Never Retire: The People Exploiting Spain's Popularity And Foreigner's Fears
After today’s post, I am keeping things super light for a while. Less about the planning and the tasks and the setting up shop and more about the living—doing life—in this freaking incredible city that I still can’t believe we call home.
We walk around this place and feel so grateful to be able to be here. It’s my half lifelong urban planning dream.
So—yeah—food, the way this place is laid out and set up, the bikes, the people, the experiences, the everything. As—don’t worry—I prepare more practical advice to help guide you through this or a similar process.
A handful of relatively high-profile (and not so high-profile wannabe) content creators have gone all-in on the desire people have to move to Spain. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing—because they often provide good information—it can pose a problem I think people need to consider if they’re thinking about moving abroad.
Because—in our experience—the sum of all of this alarmist content created unnecessary anxiety for us ahead of the move and after we arrived. Anxiety that still lingers, even as actual events have helped mostly alleviate it.
And this is anxiety from a person who actually relishes navigating and attempting to conquer administrative and bureaucratic systems. No doubt—they’re complicated here. But not any more—and maybe a lot less—than the US.
I don’t think the systems are the problem. Rather the lack of patience on the part of people trying to use them—during what is often a frantic and stressful period to begin with—creates what amounts to a false narrative on incompetency and nothing working in Spain. Shit works just fine here, if you put in the time to figure shit out.
More on this in a minute.
But first—
A few subscribers have contacted me recently asking for two things:
A how-to guide for moving abroad, in particular, to Spain.
A detailed rundown of all the administrative and bureaucratic tasks we have completed.
They’re coming, but I want to do them well and do them right.
The how-to-guide will come first because we’re done with the move. We have an apartment. It’s awesome! And this is our home.
The detailed rundown will likely come in April. Why? Because we have our TIE (residence card for foreigners) appointment at the end of March. And that’s the last big administrative hurdle.
To expand on today’s introduction, I’ll start with a list of the administrative tasks we already accomplished and illustrate how shit works (or doesn’t) and why it doesn’t really matter either way with what I got done in like 20 minutes yesterday morning.
This is what you get from this newsletter. A ton of practical experience from Spain that I think you can apply/adapt to other countries and situations. And how we are handling all of that and more.
More being this newsletter’s primary focus: Life—on the ground—in a foreign country with real, raw and honest stories about the experience as we’re experiencing.
Today, you get this. Yesterday, you got this.
So, it’s a balance and—in my humble opinion—well worth $100 (and even more if you’re feeling generous) for a founding membership, which I immediately convert to a comped lifetime subscription.