customers. Some will take my money off me and pay it into my account but they charge several euros to do it.

I had a period of being paid in cash and, to avoid charges, I would drive to the nearest branch of my bank in Monóvar, about 15 kilometres away. The process was simple enough but the wait could be mind bendingly long. At least I learned not to be coy about using the Spanish queuing technique of asking who was the last person in the bank so that I knew when it would be my turn. Spaniards do not, generally, care for the one in front of the other British queue.

At work, for reasons, I was paid with a cheque. I last saw a cheque in Spain about ten years ago so I wasn't sure what to do with it. I took it to the issuing bank and asked. Well, first I waited for about twenty five minutes before I got to speak to anyone. The two cashiers dealt with a total of three people, in front of me, in that time. I showed the teller the cheque;

"Can I pay this in to my account?"
"Of course you can."

So, I asked her to do it. She explained that she meant that if I drove to my bank and queued there then I could pay it in myself. She did say that her colleague could give me cash for it though. So I went back to waiting. I handed over the cheque and asked for cash. I was asked for ID and the man made some huffing and puffing noise when I handed over the A4 piece of paper that is my official ID document. It's been in my wallet for a long time and it looks a lot like those remnants of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Then he asked me for photo ID. This is all pretty normal. Everybody in the world seems entitled to ask me to prove that I'm who I say I am so I wasn't phased. I handed over my passport and asked if he'd prefer something Spanish, like my driving licence. He said he would. He asked me if I were resident and I suggested that a Spanish driving licence and a residence certificate may be a clue. He gawped at the computer screen for a while, made a copy of my passport, got me to sign two bits of paper and then, the part I really liked, bearing in mind that we are now closing in on 45 minutes.

"You shouldn't use cheques, you know, they involve a lot of bureaucracy."
"And is that my fault?," I snapped back, in Spanish.

He'd been condescendingly talking to me in English despite the fact that I addressed him in Spanish. He responded in Spanish that time. He assured me that I was not responsible for whatever process the Caixa Bank had agreed with who knows what supranational banking system and handed over the few euros that the cheque was worth.

Sometimes there are still reminders of the years that Spain stagnated while the rest of Europe moved forwards.

Suddenly poor

As far as I can see the only good thing about work is that sometimes you get paid for it. I'm not sure what work is to you, because it can be different things to different people, but for me work is almost everything that I wouldn't choose to do if I had the choice. Some people cook because it's their family role, some because it pays the bills and some for pleasure.

Here in Spain my first job was in a furniture shop. The work had its ups and downs but, in general, as work goes, it wasn't bad. For the past several years I have worked as an English teacher usually in a sort of private language school called an Academy. In fact I've worked in five. Most of the people I have worked for have been very pleasant. Nonetheless, working practices in Spain, in my opinion, leave something to be desired. Pay is low and there are plenty of little dodges that the employers use which are to the employee's disadvantage. Contracts are designed to avoid paying for things like dead time between classes, holidays or extra work. I'm not complaining, well not too much, because that's the way it is and I've got used to it. It's probably the same in the UK now too.

Having said that I don't like work I have to say that teaching English can be perfectly pleasant, good fun even. With children it's nearly always horrible - especially with the ones who bite or who dance on the tables. They don't like me and I don't like them. Teenagers and adults generally behave well though and even if they don't give a jot for learning English but have to get an English language qualification we can, at least, have a reasonably good time along the way.

One aspect of giving English classes in academies is that there are terms, as in time periods, and that it's a seller and buyer thing. For the first term that starts mid September or early October people are keen - the learners stump up their payments relatively happily. After Christmas, for the second term, only the determined keep going though, sometimes, there is an influx of New Year's Resolvers. After Easter only the true enthusiasts or the committed qualification hunters plough on. So the last term, the summer term, can be pretty quiet and employers have been keen to lay me off, at the end of May or at the latest mid June, until they need me again in September or October. This suits me down to the ground. The only problem is that it means I don't get paid for four months.

Now I do have a bit of income from a pension and our lifestyle here is not expensive. Even then, over the summer the money in my bank accounts plummets. I'm glad when October arrives and I finally have some income. I've never earned much but it's usually enough to mean that there's slightly more coming in than going out. Well that's been the pattern for the last few years but this year, for one reason and another, it didn't work out as usual and, when I got to June 2017, I was worse off than I had been at the same time the year before. It seems to have been an expensive summer too. Some costs, like the car repairs, the fifteen fold increase in our "council tax" and the the new electric meter and tariffs are unavoidable. Others, like going on holiday to Eastern Europe are my own daft fault. Nonetheless the result was that I was a lot closer to absolutely skint than usual. Never mind, October was on the way, I'll soon be back to work and things will return to an even keel. Well that was the thought but it has suddenly all fallen apart because October is here and they haven't.

The place I teach in Pinoso offered me some work, more work than last year, up to about ten hours per week, so things started well. A nice spread of classes too. But the bigger job in Cieza hasn't materialised. When the boss finally contacted me, she'd been waiting for information from someone else, the twenty two hours of last year had reduced to just five hours per week and even that hasn't been confirmed.

Last night I stared at my bank balance for quite a while before going to bed. This morning I got up early thinking about bills, income, outgoings, taxes and the like. Like the title says.

Evading tax

I got a letter from the tax people yesterday. Now letters from the tax people are not written in normal, everyday Spanish. They are Brontesque in style. With the envelope ripped open and the single page scanned it looked bad. There were lots of words I didn't understand but it was clear that the Revenue, Hacienda, were unhappy about the tax I'd paid on my pension. Tax people can be nasty. Tax people take your house and send you to prison when you're naughty. Unless of course you are very, very rich in which case they are extremely nice to you.

I explained my situation last year in a post on Life in La Unión Just a quick recap. Normally, if you are a Spanish resident, your worldwide income is taxed in Spain. However, I have a local government pension from the UK and there is an agreement between Spain and the UK that government pensions are taxed at source, in the UK. So far so good but where I turn into Al Capone is about my additional voluntary contributions. They provide an additional pension of about forty quid a month. Rather than declare that cash in Spain I simply left it in the UK tax regime. I shouldn't have done. I should have declared it in Spain.

The financial year in Spain is the calendar year. Sometime early in the year, March I think, Hacidenda do their sums and decide whether you owe them money or they owe you money. In 2014, for the tax year 2013, they caught up with me. I came clean and paid the unpaid tax. It was about 70€. The tax office said that to sort out the same underpayment for 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 I'd have to go to an accountant. So I did. I just chose an asesor at random in the town where I was living, La Unión and asked for advice. To be honest the accountant didn't exude reliability but he told me that I earned so little in total that it was all straightforward and I didn't need to do anything. No fines, no clink and no public humiliationn coming my way.

So when I got that letter I started to curse the accountant and think bad thoughts about the man from the Prudential who sold me those worthless AVCs too. Ten minutes later though with a more careful reading of the letter, and only needing to look up two words as it turned out, I realised that the tax people were actually offering an amnesty to we foreigners who hadn't paid up on our pensions. They mentioned the special circumstances we are under i.e. we don't understand the lingo or the culture and we have no idea what's going on. We have till June to sort it out.

Now I have an accountant because I am technically self employed. I phoned him. No worry he said. If it wasn't sent registered post it isn't dangerous. We can talk about it when we next meet.

Thinking about it this letter is actually good. It's a general letter. The accountant in La Unión could be right and it could be that I owe no tax. It could also be that the accountant in La Unión was wrong and I do owe some tax. However, with the amnesty there will be no fine and no interest to pay so the worst it could be is four times the amount I handed over last year or thereabouts. But the best thing is that Hacienda has a process for sorting this out and once I've filled in the appropriate forms and paid any debts it will all be nice and starightforward.

And I do value a quiet life now I'm in my dotage.

Shifting money

For years and years I've had a bit of a deal going with some friends who have a holiday home here in Spain. They pay money in sterling into my UK account and I pay Euros into their Spanish account using the FT exchange rate. They get money to pay their direct debit bills and I got enough to service my Amazon habit.

The more usual methods of transferring money can be quite costly. There are all sorts of schemes and methods but most of them make their money by giving below the "money market" exchange rates (the ones that say no commission) or by charging a fee. To give an example for small amounts, say £300, my normal method is to use an account I have with the Nationwide. They charge me £1 per transaction plus 2% of the amount. So that's £7. Actually that's as cash so it's a bit different but the figures are illustrative.

Recently Cliff told me about a scheme that he had heard described as peer to peer. It's what my friends and I have been doing all these years except that the firm charges a commission and I don't. In these schemes the money goes between bank accounts.

I used the company for the first time last weekend. I paid my Pounds into the firm's account in the UK. Somewhere in Spain  a Pedro, Paco or Maria wanted Pounds and they paid Euros into the same firm's Spanish account. The firm pays me with P,P or Ms money, the firm pays Pedro, Paco or Maria with my money and takes a commission from both of us. The commission rate on the same £300 seems to be around £1.50. In effect it's a national rather than an international transaction

If only we'd been smart enough to realise we had a business idea my friends and I could be rich by now!