Originally Posted by julie.plowman@gmail.com

Hiya BP,

That's a brilliant idea, we've been doing a similar thing on a forum I use here in France. It really gives people a good idea of what expenses they need to take into account.

I'm kinda putting together a 'hit-list' of my own of things to sort in prep of coming to live in Spain and to include an annual living expense will be very useful. It seems like you have to trawl through loads of different sites to get the information so perhaps between us all here we can put it all in one place.

We plan on doing a lot more research this time around although it doesn't matter how much work you put into this there's always going to be something that comes up that you didn't think about or realise you needed to do. We're planning on driving down the end of Nov to do a reccy on the area were thinking of living in so hopefully we'll come accross loads of other stuff then.

Anyway, don't know if you're interested but just as a comparison I've budgeted our current annual living costs here as approximately 25,000 euros, we have a 4 bed property with 2 gites and swimming pool on land of approx 1 acre. We're looking to downgrade to a 2 bed property so hopefully will be able to substancially reduce these costs, especially as yourself and others have pointed out that cost of living is much cheaper in Spain.

I'll definately be watching this thread for your future postings.

Cheers!
Jules