Hi all,
When I sold my apartment in Valencia, I had to pay an amount to the tax authorities for that sale. Well, you pay multiple taxes for that money.
In Spain, when you sell a home you must pay the notary, a local tax and then pay the tax for the supposed profits you have had. This profit is basically the difference between the purchase price and the sale price.
In June 2018 I sold my apartment and for 2019 I would have had to pay a fortune to the tax authorities of that supposed profit that I had. At that time, I opted to declare in the statement of income of 2019 that I was going to reinvest that money in another property of habitual residence.
In this way, the tax authorities give you 2 years to reinvest that money. As long as it is for a primary residence. My idea was to have left Spain before those two years were up and to have closed the accounts I had there.
Unfortunately, the plans I had to move to another place were delayed a lot and the two years passed without having changed residence and without having taken my money out of Spain. The important thing was not to have money in any bank in Spain since in that country the government can take money from your accounts or evict your payroll as and when they want.
So, in June 2020 I had to pay the tax authorities.
It should be noted that from that supposed profit you had from the sale of your home you can be deducted with some things if you have an invoice, but they are very few.
In 2019 I made the income statement with an accountant that at that time seemed acceptable to me. But in June 2020, when I had to make the 2018 income modification, the guy kept holding me off until December because “he was very busy.”
By the third week of December, I went directly to ask in a tax office since I saw that the year was running out and this accountant did not appear. I found out that there was a default interest on that profit that I was supposed to invest, which the accountant had never told me. In addition, because of him I was going to have to pay 6 more months for not having made the modification of the income statement as the due date was June 2020.
A friend of Diego’s recommended us an important accountant of those who have clients with a lot of money. We called him and he explained what we had to do and that we could do it alone on the web since he charged 150 euros for an income statement and thus at least we saved that money. If not, that they made the procedure to us in a tax office because is their job.
They did not want to modify my tax statement because supposedly if they did it there, “the case went directly to disciplinary proceedings” regardless of whether I was doing everything on time and according to the law. It was clear that the officials did not want to work and did not feel like doing something that would have taken them 5 minutes and was their job.
So, we went to the website to make the 2018 income modification and we spent about two hours because in Spain the websites of public administrations are the least intuitive and least functional thing that can be found.
We finally succeeded and the tax office had told me that I could not pay online, so I had to go with cash to pay it at the bank. I had to pay almost 4500 euros. Yes, all that money that I had to give to the Spanish Government for doing nothing. More money than a real estate agency charges and without helping me in any way to sell the apartment.
As Diego just had sold his car and had been paid in cash, we ran to bank.
We went to three banks: Bankia, BBVA and Cajamar. In none of them wanted to do the procedure for the payment of the taxes. The first excuse was that I did not have an account with them, which does not matter since taxes can be paid in any entity, even if you do not have an account. Then it turns out that it was not the day to receive cash. The BBVA directly said that had no cash register and that “it was a lot of money”.
Spain is the only country where you come across these cheap excuses because people just don’t want to work. Then they regret if they get fired.
In Cajamar, after fighting for a while, they finally told me that they could receive it, but that they had to open a file with my data. I was like ok, do what you must do. Then they wanted payroll documentation and other things. As each time the discourse was changing, we left.
At home we went back to the infernal website to see if there was a way to pay for it online since it was the easiest and most logical thing to do. After an hour of walking around, we found out how to do it and paid.
After 7 years of living in Spain, the truth is that the incompetence that I always found to do anything never ceased to amaze me. Something as stupid as paying a tax they managed to turn it into a James Bond movie. What is more absurd to me is that even to take your money, they make your life impossible.
When I bought the apartment, I remember that I lost more than 5 hours going from here to there to see if someone would like to take the 6,000 euros I had to pay in taxes. Then when I sold it, I also had to waste a lot of time to give 4500 euros to the Spanish state. But of course, if you don’t do it on time, you get a sanction and a fine.
Pay a tax to buy, another to register, another to do the property registration, another annual tax. Each thing is at least 300 euros. Think that for the average Spaniard “a good salary” is 1000 euros, so having to pay 300 euros for each procedure is an atrocity.
As if that weren’t enough, apart from the money they get for doing nothing, you have the physical and psychological exhaustion of wasting hours going from one place to another and dealing with incompetent people. When money should be taken from your hands with a smile on their faces and a “thank you.”