Will - Page 2

Hi Glen, 

I have read all the replies and seems no one here has used their notaries instead of solicitors. Your local notary should charge approx 60/80€ each person, a big differrence to what you have been quoted and others have paid. I used a notary in Almoradi highly recommended on this groups sister site, Costa Blanca Forum. His charge last March was 57€ each and his english is superb. Many have used him and he also gave freely a lot of info on inheritance(unlike most greedy solicitors who charge for everything).

If you are a non resident you will only pay IHT on your spanish property leaving your english will to deal with Uk assets. It needs doing because of the succession rules in Spain. You can not leave your assets to whom you want as there is already a spanish ruling favouring offspring rather than spouse. So your Spanish will must have the clause "to be conducted under English law, or law of your nationality(country of birth). This allows for your choice of inheritors and how much instead of spanish set % rules. However the IHT allowance is differrent in each province and ours in Valencia is 100k€. If joint owned that means half of assets as survivor owns half too.

If you are a spanish resident even with an english will (if you have property there) your allowance in Spain is set against your worldwide assets which the hacienda will know from your modelo 720 declaration.

If you need the name of the notary we used (he gets people travelling from afar as he,s so well recommended) let me know but all notaries can do this for a lot less than your solicitor. After all your solicitor just draws it up (write it) and it must go before a notary to have it legalised and registered. Btw I am a member of both forums as my property is halfway between both costas so I joined both and I have to admit the Costa blanca forum has a lot more "super helpful" members (one in particular Jim Fletcher who virtually knows everything anyone ever needs to know and he has recommended same notary. Everything was done by email, photoed our english wills and had mirror wills ready in approx a week to go and sign after sending us draft copies by email for our agreement. 

Hope this helps you

Regards

Pauline.

Hi Glen, 

I have read all the replies and seems no one here has used their notaries instead of solicitors. Your local notary should charge approx 60/80€ each person, a big differrence to what you have been quoted and others have paid. I used a notary in Almoradi highly recommended on this groups sister site, Costa Blanca Forum. His charge last March was 57€ each and his english is superb. Many have used him and he also gave freely a lot of info on inheritance(unlike most greedy solicitors who charge for everything).

If you are a non resident you will only pay IHT on your spanish property leaving your english will to deal with Uk assets. It needs doing because of the succession rules in Spain. You can not leave your assets to whom you want as there is already a spanish ruling favouring offspring rather than spouse. So your Spanish will must have the clause "to be conducted under English law, or law of your nationality(country of birth). This allows for your choice of inheritors and how much instead of spanish set % rules. However the IHT allowance is differrent in each province and ours in Valencia is 100k€. If joint owned that means half of assets as survivor owns half too.

If you are a spanish resident even with an english will (if you have property there) your allowance in Spain is set against your worldwide assets which the hacienda will know from your modelo 720 declaration.

If you need the name of the notary we used (he gets people travelling from afar as he,s so well recommended) let me know but all notaries can do this for a lot less than your solicitor. After all your solicitor just draws it up (write it) and it must go before a notary to have it legalised and registered. Btw I am a member of both forums as my property is halfway between both costas so I joined both and I have to admit the Costa blanca forum has a lot more "super helpful" members (one in particular Jim Fletcher who virtually knows everything anyone ever needs to know and he has recommended same notary. Everything was done by email, photoed our english wills and had mirror wills ready in approx a week to go and sign after sending us draft copies by email for our agreement. 

Hope this helps you

Regards

Pauline.

Hi Pauline, that's great thanks so much for your help cheers Glenn 

Just to correct myself, I dont know why I wrote, Jim Fletcher,?? super helpful member is Jim Taylor, must have been a senior moment, (hope he hasnt read it). Also sorry for posting twice??, must have dropped off asleep!

Regards

Pauline

😂

It's not true that you need a solicitor to make a Will! You can do one directly with a Notary, who will then get it registered with the general registry office, which gets your Will registered correctly on the national registry and cannot be tampered with by anyone, after your death. This will cost you a lot less than a solicitor and your solicitor would have to take you to the Notary to do the Will anyway, so all you're doing is cutting out the expensive middle man. We paid 65€ each for ours. If you don't speak good Spanish, then take someone along with you who does. If you want to Will your property and money etc. under the law of a country other than Spain, (i.e. England or Wales) then you must ensure that your Will in done "under the laws of England and Wales"  as "UK or British law" doesn't exist and Scotland have their own laws and Scots should make sure that their Wills state that they want their Wills done "under the laws of Scotland". I don't know what the wording is for people from Northern Ireland but you can just state that you want you Will done under the law of the country from where you come. 

Hello Forum, I had recently  updated my English will to include Brussels IV.(as of 2015) So apparently this law change now means an additional Spanish will to be unnecessary!!  If so? Do I still need a translated equivalent ?   Thanking you for feed back Mike.

We also have this included in our UK wills but have been advised to have Spanish wills made too...although not absolutely necessary it may avoid complications should the situation arise...

Brussels lV....the catch 22 is that you need to employ a Spanish lawyer to sort any type of property or goods to be transferred into your name ...which will probably work out to the same cost as not having a will... we have a UK will drawn up by a solicitor... and we have a Spanish will drawn up by a Spanish lawyer / notary. ...a friend of mine spent many many thousands of Euro's on sorting out a late uncle's Spanish property that didn't have a Spanish will...it had also taken over 2 year's to sort out ....I also own another property on a gated community in Los Balcones it has 125 properties on it ..at the last yearly community meeting someone asked what was happening to the property next door to him as it has been empty for many years ...and the reply from the site administrator was that it was still in probate and that it has a dept of €15,000 owed to the gated community ...they also said that we have 6 more empty properties in probate owing many more thousands to the community....so the moral of this story is get a Spanish will drawn up at a Notary otherwise you are going to leave one big head ache for your relatives to sort out.

Thank you for this information, sounds like I have wasted £120 on having an update to include Brussels IV typical solicitor spiel !!