Bureaucracy

Who wants to look at a picture of paperwork? 

Here´s a nice photo from a German garden instead.

No one likes paperwork and bureaucracy, but it all grows more complicated once you live in a new country. You suddenly need to make sure you are living there legally, something you did not need to worry about in a place where you have citizenship. You have probably always paid taxes, but now you need to think about paying taxes in multiple countries, and how those countries' tax rules interact with each other. As an adult in the US, I could rely on my parents and friends to teach me about the paperwork of being an adult, and use them for advice when I got stock. In Spain, I have generally needed to pay experts to help me, because I have a lot fewer everyday resources to draw on.

In my first two years here, I hired a paralegal (aka “gestor”) to file all my visa paperwork. Gestors are hired even by locals, because navigating the legal complexities of Spain is considered too onerous for regular people. I also spent a lot of time looking for someone who was licensed to file both Spanish and US taxes, because understanding and applying tax treaties between two countries is pretty specialized work.

This year, with my increasing language skills and experience with previous visas, I planned to file my American taxes, my Spanish taxes, and my renewal visa application all on my own. I have managed to do this (hopefully correctly) for all three situations, although the Spanish tax preparation involved a week of paper collection followed by 20 adrenaline-filled minutes of individualized help at the equivalent of the Spanish IRS. I definitely found the limits of my language skills as I struggled to explain capital gains and interest en español. This took weeks of work throughout the spring, but I estimate that I saved several thousand euros. My promise to myself was that if I managed this, I could spend a percentage of the savings on a very fancy raincoat. So now I´m reveling in the fact that I don´t have to think about taxes for another year, and just waiting until the fall, when it will rain again and I can enjoy wearing the stylish raincoat.

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Lo siento, hoy no hay ninguna entrada en español.