So, we’re here at Señorio de Marbella on the Golden Mile. We’ve just bought a little investment property here. Delighted about that. But it didn’t all go to plan at the notary.

We were buying it through our company, and we wanted to do half in cash, as in money, and half in a mortgage, which seemed perfectly reasonable. And our bank, which is Cajamar, who we’ve banked with for over 20 years, said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, not a problem at all.” And we signed all the agreements, and everything was fine. We turned up at the notary last week, and the bank wasn’t there. I thought, “That’s a bit odd,” I mean, normally you have to wait around for the bank anyway, but a little bit odd.

Then we get a phone call from the guy at the bank saying, “Ah, we’ve made a mistake.” So, the situation is, I think I’ve mentioned in videos before that normally in Spain, it’s a fairly new rule, a couple of years old, when you take out a mortgage, you normally have a 10-day cooling-off period. So you have to go to the notary to sign the form saying you understand the mortgage and the terms. And then within 10 days, you can change your mind, and then 10 days later you can go to the notary and sign for it properly. Fine.

Because we were getting the mortgage through the company, we were told that, “No, no, no, you don’t have to do that. It’s only for individuals.” So, it was a case of just going and signing for it properly on the day of completion. No, it’s not. Because we had two guarantors, myself and my fellow shareholder, for the mortgage, it actually counted as what they call a hybrid mortgage, which meant that we did have to sign 10 days in advance to say that we understood the terms.

We were left in the notary in Marbella on the day of completion with a property to sign for, no mortgage, no possibility of getting the mortgage that day. We would have to wait 10 days. And we had a seller who’d flown in all the way from Lithuania to complete the purchase. And we said to her, “Look, can we wait 10 days?” No. And she was quite within her rights to retain our 10% that we’d already paid because we were technically in breach of contract. We couldn’t complete on the day. Luckily, we were in a fortunate position that we had sufficient funds in our company bank account to complete the purchase, effectively to pay ourselves the mortgage. But without that, we could have lost a sizable sum of money.

So I’m not too happy with my bank at the moment. I think the lesson to be learned with all of this is if you’re going to get a mortgage, even if you’re an experienced pro like me, use a broker, because a broker would’ve spotted that problem along the way and would’ve said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hang on a minute. These dates aren’t right. You need to have the 10-day cooling-off period.” As it was, we didn’t have any of that from the bank because we were working with them directly, and they’d made a huge mistake.

A word of warning: make sure that your lawyer or your broker, use a broker, just keeps you on the right track because we could have lost a lot of money if we hadn’t had those funds ready in our account. Anyway, the good news is we’re getting the mortgage next week. The 10-day cooling-off period will have expired, and we’ll just be dropping in the money that we were being promised last week, next week. But it could have been so different.