July 18, 2016
Dear Mr Jones
I rang the Costa Blanca newspaper this morning after reading Page 11 of this week’s newspaper, July 15-21, 2016.
Joe talked to me and I spoke all about the stress we have been under with such a lot of things while we have been living here in Spain.
1. Letters are now not being delivered to our houses and everyone is exhausted with going to road demonstrations in the town twice a month for about two years.
2. We are paying for amenities that are included on a household bill for the residents in our area, not just us but the area about us, and not even having that service. So that’s the next thing the association wants to take up and try to get that money taken off refunded to everyone – an about three-and-a-half years amount.
3. My husband and have been waiting for six years for a bank to give us back our savings they had of our money that we entrusted them with. Honestly, this has had an impact on the health and happiness of both of us.
4. Double taxation. We both worked for the NHS and retired on early pensions, of which wasn’t much, but my father-in-law was extremely ill here in Spain and he actually passed away about three months after we arrived.
We managed and we filled in Form 720 and then got state pension, and from then on have had trouble as you know the pension/s are taxed at source in England on the money above the Personal Allowance. That’s fine, but here the whole of your pension/s are added together and then changed into euros and then the allowance allowed to the people of Spain of retirement age is much lower than the English yearly tax break. So, for example, 10,000 before tax in Britain – and here just 6,000 tax break and we were told you are in Spain living and so you are only entitled to the same amount. We are taxed twice. Then the company who deal with us for tax affairs here sent off a form to apply to the English HMRC to refund the tax they took off in the beginning, but also said that when the money from HMRC is given back they would have some of it too. You cannot understand all this at all.
Thank you very, very much.
