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.

Mileuristas

Mil means 1,000 in Spanish, euristas is derived from Euro, the currency, and, to finish the word off it is personalised with that ending istas. So Mileuristas are those people who earn around 1,000€ (£870) per month.

I aspire to be a mileurista, I've never been paid as much as 1,000€ per month either before or after tax whilst I've been in Spain. Fortunately Maggie breaks the barrier easily enough.

There was a report yesterday that said that 63% of the Spanish workforce earned less than 1,100€ per month - that's less than 13,200€ gross per year. The average wage here is 18,087€ gross (before tax etc.) If we were doing this in sterling we'd be talking £15,727 per year. In the UK it's around £24,000.

Now we all know that averages are rubbish, I'm almost certain for instance that you have more than the average number of feet! Nonetheless it feels true that Spanish people earn derisory amounts of cash by European standards. I heard one of those "dolebuster" features on the radio where a boss was obviously proud that he was offering a salary of 18,000€ for a trained and experienced chemical engineer. The woman in the dole office agreed with me that it wasn't too ridiculously greedy to ask for a salary of 1,500€ per month if I would have to move house to take up a new job.

Earnings of course mean nothing without being able to judge outgoings too. The 2 bed flat we've just rented in Cartagena seemed averagely priced at 550€ per month. A litre of milk costs around 70 cents and it's about 6€ to go to the pictures. We thought we were onto a good deal for a phone/broadband and basic TV package at around 65€ per month. A litre of ordinary diesel is 85 cents and 95 octane petrol 94 cents. A bread stick might be discounted but expect to pay around 50 cents and an English style loaf can cost as much as 2.50€. It's a long time since I've been in the UK but I suspect that some of those prices sound good and others sound high. Not drastically different though. And not enough to make that 63% of the population comfortable.