June W

I am looking for a lawyer/fiduciary to handle all my issues year on year. A long term relationship. Needs to be Algarve based.

Can anyone recommend one that handles everything i.e. immigration issues, driving licences, property purchase issues, tax advisory and annual submissions, the whole caboodle?

Thank you.

riv

You might want to be more specific about where in the Algarve, assuming you will want to have at least some contact in their office, as well as via email ?

MrBife

I am struggling to understand the benefit of searching for one person that perhaps does everything instead of two separate specialists in their own field - they are certainly very different jobs and IMHO Lawyers do not make good accountants and vice versa. Perhaps too you shouldn't be considering using a lawyer for driving licenses because those kind of issues are much more efficiently solved using a bureau service.

Alan PT

I can understand the attraction of a "one stop shop", it's a classic expat type service - sit in a nice office drinking coffee while someone in a nice suit takes all your worries away. If you have the money and you are happy to pay a premium for the service then fair enough, why not!

The only firm I have seen offering something like this is https://www.eurofinesco.com/ They did one tax return for me and they were OK, but a bit expensive and not a good fit for me - I'm more "tell me what's going on, explain stuff, update me" and they were more "we are busy sorting it out, just trust us" which made me a bit nervous

SgtTroy

Same here, but I do appreciate that for most accountants it would take disproportionate amount of time to explain Portuguese tax system in detail as it is fairly complex.
A joint filing could take a good number of hours - asking for documents, invoices and bank statements, explaining why something is relevant and that you should put your NIF on any similar invoice next year, manual calculation of monthly UK interest of £2 as per ECB rate for the day, withheld UK taxes at source and how much is that in €, submission for approval, then getting back to the clients with responses to their final queries...
I don't know what they charge, but anything like €100 + €50 for each Anexo, which could mean €200-300 at the end seems more than fair, as it may easily involve a day of work in total.

My approach was to read a lot beforehand, and then it wasn't so difficult with the tax returns.

Alan PT

Just checked back - 500 for mine, plus 430 for my wifes from Finesco (was better to do separate than joint). I supplied all the docs up front, I'm pretty organised about these things

Not overly complex returns - Portuguese employers, NHR high value occupations, minimal UK bank interest (where I had pre-computed the euro conversion), extra cost on mine vs my wifes was for an extra annex because I had a closure dividend from my UK contracting company (this was a bit more complex, but I think largely because they over-complicated it...)

To be fair, they bailed me out late in the day when somebody else let me down, but this was their standard charge, not a "rush charge". Last year a Portuguese accountant did much the same thing (minus the extra dividend annex) for 80 in total.

The Portuguese accountant made a mistake and missed one entry, I pointed it out, he fixed it, all good So this works fine for me. For someone who wants to just hand over all responsibility to someone else, not take an interest in the details and is not cost sensitive, the Finesco approach might be better