In Focus News & Insights

Keith Littlewood is Blacktower Financial Management's Regional Manager covering Murcia and Costa Cálida. As an international financial adviser of around thirty years' experience and an expat of more than five years in Spain, Keith is ideally-placed to help expats negotiate the process of becoming an expat and can help them understand just what it means to be a fiscal resident in the country.

This week, in our latest Around the Branches piece, we take a look at Gibraltar's plans for Brexit and how Spanish parliamentary developments are affecting ongoing negotiations.

Increasing numbers of British expats in Spain are looking for advice and direction in relation to their Post-Brexit futures, the Guardian reports*, with many expressing their disappointment at the level of communication offered by British and Spanish officials.

This impression is supported by the findings of Karen O'Reilly, a sociology professor at Loughborough University, who recently published the results of an 18-month long research project which documents the considerable levels of "uncertainty and worry" among expats.**

Labour MP for Islington South and Shadow Foreign Secretary Emily Thornberry has published an article for Politics Home in which she calls for greater pensions freedoms for public sector workers.*

Written as part of her failed leadership campaign, the article named five major policy areas she felt the party needs to address in the future: climate crisis, the NHS, Social Care, affordable housing, and pensions.

In fact, the article was largely concerned with the issue of public sector pensions as Ms Thornberry warned that the country faced a "ticking time-bomb" in respect of the sums which will become payable in future decades. She quoted a 2017 estimate which suggested that public sector pension liabilities had a £1.7 trillion shortfall. She said that the public currently spends around £40 billion a year meeting this gap.

The latest Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) survey describes widespread growth across the UK economy, with notable upturns in the services and manufacturing sectors.

The PMI records and aggregates the strength of various sectors of the economy and is often used to predict likely changes to interest rates. The fact that data for January indicated the most significant growth in 16 months, led many pundits to speculate on the unlikelihood of an interest rate cut by the Bank of England. And they were right.

The picture of growth was supported by numerous data channels. For example, figures from Rightmove revealed a 2.3 per cent month-on-month upturn on UK house prices in January, the largest ever recorded for the month, and this assisted the annual house price rise figure to 2.7%, the largest increase since 2017.*

Many British retirement savers could retire two years earlier than they realise, according to a new piece of research from pensions advice firm Profile Pensions*.

This, says the firm, is because one in four over 55s have lost track of their pension funds, a fact that helps to account for a significant proportion of the UK's approximately 1.6 million unclaimed pension pots. It is estimated that these funds have a combined value of around £37 billion.

The situation is even worse for younger retirement savers, with three in ten 25-34 year-olds saying they have lost track of a pension. One in ten respondents were not sure whether they would be able to account for all their pensions.

The value of defined benefit pension scheme transfers in 2018 was an all time-high of £24 billion.

In 2019 the value of pension scheme transfers, according to Willis Towers Watson (WTW)*, is likely to be around £40 billion, which represents a substantial increase and a further record breaking amount.

The figures describe a market in which final salary pension schemes are increasingly transferred in favour of the opportunities and returns to be found in alternative products and investments.

There is so much to recommend around retiring to Spain. However, the many opportunities inherent in a move to the country also bring a great many challenges. As such, if you want to join the approximately 250,000 British expats who currently live there, you will need to consider a number of important questions, not least the cost of retiring in Spain.