In April 2007, 30 intrepid Notes from Spain forum members came over to Madrid for a wonderful weekend of great food, drink, and general Spain-loving fun. It was such a success that we decided that we just had to organise another ‘Great Madrid Escape’ in 2008. Are you up for it?
I often think the best way to write a blog post is to imagine that you have an audience of one, or that one day, at least one person will benefit from whatever you are writing. And this piece of advice might make a big difference to someone’s life in Spain one day:
If you are going to set up a business in Spain, get a gestor to do it for you.
Don’t under any circumstances try to go through all the paperwork and different steps involved on your own. We did, for a saving of approximately 500 Euros, and we wish we hadn’t. In fact a large part of my recent burn out was undoubtedly caused by our decision to do most of the work of setting up Notes from Spain S.L. on our own.
Like any other bureaucratic nightmare here (and there are many!), setting up your own business in Spain requires an endless shuffle around different offices of inconvenience (to coin a new, appropriate phrase), interminable waits, and inevitable errors (filling out the wrong form, in the wrong order, and having to jump back two steps to get everything back on track again).
Despite receiving excellent advice and help in filling out the appropriate forms from the Madrid Chamber of Commerce, it still took us around 3 months to cover all the bases, and in the end we still needed a gestor to complete the final steps. I’d estimate we lost at least a week’s work doing things that a gestor could have done for us, removing immense stress in the process.
So what is a gestor and where do you find one?
A gestor is like a glorified acccountant. He or she will charge fixed fees to complete certain jobs, such as setting up your business, getting your driving license renewed, and doing your monthly accounts. If you run a business here then you have to get one eventually anyway, to process and register your yearly balance of accounts for example, so you might as well get them to do all the hard work for you from stage one.
Where do you find a good one? We found ours by asking Ana, the girl who runs the photocopying shop around the corner. She seems nice, trustworthy, discerning, and runs a good business. Sure enough, she put us on to a local gestoria (gestor‘s office) where unbelievably efficient women of a certain age process our monthly receipts with a minimum of fuss. They tell us what we can get away with deducting tax-wise (lunches, fuel, etc), what income we should be paying ourselves every month, and what forms we may have forgotten to fill out (actually they fill them out for us, we just turn up and sign – what joy!)
OK, to recap: if you are going to set up a business here in Spain then make sure you get a gestor to do it – it might cost you around 500 euros more (bringing the total cost of setting up a business in Spain to around 1,000 euros – you have to pay the Notario for some official paperwork as well, for example), but it’s worth every centimo in time and stress savings. To find a good Gestor or Gestoria ask around in respectable local businesses, or ask other ex-pats who are already running their own show.
One final piece of advice, if you are setting up an on-line business in Spain, make sure the Gestor is prepared to learn about this side of the business world as well. Most will never have worked on this side of things before and may have absolutely no clue about what Paypal is, for example. Make sure they are interested in finding out!
There we go, hopefully someone, somewhere, some day, will benefit from this piece of advice!
..myself from starting any more blogs. Punto pelota.
Wandering off topic again (“topic” meaning living, working, culture, traveling in Spain etc), but I had a totally revolutionary past few days, rebooting completely and, who knows, someone might find this list useful one day. So…
Last week I was mentally, physically and inspirationally 100% burnt out. I couldn’t imagine ever managing to come up with another interesting blog post or podcast idea, and the mountain of life/paperwork/un-fun crap that needed sorting out seemed insurmountable. I was wound up as tight as I’d ever been in my life, moody, snappy, obsessive about all sorts of ridiculous things, complaining all day, and generally pissed off.
How did this happen? Well, if you really want to know, I would say it was a combination of: trying to keep on top of far too many projects and streams of information at once, never taking a proper break, and quite a bit of latent emotional stress and mental exhaustion related to the death of my mother earlier this year. (Sorry for the heavy stuff at the end there.)
Then I heard someone mention the word ‘burn out’ on a podcast, and I thought, ‘that’s what I’ve got!’ I googled the phrase just to make sure of course, and yup, all the symptoms fitted. If you’ve got this far and you’re thinking, hmmm, burn out, that sounds about right, then maybe this list might come in useful. This is what I did to reboot, and how around a week later I feel about 100 times better:
Ben’s top 10 12 ways to reboot after total burn out / stress collapse (in no particular order):
1. Take a 90 minute to 2 hour walk every day in the park or countryside with enlightening radio/podcasts in your mp3 player/iPod. I was recently led to/discovered the following podcasts, and they were great, enlightening, inspirational, interesting: Front Row Highlights from the BBC (good solid BBC cultural interviews), NPR’s All Songs Considered (lovely music podcast), WNYC’s Radio Lab (philosophical sciencey stuff). Important: walk very slowly, don’t rush, and for at least 10 minutes of the walk, turn off the iPod and just enjoy looking at those magnificent trees/hills/people/fields…
2. Have at least one long hot bath a day. Have two if you want 🙂
3. Stop living and working according to your conception of other people’s expectations of you. E.g. “I must write 5 blog posts a week, people expect it”… Who cares what people might expect of you, you’re burnt out! Take your own limitations into account for once! There are no rules about what you have to do. Do what you can for a while!
4. Take some exercise. (I didn’t get beyond the slow walks, but even that helped no end). Oh, and stop drinking for a while. You can’t reboot with a hangover, even a tiny one. You need to wake up in the morning feeling GOOD! (Eat lots of really nice, healthy food too!)
5. Remove as much information ‘noise’ as you can from your life. I realised that certain activities lead to that nervous knee-tapping thing that nervy people get on first dates. You know, where your knee starts involuntarily bouncing up and down? I realised that trying to read through the 40 or so RSS feeds I was subscribed to on Google Reader caused this as soon as I opened the page, so I wiped the lot and removed Google Reader from my browser bookmarks. I stopped checking Facebook 5 times a day (by removing that from my browser’s bookmarks too), and only checked email once or twice a day. If you notice a tell-tale sign that something makes you agitated, remove its ass!
6. Destroy your “to do” list! Looking at my to-do list (in a text file on my computer) led to instant melt down, so I wiped the lot. About 100 items deleted in one fell swoop. I’ll remember all the important stuff, the rest is gone, the world goes on, hurray!
7. Get up later whenever you can. Just for a while. You can get up super early again next week, when you feel better.
8. Go to the cinema. I saw the wonderful Death at a Funeral. Laughed so hard I cried!
9. Enjoy music and sofas, at the same time. Or your cat. Or garden. All immensely therapeutic stuff.
10. Work out what burnt you out and what you are going to do about it. Do that thing less or more efficiently. How are you going to make it fun again? Can’t? Make changes, no matter how impossible that might seem, or how big they might have to be. Can’t advise much on this one, only you’ll know what to do.
11. Get others to help out with things that need doing while you reboot. A million thanks to everyone who sent in posts on the worst of Spain last week to keep this blog going.
12. Take up the guitar! OK, that’s what I’m doing, but I bet there’s something you’ve always wanted to do, learn, start. Make time for it. It feels so good to be learning something different and new again, and something off-line! I’ve always wanted to do something musical and at last I am. What about you?
Well, that lot worked for me, I feel pretty energised again. (But cautious to keep applying the above for, well, forever would probably be a good idea…)
Any thoughts?
I know I said I was going to take 10 days off blogging here, but this popped into my head this morning…
One of the most commented on elements of my recent recording about learning to live abroad, was the fact that when you up sticks to go and live far away from family and friends, it’s easy to feel guilty about those you leave behind. For many years I felt terrible about having voluntarily moved myself so far from my family, even though I’m just 2 hours from the UK by plane, and it’s just 8 hours door to door from here to my parent’s house.
One thing I neglected to mention is that there is one possible lifestyle choice, which although it may at first not seem open to everyone, can make a big difference in removing those feelings of guilt: being self-employed. In March 2006 my mother became very ill, eventually dying in April 2007. It was a horrendous year to say the least, and the one thing that I constantly thanked fate/luck/myself for was the fact that I was self-employed and able to travel to England regularly, and at the drop of the hat. Had I had a full-time job here with a contract, I would have been up against the horrendous rules that govern emergency days off in Spain. But I was working as a freelance translator and building our websites into a business, and as long as I took my laptop with me and summoned enough energy, I could keep things going from the UK while feeling really happy to be able to be around the family and lend a hand.
Now, I was of course very lucky. Not every freelance job will let you have this sort of freedom, the sort of freedom that goes a long way towards assuaging those feelings of ex-pat guilt. But there are many many jobs and businesses that you can set up or aim towards that will allow you the freedom that was so crucial to my life from March 2006 to April 2007. It’s worth thinking about, especially if you are considering a move to Spain or feel trapped here by an imposing job.
I never, for one minute, thought I could be a successful freelancer or start a business that would give me the freedom to travel freely to the UK and beyond. The former, being a freelance translator, was relatively easy in the end. I’m still not sure I could have done the latter, setting up a business, without Marina doing half the work as well. But if you are determined enough, there is no reason you can’t make the life you want in Spain, relieving half the guilt in the process. There are hundreds of freelance jobs that can be done on-line, and many more businesses that can be set up and run over the net. Good luck!
Essential reading: The 4 hour workweek
There have always been two reasons why I like the band Radiohead. Firstly, I love the music (and started loving it before I was 28 which, apparently, is when our music tastes freeze for all time). Secondly, I went to the same school as they did, Abingdon school, and knew Jonny, the guitarist. He was in my French A-level class. I bought one of their fist demo tapes (eventually sold for 600 pounds on ebay to pay for my Charity India motorbike trip), and my friends and I went to all their early Oxford gigs, some before they were even signed and were still known as On a Friday….
Now I have a third reason to like them. They have just completed their latest album, to be released on October 10th. So what? So, they are releasing it on their own, with no record label involved, via their website. And guess what? You decide what to pay for the album. If you go for the digital download option and click on ‘view basket’ you see empty boxes where a price should be. Clicking a question mark next to the empty price boxes elicits a new page saying ‘You decide’, and again, another question mark links to a page saying, ‘No, really. You decide’… and so it is, the fans decide how much they want to give the band for their new record. I paid 5 pounds to pre-order mine (which I reason is more than the band would normally get from their cut of a CD sale), and will get an email on or before the 10th with my download link.
So, not every band has the clout to make this work, but this is obviously a revolutionary move, and just how the music business ought to work: ditch the greedy labels, and make the fans happy to pay you for your work. No matter what happens/what people pay (and I’m sure Radiohead will come out very happy from this new way of selling their music), they will still make a fortune on the concerts that will follow and the admiration this will inspire. So it’s win win for them, and win win for us!
What do you think?
Lessons learned living in Spain… and questions for you: What did you last learn? What was the motivation? What did it lead to?
Answers below or in the show’s forum post!
South of Watford has a great map and explanation of three incredible treks through the Picos de Europa
Our latest open forum question asks: What’s your Spanish learning program?
Show Me… Spain on Spanish dress sense: “Suit & tie – conservative, suit sans tie – socialist, no suit – communist.”
BBC: Spain police seize Basque leaders
Our Notes in Spanish – Phrase of the Day Facebook app has over 11,000 users! Have you added it yet?
Spanish beer is served up in a huge variety of shapes and sizes, but nothing beats the good old fashioned tubo pictured above… Though the tapas in the picture usually provoke a collective groan from my friends and I – there’s just something too pink about this particular brand of embutido (I’ll even take bog-standard olives over this stuff!)
At the other end of the tapas scale you have this, Tortilla Paisana, the mother of all omelettes!
OK, so the tapas in the first picture are free, and you always have to pay for tortilla this magnificent, but Tortilla Paisana is worth a every centimo. Look at it! It’s a meal in itself! What distinguishes the Tortilla Paisana from your average slab of potato and eggs? Apart from it’s size, it usually includes other delectable ingredients such as chorizo, red peppers, even peas!
Commonly found in Asturian bars and restaurants, where food is always large!
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 