Moving UK -> Spain. Costs / paperwork

Hi All,

  Just doing some final planning; we've sold our UK property and moved into rented accomodation, and our house in Spain is nearing final completion of the build.

  I'd like to look into the removals side of things; we still have all our old furniture, and some of it is quite old. I've looked at initial advice around paying customs charges for moving furniture, and it looks like maybe we have to pay some taxes for shipping our own property, even though it's quite old. There seems to be some advise around showing invoices / receipts for when they were purchased in order to legally avoid paying taxes on old things, but truthfully, some of it is so old, I've long since thrown out the receipts.

  So, does anyone have any advice about moving your existing "stuff", and what was involved, whether it was easy, or painful, and did the authorities ask you for money, etc to move your own property?

  The car is worth nothing basically, so we could happily trade it for a LHD car either here or there I guess. I have no preconceived ideal there so just asking for feedback I think around what might be useful choices on that.

  That's the discussion on material things; a little about us as a family. Husband and wife with 2 girls who will be 14 and 11 at the time of the move. The will literally just be going into years 10 and 7, and the youngest is the catalyst for the move, because she will finish primary school and move to high school, so we wanted to try to do it at a time when she will have major changes anyway, so may as well move overseas. We're all dual citizens, and ll speak a smattering of other langauges, with my wife being Spanish.

  Any other advice before we make the move (we're thinking around August)?

Thanks,

Rob

If you are a EU citizen (eg, UK) then you can import personal goods into Spain with no customs charges if you are taking up residency in Spain. That doesn't apply to cars.

If you are a non-EU citizen you can import goods with no charges providing you have owned them for more than 6 months and you import them within 3 months of taking up residency. I don't know if there's a time limit for EU citizens on importing personal items of furniture. I think you also sign a form to say you won't sell the good for a period of 12 months but I don't recall having to do that when we moved over from UK.

When we moved over, we brought quite a bit with us as things were very expensive here then. Now the prices have equalised a lot and I doubt if we would do it again. I mean white goods and large items of furniture which are now very much on a par with UK plus there are loads of auctions and second hand dealers around who can supply stuff.

Of course, there are many things you will wish to bring with you. A good removals company will sort out all the paperwork for you and some will even store (at a price, of course) goods until you are ready to move them to your house.

We had an old car and drove it over loaded up with stuff. Before we took out residency, we bought another car here and then drove the old one back to UK and gave it to our daughter (transferred in UK) and then flew back to Spain. 

Thanks Mariedav. I guess we should be okay, as we're all UK/EU citizens.

I guess the issue with prices for things is that if we sold, we'd get nothing much at all for our second hand things, yet replacing them would cost whatever the new price was. It's really a case of the transport costs and whether or not it's worth it. It's a relief to know taxes won't be an issue though.

I think your solution for cars is a good idea.Thanks again.