For lawyers in Spain we’re going to use Pellicer & Heredia to help us with all of our legal needs as we move to Spain. The have offices throughout Spain, but are based in Alicanté and have an office in Jávea, so they’ll be close by. Unfortunately when we in Jávea in August almost everyone was on summer holidays, so we had to postpone our first meeting.
We had our first call with them a few weeks after we got back. It was definitely an interesting meeting. One of the best things we found out is that they can handle a lot more than just our visa applications. They can also help us with everything related to the property purchase (including price negotiations), mortgages (if we decide we want one), tax related items, visa renewals, drivers licenses, importing our household items and more. It’s going to be so much easier if we can have a “one stop shop” for everything, since they’ll be knowledgeable about our entire situation.
The one major thing we walked away from our conversation with was the 183 day rule for becoming a tax resident of Spain. We want to get the timing of everything we need to do to wrap up here in the US and getting started in Spain to ensure we delay owing taxes in Spain as much as we can. We don’t want any proceeds from a house sale in the US, to incur taxes in Spain.
We’ll meet with them again in late Spring after our next visit to Spain. At that point we’ll need to start planning on what we’ll need to do from a financial standpoint to make sure we setup things here in the US to be aligned with our Spanish tax strategy.