Moving to Spain? Help!

I think what we needed to establish, if we were going to do this, is what the short and long term use of the property would be. ‘How would you like to use this property, just as a holiday home?’ I said to Deb. ‘You said it yourself before’, she replied. ‘After you retire do you want to be in the same place but with nothing to do? Of course not. So what about a holiday home for now and permanent retirement home when we give up work’.

Actually, that would really suit us. We are not ‘all inclusive hotel’ kind of people. We like our privacy, really enjoy each other’s company and thrive on peace and quiet when we are away. For that reason we aĺways go self catering and always in a detached property in its own plot with privacy.

Deb is getting so sick of looking for suitable properties in a chosen area at the right price. Most offer privacy but few give it, and when you turn up at your ‘secluded’ villa and see another villa directly next to you with a first floor balcony overlooking ALL of your garden what can you do. That has happened a few times, along with having a building site next door and one with a golf course at the bottom of the garden. What’s wrong with the golf course you might ask? Well, you’re on your sunlounger trying to read, sleep, chat, or whatever and every 10 minutes you get a group of up to 4 people wandering past, with their clubs shouting ‘good morning/afternoon/evening (yes it goes on all bloody day) or they randomly stop to have a chat with you. Now I haven’t got a violent bone in my body but I had come up with a few alternative uses for a 7 iron by the end of that holiday.

I said to Deb ‘ That makes so much sense but are we sure it’s inland Northern Spain or is there anywhere else you would like to consider?’ Obviously this didn’t include France or Portugal. ‘Florida’. She said. Now I knew she was referring to the Gulf Coast and not Mickey Mouse world. We love it out there, pace of life, beaches are amazing, love the people when we do get out and about, I could go on and on. But a holiday home in Florida? The cost of the flights, car hire etc would limit you to one, maybe two, visits a year and the last couple of times we’ve returned it’s taken me a week or more to get over the jet lag. Must be an age thing. Deb knew all this and I know she still loves Florida, as do I, but it’s unrealistic. We have also said that it’s fantastic to holiday there for 2 or 3 weeks but permanent living? We don’t think so. Northern Spain it is then, with the occasional foray to Florida for the odd holiday maybe.

Ok, location sorted, what about budget. I said to Deb ‘We obviously can’t afford to buy somewhere like that one for 100,000 cash, we’d need a mortgage. Shouldn’t be too much trouble getting one though so what do you think on budget?’

Note here that the last mortgage I had applied for was for our family home back in 2004. The criteria at that point for qualifying for a Self Cert mortgage was that you essentially just ‘told’ the lender you could afford it and then they gave you a big bag of cash. This system worked great for self employed people. They knew they could afford it even if the books didn’t quite reflect this.

I ‘knew’ we could afford a small mortgage for a Spanish property so it shouldn’t be an issue, I’m not stupid, I wouldn’t risk everything. So we went onto a mortgage calculator with, I think Caixa bank in Spain, and established what we thought we could afford, which then established our budget. Really useful item with their mortgage calculator link also reminded you to take into account 10-14% of the purchase price for fees. We now have 130,000 Euro budget, with just over half of that mortgaged, and for that it seems we can get a large detached property with all the bells and whistles. But what bells and whistles would we want?

‘Ok,’ I said, ‘We have 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, pool, indoor kitchen and a barbecue. We also now know that your life will never be fulfilled until you have an olive grove. What else do we need?’ Deb looked at me then, a little bit emotional and said quietly ‘Can we really do this, it’s not a pipe dream?’ I said ‘Of course we can hun.’ ‘Well’, she said ‘in that case let’s go for it! I think we should have outstanding views, no overlooking neighbours, private and secluded but not isolated, in the country but easy access to all amenities and within about half an hour or so to the coast. Oh yes, a couple of orange and lemon trees would be nice.’

Well you’ve got to start somewhere haven’t you.

Excitedly Deb tapped into Google ‘Estate Agents Montroi Spain’ and 3 came up immediately. First was Spain and Property. She said ‘I think the Company marketing man was on a day off when they decided on that name’. Then Azahar Properties, we both liked the look of that one, and ACO Inmobilliaria, what? Even though zero thought had gone into the name Spain and Property, at least it told you what it was about, but this? (We found out later that inmobilliaria is Spanish for real estate). Our learning curve had begun.

Into Azahar Properties web site we dived and straight to their search engine. Decisions to be made. Where? Was the first question. I said ‘We don’t know the area at all so it doesn’t matter, ignore this’.

Number of bedrooms? ‘Well that’s easy Deb said, ‘ minimum of 2, so there will be somewhere for me to go if your bloody snoring disturbs me’, what can I say, it never disturbs me ‘and one for when Josh comes to stay or the occasional guest’. 3 it was then.

Number of bathrooms? ‘That’s easy as well’, she said, ‘2, preferably a family bath and a decent en-suite’.

Type of Property? A list came up then with everything from Apartment to luxury villa. ‘Let’s try villa’ Deb said, ‘I don’t want an apartment or a townhouse as they won’t have enough outside space, I wouldn’t think we’d be able to afford a luxury villa, so we’ll go for villa’. ‘Do I get a say?’ I said. ‘Of course you do,’ she replied, ‘but you’d have chosen villa over the others wouldn’t you?’ She knows me better than I know myself. It was sound reasoning so villa it was.

Price? The biggie. I said ‘We could maybe only buy a cowshed for 1million euro or a palatial detached villa for a fiver, we have no idea. Start off with 100,000 euro, see what comes up and we can re-assess from there’. 100,000 was typed and Search pressed. Exciting.

WOW!!! First property of 21 listed was a 4 bedroom, 2 storey detached villa with master en-suite, family bathroom, indoor kitchen, outdoor kitchen (is that Spanish for a barbeque?), wood burner, swimming pool, solar panels, all in an 800sq m plot. For 95,000 Euro. ‘What’s that in real money?’ Deb nearly shouted at me in excitement. I had to check what the current exchange rate was, I think about 1.17 at the time, and then work out the value in sterling. ‘Nearly £82,000,’ I shouted back, equally excited. ‘We could buy two and you could have a whole separate house if you get sick of my snoring’. We did laugh.

But seriously, a 4 bedroom detached house with its own pool and barbeque for 82,000, this has to be worth looking in to.

Then Deb looked at the details and accompanying photo’s. ‘There’s a neighbour overlooking the back garden where the pool is. I’m not happy with that’. She said. ‘And it’s an above ground pool, I don’t want one of those. And it’s painted red, that would need to be changed. I’d like an olive grove and it hasn’t got one.’ What?? Where did that come from? At no point in the last 45 mins of discussing changing our future lives forever had the requirement for our own olive grove cropped up. I hate gardening and I can’t stand olives. It just sounded like so much hard work for no reward.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘If we are going to look at this seriously then we need to agree what we both want and look for properties that tick as many of those boxes as possible.

Hypothetical had very quickly become real.

Thinking of moving to Spain? Please read on. Hopefully you will find our journey informative and useful.

This is my first Blog, how exciting. Where to start? At the beginning I suppose with a bit of background.

I’m Rob, 58 year old Architectural Designer based in the UK. Self employed with my own business which has been established for some 20 years. Married for nearly 25 years to Debbie, 50 something, light of my life and a Technical Administrator. We have been moderately successful, live in a nice area with a reasonable lifestyle.

One son, Josh, who is the complete focus of our life, 21 years old and currently at the end of his second year of a Masters in Civil and Structural Engineering. Invaluable help to me during Uni holidays, don’t know what I’ll do without him when he graduates, he has far bigger ideas than taking over my little business. Good for him.

We’re all reasonably healthy although I have high blood pressure, and Debbie has Fibromyalgia, which is described as a chronic condition of widespread pain and profound fatigue. Debbie doesn’t have a chronic version of this but suffers mainly in the damp and cold with pain and discomfort.

So, the beginning. Back in 2016 I raised the subject of our long term future as we had no plans in place for retirement and what we were going to do with our long term, post work life. ‘I’m worried’ I said to Deb, ‘Are we just going to give up work and then the following day we are in the same place but with nothing to do?’

We were sat in our lounge, the TV was on in the background and of ‘A Place in the Sun’ was showing. Who doesn’t watch this programme and have a few dreams? I said ‘Why don’t we do that? A nice little place in Spain or France or somewhere. Not Portugal, I don’t like Portugal.’ This sweeping statement was based on my one holiday to Portugal, about 20 years ago. It was particularly windy February, rained occasionally and our accommodation was awful. On this basis the whole of Portugal was discounted. Slight me once and be forever cast out!

‘What about France?’ I said to Deb. ‘I don’t like the French’ she replied. Another broad ranged, sweeping statement based on a visit when she was a young girl with her family, during which time they fell out with a stroppy local.

France is not somewhere I’ve visited and it’s never really come up as a destination when considering holidays. More of a place you drive through, fly over or sail round to get somewhere else.

‘Spain then?’ I said. ‘Hmmm’ she replied ‘Why not?’ And so the discussion progressed, in a hypothetical sense.

Now Debbie is very familiar with Spain. At 18 years of age she was in the Costa Del Sol selling villas to the rich yuppies of the 1980’s in Marbella and Puerto Banus. This experience has tarnished her view of Southern Spain forever, bit like the French. She can really carry a grudge.

We’ve holidayed in other Spanish coastal resorts, as everyone has, and to be honest I wasn’t that impressed with the offerings of all day breakfasts and Sunday roasts, what’s that all about? I prefer to try and embrace the locals and the culture of whichever country we visit on our holidays. Apart from The Gambia of course, there wasn’t much embracing of the locals going on there. You’ll know what I mean if you’ve been.

‘Southern Spain is also too barren,’ she said ‘ I prefer it further North where you still have some dramatic landscapes but also a lot of rolling green countryside filled with orange and lemon groves, olive groves and the like’. Sounded good to me. ‘Obviously we wouldn’t want to be in Little England in the sun would we?’ I asked. ‘Absolutely not’ she replied.

We were then, hypothetically, getting somewhere. We pulled out the laptop and zeroed in on the Costa Blanca, further North than Benidorm, around Javea and Denia. Now we’ve visited Javea a couple of times, which is a lovely place for a holiday but not somewhere we would want to live. Native language is English and you can’t move for expats. It suits a lot of people and I hope they enjoy their lives there, but we would prefer somewhere more traditional. Further North then to Denia then Gandia. These are more working towns with a tourist industry but a little too built up for our needs. ‘Try inland a bit’ I said. ‘Within striking distance of the coast if you fancy a day out but far enough away to be a proper Spanish town.’

Inland is a completely different experience and one that looked exciting even on Google Maps. We scoured the area further North than Gandia and inland from Valencia. We obviously hadn’t a clue what we were looking for so we just moved around the area looking for an interesting sounding town. Well, hellooooo Montroi! Small town, surrounded by fields, larger town of Montserrat nearby and a dramatic backdrop of mountains. Only half an hour or so to Valencia, sounded ideal. What then would your hard earned savings buy you in Montroi?

Within half an hour of me asking my critical first question, we were about to start looking at properties in Montroi, Valencia Region, Spain for a, still hypothetical, move. Deb and I are nothing if not impulsive.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton