15 Billion Reasons Not to Live in Spain
Published on Thursday, September 17th, 2009
Despite everything, Spain remains one of the most popular choices with Britons dreaming about or even actively planning a new life abroad. It’s accessible from the UK with cheap flights aplenty, it’s a country you don’t need a visa to live in, and what’s even better is that in Southern Spain the sun shines almost all year round.
These are all fine reasons for choosing Spain as a relocation destination, but in this report we’re going to counter that positive argument with 15 billion reasons not to live in Spain. You see, if you thought the UK was in a bad way economically speaking, you ain’t seen nothing until you read about the mess Spain has found itself in.
The Spanish government have seemingly acted as ridiculously as our own dear politicians in the UK in terms of digging an enormous budget deficit shaped hole, and now they’re looking to the lowly taxpayer to fill it. And if you moved to Spain, you would become one of those lowly taxpayers…
With the euro still riding high against the pound, the British economy in recession, the housing market on its knees and no sign of a particularly positive breakthrough on the horizon any time soon, we understand why many people approaching retirement in the UK are quite keen to leave, but are perhaps prevented from doing so because of fiscal restrictions.
According to a newspaper report out today, Gillian Merron, the British minister for consular affairs in Spain has intimated that expatriate unemployment rates in mainland Spain are rising. This is worrying news for those already living in Spain and committed to their new country – and it’s also concerning for anyone contemplating moving abroad to the sunshine in Spain to escape the gloom of the UK.
If you’ve holidayed on the Costas or visited Spain regularly and decided that it really is the one country that you could call home, chances are you have a basic but not deep understanding of the country. Unless you’ve committed to living in Spain for at least a few months, you won’t be able to say for sure that this is the country that you really can settle into.
In the latest edition of the excellent ‘Going Native’ series from BookShaker, author Susan Bearder explores the Spanish region of Alicante. She goes way beyond the ‘highlights’ such as the airport and Benidorm (!) to discover that this is one of the most exciting, fascinating and ironically undiscovered regions of Spain.
Despite the fact that the Spanish property market is really suffering a drought in terms of buyer activity at the moment, don’t be fooled for a second into thinking that we Brits have fallen out of love with Spain. For one thing, there has to be more to Spain than its property market to have attracted something in the region of 760,000 Brits to relocate there.
Even if you want to move abroad to escape the economic turmoil in the UK, you may find that the country you had in mind is also not doing very well economically speaking! Take Spain for example, it has a worse unemployment problem than the UK, it is teetering on the brink of recession, and the government is being heavily criticised for the position the nation finds itself in.
In a recent article entitled ‘
If you’ve been contemplating a move to Spain and were wondering if you could really justify it to your friends and family, or if you were just looking for one more reason to quit the UK, it comes in the form of a quality of life survey from uSwitch.com.
