For those of you who read my last Ezine you will be happy to know that I got my wellies for Christmas and also a more than welcome surprise of a toolbelt. I feel complete! I have been putting both to good use in the last week (seeing as though we have a good weather spell), by doing some early morning ‘potatura‘ of the olive trees.

I thought I would have a go myself this year since the chap who came last year hasn’t committed and it appears to be quite hard to find people in the area who are not already booked up. So, I thought I would give it a try after reading a few books, speaking with numerous people about it and watching far too many Youtube videos on the subject.

I am quickly realising how obsessive one can become when you are pruning olive trees, regarding correct shape, removing too much or too little and wondering whether the tree is growing too high, how to train it further down, whether to cut this branch or the other one. It’s quite therapeutic actually although it appears to be rather arbitary because we have no idea where the olives will produce, how many, and if environmental factors will affect production this year. However, as my 7.30am to 9 am morning routine (when not travelling) it is a good way to start the day.

Anyway, for my readers who have been doing this for many years, I will let you be the judges. See some fotos below. (Feel free to send comments about where I might be going wrong).

Moving on from land work I wanted to send this brief Ezine out just to reconnect in the New Year. 2025 proved to be a positive year for our investment accounts and it is anyone’s guess what is in store for 2026.

I am attending the Spectrum IFA Group annual conference from the 26th to 30th January and will be doing my usual round-up Ezine when I get back. We will be speaking with Rathbones Asset Management, Evelyn Partners, Prudential, New Horizon Asset Management, LGT Wealth Management and others as well.

But, before I return (hopefully Greenland will still be a part of Europe by then) I wanted to share some information on Italy with you, as a light hearted read.

On Facebook I follow a page called Dataroom di Milena Gabanelli.     You may know of her from the programme ‘Report’, which is where I first became familiar with her around 15 years ago.    Now she works for Corriere della Sera and has her own FB channel.   It’s very interesting as they regularly put out content about Italy and global events but backed up with solid facts.

The most recent one I saw was ‘Chi paga meno tasse’.  A look at the health system and exactly where tax revenue is coming from to support the system itself.

The following is summary of the video, which is only a few minutes long, but provides some quite interesting information, which I wanted to share with you.
(The data is taken from studies of  contributi previdenziali relative dichiarazione 2023.)

Let’s analyse things a little further

With an income of €29000 gross pa there is likely to be very little margin to pay your health care expenses.   In this category fall many ‘pensionati and dipendenti’ and so we can exclude them for the purposes of the analysis.

The rest are autonomi ( self-employed people- like myself)

• 1.8 million autonomi in Italy are on the flat tax regime and so cannot be considered.
• 2.2 million autonomi pay IRPEF (normal income tax rates) and of these 1.3 million declare income under €29000pa.   This means that they pay €2 billion in tax or ONLY 8% of the whole category for the autonomi.

To analyse further to see whether any of these people have a real need or if they are working in nero, we can look to the index ISA which looks at fiscal ability to pay.  They work on a points based system and if a contribuente has under 8 points then there is the risk of fiscal evasion.

Anyone who is declaring less than they actually bring in is also paying less contributions towards the health service and also they will receive less pension, which means that the people who are paying will have to pick up the bill.

It’s no surprise that the Italian government really doesn’t have much, if any, room for manoeuvre to change tax rates and why the health service is underfunded.

Short term rentals

If you like those facts you may also like the following ones about the explosion in short term rentals in Italy (affitti brevi), which go some way to explain why many cities and famous locations in Italy are now almost impossible to visit without a tremendous amount of people all doing the same.

• In 2011 short term rental advertisements didn’t exceed 20000 in the whole of Italy
• In 2021 this number had exploded to 620000
• In 2022 to 644000
• and 2023 to 700,000 which equates to approximately 11 billion euro invoiced a year

In the market of short-term rentals Italia is No 3 in the world behind the France and the USA!

If we analyse some of this data then we can see that 75% of these rentals are in the hands of private landlords and 25% managed by agencies.

Agencies, in general, retain 35% of the income to manage the cleaning and change of sheets etc. Almost all of the advertisements are now on the digital platforms like AirBnb and Booking.com, who in general keep between 14 and 18% of the income. The same platforms have been obliged since 2017 to apply a withholding tax of 21% on gross income.

In the Legge di Bilancio 2026 this withholding tax of 21% now applies to the first property. For the second a witholding tax of 26% and for owners of 3 properties or more, they are now deemed to be a business activity and must open a partita IVA (VAT position). The war on private landlords continues, not just here in Italy but across many countries, but whether it will make much difference in the long run is anyone’s guess.

Indennità parlamentare, which is a compensation payment for being a politician and spending time away from home. It is currently €10435pm Gross or €5000-5300 pm after taxes and contributi.
Diara (per deputati e senatori) – just €3500pm
+ Expenses reimbursement.

These do not always have to be documented!!!!

They also qualify for reimbursement of travel expenses
And reimbursement of telephone expenses

Pensions
The same politicians are entitled to a pension after only 5 years of working in Parliament. (versus 20 years for the rest of us!)

Interest payments
They are also entitled to an interest rate of 5.4% on the money in their savings and current accounts. The bank pays this automatically versus the average rate for us , at about
0.2 %

And on that note I will leave it there. This Ezine was really was meant to be a light-hearted way of staying in touch.

I will be following this up from our conference with a market review from the week after next, followed by some other Ezines on tax and also organising your affairs for your loved ones.

It’s time to pay (even more) attention!

We all know that we have to be careful when we are dealing with financial matters, especially when we are online.

I appreciate that this isn’t news to anyone, but it is easy to become complacent, as well as to fall behind in our awareness of the sophistication fraudsters have available to them in the era of Artificial Intelligence. I honestly think that we are all vulnerable to frauds, but if we have the humility to admit this, we can better protect ourselves against the most common pitfalls.

I recently watched a webinar made available by Cazenove Capital in the UK and whilst there were things in it that I already knew, I must admit that it also opened my eyes to how frauds are developing as well as reiterating what our best practices should be online and when dealing with financial matters generally.

I would strongly suggest that everyone takes the time to watch the full webinar, but here are a few bullet points that we all need to reflect upon:

• The golden rule in life is that if something seems too good to be true, it most probably isn’t true. However, human nature means that it is a good idea to be reminded of this fact on a regular basis.
• Most frauds are still relatively “low-tech” and involve things like hacking e-mail accounts – the fraudster may monitor e-mail traffic for a while before finding their opportunity, maybe by sending messages from your e-mail account to financial institutions you deal with. Two-factor authentication is an excellent protection against this possibility – if you don’t have it set-up on your e-mail accounts, do it now!
• Be careful clicking on links in e-mails you receive! These communications seem ever more credible nowadays and can easily trap the unwary.
• Any financial transaction that someone is urging you to carry out in a hurry should instantly raise a red flag. If you are being pressured to transfer funds, even by someone you know, hang up the phone, take a few deep breaths and call the person back on a number you know can be trusted. If you aren’t sure what to do, seek counsel from someone you trust who is not connected to the situation at hand. Deep-fake calls are a possibility (where it will appear that you are speaking to someone you know), but there are also cases where people have been contacted by complete strangers who claim that a family member is in trouble and needs money transferred in a hurry.
• If you do expect to have to make urgent payments to someone – maybe a family member or a business associate – use code-words or agree a protocol that only you and the person concerned will know. Agree in advance which accounts any payments will be made to. SEPA transfers in the EU will now confirm the identity of the beneficiary account holder – if your bank flags up any discrepancy between the name you have entered as beneficiary and the actual account holder, take time to check!

What is Spectrum doing to protect me?

For some time now, all Spectrum advisers are required to conduct video calls or in-person meetings when processing withdrawal requests from any investments we intermediate. The fact that withdrawals generally take some time before being paid out also takes away the threat of panicked decisions being made. Of course, one day deep-fake videos will likely become a reality and so even video calls may not be trustworthy, but for today this procedure will protect against all but the most sophisticated fraudsters (and these aren’t the ones who are targeting the likes of us – they will be defrauding multinational institutions).

We must make our job that of being a harder nut to crack compared with those around us. Rather like home security alarms: they will not be sufficient to stop the world’s most sophisticated thief, but they will be enough to make the opportunistic criminal move on to an easier target.

If you find yourself confused or worried about any of the above, please don’t hesitate to give me a call to discuss. The more we are aware of the risks we face, the better we can protect ourselves.

It’s Christmas again and how the time flies!

I am hoping for a new set of wellies this year because the emergency pair I bought when we purchased the property didn’t last very long at all.

I sent out a not-so-subtle message to my wife and so I hope my Christmas wish comes true.

I will then be able to also complete my true Yorkshire look in Umbria.

I hope you have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, whatever you are doing.

We will be relaxing at home this year.    My Mum has just been for a few days to visit (she hasn’t seen the house since June 2024 when we were in the phase of renovation) and so it was good for her to see it for herself.   We are now on our own, but have lots of fun things planned.  My son will be playing in the local Pasticceria Russo, in Amelia,  this evening (23rd) , playing one of his newly learned Beethoven classical piano pieces.

The Pasticceria is becoming a bit of a focal point for us in the area (as it seems to be for alot of other people as well) and they have their amazing range of sweets and Panettone artiginale, which is a little bit too more-ish for my liking.  I am trying my best to resist the temptation and am doing OK, until now!     The only way to combat that is to engage in more physical land work anyway.   As many of you have told me since we moved here: ‘there is always work to do on the land’.

It will keep me out of trouble until I am back into work full-time in the New Year.