Getting ready for the move

Once we had returned to England we understood the enormity of what we has set out to do,

Firstly there was the business of telling people what we had planned to do. Some thought we were very brave, others thought we were doing the right thing. Many said they wished they could do the same.

Then there was the small matter of selling our own house. Some of the people we met had already sold their houses in England so that they knew exactly how much money they had to invest in Spain. We didn't want to do that because we would have felt pressurised into buying just to have a house. In the event selling our house proved to be a lot more difficult than we imagined.

Most of the agents who sell new houses in Spain arrange staged payments rather than payment upon completion. Each company varies slightly but in our case we had four stages:

1. The deposit of £2,000 paid to secure the house during the Inspection Trip
2. 40% of the house price (without extras) after one month. At the same time we had to pay about half of the legal fees.
3. A further 20% after three months
4. The final payment on completion of 40% plus the cost of all the extras, the remainder of the legal fees plus 3% of the value.

In order for these payments to be made our solicitor in Spain had set up an account with La Caixa bank and we had signed payment slips for the 2nd and 3rd installments.

So our next task was to release capital from our house in England to enable us to make the payments. There are any number of lenders who will give you an interest only loan on your house - we chose Intelligent Finance.and arranged a loan which would cover the payments as they were due. Of course we only wanted to be paying interest for as short a period as possible so we hoped to sell our house in England quickly. Once we had the money to make the payments we used Currencies Direct to transfer the money to our Spanish account. We were at the mercy of the exchange rate but there was little that we could do about that. A few cents difference in the rate change the price of the house by a thousand pounds more or less. We would watch the rate daily to try and predict when it would be most favourable.

The process was quite simple. A phone call to our broker at Currencies Direct and the rate was set. He would then fax a copy of the deal to us which we had to sign and return. Finally to complete the transaction we would transfer the money by CHAPS from our Nat West account to Currencies Direct. They would then transfer the amount in euros to our La Caixa account

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