Santa Claus and Catalunya

Traditionally Spain has celebrated present giving during the Three Wise Men on January 5th. The obvious flaw is in the holiday scheme, where you don’t get the presents until the very end. Whether this was done to torture kids or parents is unclear.

Many desperate parents have adopted Santa Claus, who is capable of bringing presents as early as the evening of 24th. Traditionalist Catalan friends of ours regard Santa Claus as cultural imperialism and have instead resorted to a building giant Tio (read more about Tios and Catalan Christmas traditions here), which is capable of “producing” extremely very large presents. Hopefully this year’s bicycle and Lego boxes won’t produce a fatal bowel obstruction.

Although kids at school are very excite about the presents, I have to say that this little song 2nd grader came home with today was quite a treat:

Cumpleaños fatal
que lo pases muy mal
que te atropelle un tran via
y feliz funeral

Los regalos pa mi
los papeles pa ti
yo te invito al cine
i tu pagas por mi

(I know it’s happy birthday, not merry christmas, but the kids didn’t seem to care)

La Caixa invents a new fee for a crappy service

Someone said to me once that if the banks in Spain could figure out some way to charge you for the oxygen you breath while in their branch, then they probably would.

La Caixa has now invented a fee that I have seen at no other bank. You can look at your transactions online, but if you want to save them to Excel, they want to charge you 3 euros per download and you have to wait up to 2 hours for it to become available. Their little gnomes have to run down to the basement and find the right microfiche and quickly type it in.

Even better, if you request it in Excel, they still send it to you in this ridiculous “Cuaderno 43” text format, which was designed to be processed by COBOL code.

Bankinter provides a little conversion program that gets you most of the way to Excel, but you still need to divide all Euro amounts by 100 since they haven’t discovered decimal just yet.

Not paying your mortgage in Spain

There’s been a fair amount of hyperventilating in the international press about falling home prices in Spain and what this will do to the foreclosure rate. The assumption is that underwater homeowners could choose not to pay their mortgage.

What is missing from the story are the really horrible consequences of not paying your mortgage in Spain. It’s not like California where you can mail in the keys and get on with your life. It’s more like the beginning of a life-long nightmare, where even fleeing to another country won’t help. In theory, for a debt to be pursued to another country the defendant has to agree to the claim or have had the opportunity to object, but in Spain, you give up the right to object when you sign your mortgage, so tough luck.

In another particularly egregious case, a bank debited 26,000 euros from the account of a (soon to be ex-) homeowner to pay for the legal fees for their lawyers to sue and reposes his home. This was after the same bank had extracted all the equity out of his home, invested it in a Luxemburg-based complex financial transaction that lost all his money, and then came after his house to make them whole.

Another factor is the prevalence of co-signing for mortgages among families and friends.It’s been pretty common practice to have a best friend or family members co-sign a mortgage, without really much thought being given to what happens if things turn bad. This has had some positives for the banks, but it has also caused a ripple-effect, where one person in a family defaults on their mortgage, and soon everyone else is on the hook, and can’t afford their mortgage either. There was a profile of some of these cases in El Pais a couple weeks ago, but I can’t be bothered to dig up a reference.

If you compare this to the US, where disorganization and shoddy paperwork have meant that in many cases lenders cannot even prove that they own the mortgage, the odds of escaping from an underwater mortgage in Spain without life-ruining consequences is slim.