Battered Brits move to Spain

The daily battering of Britain continues with 1,000s of job losses and every economic barometer shooting downwards on an almost daily basis. Lowest house sales, fewest mortgages handed out, house prices down 8%, record job losses and lowest production etc.

Not surprisingly, our wine drinking is up, taking the UK to the dubious title of leading wine importer in the world.

Waitrose customers now provide another useful state of the nation indicator. The South Woodford emporium of the upmarket supermarket chain offers three charity bins for customers to pass on their sales tokens gained at the check-outs. A charity specialising in anxiety and phobias is getting twice the amount of the rivals’ bins…

Clearly a connection between increased wine quoffing, the thousands of finance sector staff being fired and a mass anxiety over the future of Great Britain Limited. Bankers may well have superceded journalists as the traditional big drinkers of wine and it is workers in the finance sector who are in High Anxiety. They are important customers for Waitrose and contributing to the anxiety charity…

Over in Spain, the sun is shining, there is less anxiety and the number of people seeking a new life in the country has surged by 12% as Brits firmly established themselves as the country's fourth-largest immigrant community. Figures just released by the Spanish government revealed that the number of British expatriates registered as resident in Spain had risen to 352,000 at the start of 2008.

That gave Spain a bigger British population than all but eight local authorities in England, according to the most recent census figures. Strangely, the UK Government, seen as inept with statistics generally, reckons there are around one million Brits in Spain.

Although the new figures were gathered before the tumbling value of the pound began creating problems for those living off British pensions in Spain, few pundits expect numbers to start falling. Emigrants to Spain are no longer mainly pensioners. The figures show only one third of Britons living in Spain are aged over 55.

So with thousands of repossessed bargains from the Spanish banks and Must Sell developers, we can expect the figures to continue rise. Paying around half of the current valuation more than compensates for the decline in sterling against the euro - and how good is it, to have an property asset in the world’s strongest currency?

www.PropertyInSpain.Net are the Google top ranked source for Spanish bank repossessions, offering bargains across Spain direct from the banks.