Episode 2: How to cope with Spanish bureaucracy - Part 1

Welcome back! If you managed to work your way through the first blog and thought you would try your luck with another one, then well done you. These stories are not for the faint of heart or sore of pile, but if you’re all ready for another one and are sitting comfortably on your rubber ring, then I’ll begin.

I need to make it crystal clear from the start that I have long realised Spain was not a country to make things easy for itself. This is a country where they still have people come to pump your petrol at the filling stations – which is nice when it’s lashing down with rain – and where the only answer to “how easy is it to do that?” is a rather frank, “no es” (it isn’t).

I’m going to dedicate Part 1 to banks. If you’re reading this as a UK citizen, you may remember opening a bank account. You walked into any one of the High Street banks, gave them more money than any bank should be allowed to manage, which is anything over a fiver these days and they opened an account for you. You may also have had Amazon vouchers, an iTunes card or

some other incentive like a weekend in Margate with the CEO’s still single forty six year old daughter. That was it. Apart from some rather dodgy photographs of you on a donkey with a stick full of candy floss and a sex-starved spinster hurtling across the sand after you in broken espadrilles, all went well; you had a fully functioning bank account. Not here! Oh no. Here, you open an account and it’s a total inconvenience for all concerned from the moment you sign.

At this stage in the proceedings, I would like to mention that most of the bank staff we have had dealings with in the past 2 months have been wonderful, lovely people. The inconvenience caused is as much to them as it is to us. Disclaimer over.........please don’t sue me!

First of all, over here, there is no such thing as free banking. In the UK, banks give you a free account and as long as you operate it with a positive balance, it will cost you nothing at all. Nada! Of course, they know that no-one operates their account totally in credit every minute of every day and they get their money from you that way. If you do keep it totally in credit, there’s always the bank’s favourite customers to keep the profits flying high - poor people. These poor saps pay direct debits with no money in the account and the banks make more than enough profit to make up for the anally retentive among us who are always, rather smugly in credit and never put a foot wrong. Here in Spain, all customers are treated to charges, day after day after bloody day! For instance, when we bought our car, the car showroom didn’t have a Visa Machine. 

We had to physically drive to the bank (hola telephone banking?!?!) and create a transfer to the car dealer’s account, which came with a compulsory commission payment of 25 euro’s. Is it my fault that the car dealer doesn’t have a Visa machine and can’t be arsed to go out and sort one? So why should I pay for his laziness? Then there are the hidden charges. Car parking. Each time we go to the bank, there’s at least a 1 euro charge for parking. You may ask why we don’t use another branch. I’ve asked the same question. I’ll tell you why.............in Spain, when you open a new account, they immediately presume you’re an international criminal, intent on laundering money for a covert pensioner smuggling operation in Costa Rica. Consequently, they put a block on your account for two months, meaning that you can’t do any dealings in any other branch, without that branch phoning your ‘home’ branch to confirm you are who you say you are. They say that this is because they want to see how you’re running your account, although I suspect that there are two women in a back room looking at screens all day and plotting. (“What do you think Concepcion? Should we let them bank at any branch?-----“No, he came in last week and didn’t even comment on my new brooch, so sod him”) Consequently, when you as a new customer go to another branch, there’s a 45 minute delay while they phone your ‘home’ branch to make that confirmation, even though you show them your ID card and donate a little blood for them to test so that you can prove you are who you are. Consequently it’s easier to go to your ‘home’ branch and pay the hidden charge of car parking, as well as the coffee and muffin required after each bank encounter, as most of them result on my blood pressure rising. It’s not a cheap do by any stretch.

Secondly, as I’ve already alluded to, Nanny is watching you and making sure that your banking experience isn’t easy. As well as having to go to the ‘home’ branch, the bank slapped a very low limit on the amount of money we can spend on our cash card. The only problem is, they omitted to tell us this. We’re in the

 process of having our kitchen gutted and refitted, so are spending money like Imelda Marcos in Stead & Simpsons. After only £250 last week, we were refused payment of £359 for a brand new fridge freezer (bargain!) but we didn’t know why. I eventually paid with my American Express card, having waved it around in a dramatic fashion first so that people could see that we weren’t really poor and it was all a terrible misunderstanding. When we asked the bank – well I say we........you must always read José when it comes to ‘we’ asking people over here, because my Spanish is limited to asking for beers and telling people they are tossers! – they sounded surprised. Why wouldn’t they limit the amount of money we could spend? What sort of spendthrifts are we? They did increase the amount, but not over the phone. Oh no. We had to go to the bank and speak with someone in person. More hidden muffin charges! Once there, they did as we asked, but oft repeated the mantra of “you must reduce it as soon as you no longer need it” like a parrot on amphetamines.

Thirdly, they have these people in Spain called a Notary Public. Basically, they are people who sit in an office wearing a suit, surrounded by lots of people on computers looking busy. All this person does is read the document we’ve taken, then read it out loud to us like teacher reading a book in kindergarten, in order to prove that we understand it (it was in Spanish. I didn’t get anything other than my name!) and then asks us to sign it. Then he calls the bank and confirms we’ve signed it. Ten minutes that took and 6 of those I was in the waiting room playing Mah-Jong on my iPhone. That also cost us 12 euro’s. Money for old rope! I want that job. I too can read documents out loud and watch as people sign them. At 12 euro’s every 10 minutes, based on an 8 hour day, that would be 576 euro’s before tax, or 125k based on an average full year. I may even do one or two in my lunch break if I needed a swimming pool built or we decided to buy Oreo’s instead of Digestives for the office tea fund. 

The one consolation in all of this, even the bank people have the good grace to look embarrassed at how antiquated their system is in places, although I suspect it may be some years before they come rushing out of the dark ages and into the 20^th Century. Don’t ask for anything more at this moment in time, or you will be charged for it!