Is Spain overrated? Living abroad in the age of Instagram

This morning I woke up to an email from Spanish Social Security.

The email was meant to notify me about a further notification, which I could download on the back end of some government website.

In my Tax Inspection! article I described the unique mix of emotions one feels while waiting for the mail carrier to come up the stairs with a certified letter.

Today, I can confirm that the mix of emotions is similar for an online notification, but lasts longer.

It takes around 7 minutes to log into any Spanish government website, giving a lowly taxpayer plenty of time to think about what bad news might be waiting on the other side.

Several pages of Spanish legalese later, I’ve understood that I owe the government another four figures in Social Security payments for the year 2023.

Of course, I’m a freelancer. I pay through the nose already.

So I made abundant “contributions” to Social Security during 2023. But it turns out that those were just provisional, and that the government has reserved the right to adjust what I owe after the fact.

Thus: a large, new tax bill. Hooray!

Sangría: the Spanish government bleeding small businesses dry

The legal basis for all this is that the government, a few years ago, decided to re-do the system of Social Security payments for freelancers in Spain.

The autónomos who earn less money will “only” be paying 200€ or so a month (meaning they’re still probably losing money every month they work, but I digress…) The rest of us will be paying much more.

And apparently, that “much more” may come in the form of retroactive demands for past years.

I should eventually get a pension payment out of this, and the tax bill isn’t going to kill me.

It’s just unexpected, and annoying.

Doing some reading, I find that the adjustment I received this morning is due to the fact that the big boys in the government wanted to charge us all for the time they spent finalizing the law, but couldn’t decide exactly how much to ask for. So now that they’ve done the math, they’re sending people bills for back taxes.

As I said a minute ago, hooray.

Is living in Spain overrated?

Last week I met up with Lydia, from the Gotta Case of Wanderlust blog and podcast, and we talked about whether Spain is overrated – or whether it lives up to its hype.

Lydia (who’s significantly younger than I am) says that it’s not quite what she expected.

But I guess it’s not clear if that’s because of something about Spain, or if perhaps moving abroad is an overhyped option in general. One that’s sometimes more difficult and depressing than it’s portrayed.

In an episode of her podcast that I listened to, Lydia talks with another girl about how Instagram sparked their desire to get out there and see the world. And I can see why the reality of expat life might not live up to the high expectations created by 30-second videos from online influencers.

I used to follow some girls who made those sorts videos, in fact.

“Here’s a typical day in my life, living abroad in Spain: morning yoga in front of a sunny window, running on the beach in a bikini, tapas and jamón for lunch, afternoon snorkeling, a brief (and fun!) Spanish lesson, and finally, cocktails at a glamorous rooftop bar to end the evening.”

In this Instagram version of life abroad, nobody pays bills, and people (apparently) spend most of the day jumping up and down, and laughing hilariously over mundane events.

Watching that sort of thing, I can’t help but feel bad about my daily grind. Why am I worrying about being a useful member of society (working, paying taxes, etc) when there’s so much fun to be had?

Living abroad: the reality vs the highlight reel

But of course, it’s impossible for real life to maintain the level of excitement shown in someone’s brief highlight reel. Because real life (like it or not) contains a certain amount of drudgery.

You’ve gotta earn a living, find a place to live, pay taxes, feed yourself, and spend time in transport from one thing to the next.

If you’re lucky, you might have friends, family or a supportive partner to make this all a bit more manageable, and to get a feeling of camaraderie instead of facing the insults and indignities of modern life alone.

But if you’re an expat living in someone else’s country, guess what?

You may also have no-one at your side in the difficult moments.

All this to say: living in Spain is sometimes less fun than portrayed on Instagram.

Expat Life: Spain then vs Spain now

A few days after my conversation with Lydia, I spoke to Natasha Kennedy for an episode of my Spain to Go podcast. Natasha came to Spain in 2001, just a few years before I did.

In the time since, she’s founded TT Madrid (a training program for English teachers) and the BLC group, a satellite university that teaches business skills and Spanish to a young crowd of international people hoping to integrate in Spain – and get an accredited degree in the process.

Check out the episode there in the video, or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. It’s “Spain to Go” episode #105.

On the podcast, we talked about how coming to Spain 20+ years ago was quite a bit different than it is now.

I, for one, made it to Spain with very little information about what I was getting into. We didn’t have social media to give everything the “glam gloss” it has now. We didn’t have streaming shows like Emily in Paris.

All I had, in fact, were some stereotypes about Europe.

“Old buildings”, “better cheese”, and “open-minded women” describes most of what I thought would be waiting for me as I started my life abroad.

And in hindsight, I wasn’t wrong. I found all those things.

But it helps not having overly high expectations when you go into an overseas move like this, and it’s probably simpler if you’ve already accepted that your life will contain a fair amount of struggle.

I had, for one reason or another, figured out that life is struggle pretty early on. And I wasn’t expecting my life to get easier when I moved to Spain.

So the reality of expat life wasn’t a huge existential shock. It even seemed like an improvement.

But your mileage may vary.

Maybe living abroad is what’s overrated

So, is Spain overrated?

Maybe. I don’t think so. But it depends on your personal preferences, and who’s rating it to begin with.

Is expat life in general overhyped?

For a lot of people, I think it probably is.

You may have the idea that you’re going to move abroad, leave your woes behind, and spend your days at the beach: eating paella, drinking sangría, and enjoying life as only Europeans can do.

But the struggle, as they say, is real: language barriers don’t go away with a few weeks on Duolingo, the culture will have things that take some getting used to, and hey, have I ever mentioned the constant bureaucracy?

Those parts are less exciting than you might be imagining, and they’re going to be permanent fixtures of your new life in Spain – or elsewhere. Better get used to them.

(My advice: learn as much of the language as you can. It’ll help a lot in everything else you want to do.)

The Spanish expat playground

These days a lot of wealthy Americans dream of moving abroad.

They apparently think they’ll arrive in Spain, rent some fancy flat for 4000€ a month, have a siesta their first afternoon here, and their whole lives will change.

And maybe if you’ve got that much money, life in Spain is pretty relaxing, and that plan is totally practical.

(The amount of money it takes for someone to be “wealthy” over here is a lot less than you might expect. And – relatedly – the sort of “relaxed Spanish lifestyle” I’m describing here ins’t something everyone’s able to do.)

But it may work for you, and more power to you.

The Golden Visa recently ended, but the Non-Lucrative Visa awaits!

Don’t listen to the anti-tourism protesters: 99.8% of Spaniards are just fine with you being here.

Working to live, or some such thing

Still, one of the clichés I’m quite tired of is this: “Oh, it’s just marvellous! Back in the US, we live to work, but here in Spain people work to live!”

Well, yeah.

Like a lot of clichés, it’s not that it’s wrong. It’s just that it’s annoying.

Working to live is what you do, if your economy doesn’t provide a lot of opportunities for getting ahead.

You work. You live. And you pay taxes.

And you hope to be able to continue doing so, for some indefinite period of time into the future.

Many Americans have decided this is some sort of enlightened life philosophy, but I think it’s just the reality of most people on this planet. They struggle, not to get ahead, but to get by.

The US economy is quite special in that it gives people a lot of opportunities for getting ahead, if that’s your thing. That’s why people from every other country in the world are lining up at US embassies to get a Green Card.

Mind the reality gap

I’m sure that the gap between expectation and reality isn’t new.

And it isn’t only a problem for people moving to Spain, either. It happens in other parts of life all the time.

For example, people have been getting their ideas about relationships from Disney movies and Rom Coms for the last several decades.

The basic premise of most of these is that getting together is some long, difficult process, but once you are together, it’s happily ever after.

Real adults know that’s not true. (Although the number of real adults in our current cultural moment is small.)

Anyway, moving to a new country is something like that. It’s portrayed as another “happily ever after”.

But in reality, it’s easy enough to buy a ticket somewhere, fall in love with a new city, and think things are going great for a few months. Building a real life afterwards is much more difficult.

And if your favorite expat influencer chronicled a day spent in line at the police station renewing an ID card, you’d probably skip ahead to someone more interesting.

Someone, for example, who looked good running on a beach in a bikini.

Yours,

Daniel AKA Mr Chorizo.

P.S. I love Spain, and I’ve talked about that love for Spain in various articles. But of course, any long-term relationship has its ups and downs, and so I’ve also got a list of 4 things I hate about Spain. Also, some people find Spanish cuisine to be overrated, but I think it’s pretty good. Check out my article Spanish Cuisine: a love story for more about that.

P.P.S. If you’re into architecture, art, and culture, of course, Spain’s got a lot of it. But your average Spaniard at this point wants nothing to do with the typical symbols of Spain or the stereotypes you might have. So if you’re expecting bullfighters, flamenco dresses, and siestas under olive trees, you might be disappointed once you get here.

P.P.P.S. What do you think? Is Spain overrated? Let me know, right here in the comments…