Is my ISA allowance carried over if I live in Belgium?

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As we approach the end of March, people’s thoughts naturally start to turn to the important things about the springtime. Important things like the upcoming start of the new tax year.  What’s that?  Oh, just me then? As many people from the UK reading this may know, the UK tax year finishes on 5th April.  There is therefore a rush on for those who haven’t already done so to maximize what they have put into their ISA for the year to take them up to the ISA limit on UK savings. There then follows a big push to encourage people to take out new ones for the new tax year starting on 6th April.

So with my mind turning away from the imminent pleasures of spring in Brussels, and the upcoming change in the time I decided that I needed to find out a bit more about what the rules were about my ISA’s given my situation working in Brussels.  Specifically I wanted to know…

  • If I was allowed to continue paying money into my ISA?
  • If my ISA allowance that I hadn’t used yet was able to be carried over to be used in Belgium?
  • If I was able to open a new ISA for the coming year?

Before I get into this any further I should point out that I am not an accountant or a tax expert.  You should not rely on anything I tell you being accurate but check it out for yourself!  Everyone’s circumstances are different, and your situation will likely be different to mine.

So after a bit of reading I discovered a few bits and pieces. If you are resident outside the UK then it seems the situation is relatively straightforward.

  • You can’t open a new ISA in the UK
  • You can’t add any more funds to any ISA’s you already hold
  • You can keep the ones you have already, and keep accruing the interest
  • You are allowed to transfer an existing ISA to a new provider

If you are only outside the UK on a temporary basis and are still resident in the UK then it’s all business as usual, whatever you did before, you can still do now.  This means in a nutshell…

  • You have a total allowance of £11280 that you are allowed to invest
  • Of this a maximum of £5640 can be in a cash ISA
  • Whatever you don’t put in a cash ISA can be put into a Stocks and Shares ISA up to the total

The general idea of an ISA is that it is a method of saving tax-free. Any interest you receive on a cash ISA, or in the case of a stocks and shares one any dividends are free of UK income tax. If you are a standard rate taxpayer this means that you avoid paying 20% of this income to the government. If you are a higher rate taxpayer then you save even more.

A busy time ahead then, sorting out all matters financial for another year.  I must admit to being totally ignorant of all matters tax in Belgium itself, so I can’t comment on whether similar schemes exist for Belgian residents.  Do you know?  Want to share?  Let me know in the comments.

Accommodation in Brussels

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Accommodation in Brussels

Accommodation in Brussels

So you’ve been reading all about the wonders of Brussels and have decided to take the plunge and visit! Or maybe it’s totally un-connected, and you’ve stumbled here from Facebook or Twitter or a search or something. Chances are whichever way you got here you want to know about accommodation in Brussels (I guess the clue really is in the title…).

When I first arrived in the city I wanted somewhere for a week at a time, and was going home every weekend.  The plan was that after a couple of weeks and after chatting to my new colleagues I’d have the short term housing market figured out and would have found something to rent for the rest of my contract. This post is a brief summary of what I have managed to pick up along the way.

Short Term Accommodation in Brussels

Hotels and hostels are the norm here, but there are some of what we call in Britain the Bed and Breakfast.  Brussels being a capital city and home to the EU there is a large choice available as you’d probably expect.  The price ranges are also very large depending on where in the city it is and obviously the quality of the establishment itself. Because everyone has different needs and budgets there is little point in me making specific recommendations.  I ended up doing this for over a month, including a couple of weekends and found the best way to find the places convenient to me at decent prices was by using a combination of tripadvisor and booking.com

While they both aim to provide the same service in the end, they go about it in slightly different ways so it can pay to use both and see how they compare.  I have found cheaper prices on the same places and dates using both.  Tripadvisor gives you lots of different ways to search and refine your results etc and has more user reviews etc, booking.com has a much simpler layout and defaults to cheapest first. I also like it because it shows you the availability and prices right there on the results page, without having to click on each hotel in turn like you do on tripadvisor.  They both also have good ipad/iphone apps which was really useful to me too.

Things to bear in mind

Without trying to come across as a travel guru, there are a number of things you need to think of when booking, if only to avoid some of the mistakes I made in my first few weeks here.

  • Look at the map – not just in terms of physical distance from the places you want to get to (in my case the office) but also in terms of the transport options available. I spent two weeks at a place that was 5 km away from my office (because it was cheap). It was nowhere near the tram/metro network and a fair distance from the nearest bus stop. I ended up walking it every day, in a cold and wet April.
  • Plan as far ahead as you can – as with budget airlines it is no longer always the case that booking late will save you money, quite the reverse in many cases. I spent a week in a hostel in Antwerp and commuting an hour each way by train, because the cost of hotel rooms in Brussels tripled from one week to the next! The reason was the seafood festival which I was completely unaware of.
  • Try to figure out what the area is like before you book, which is easier said than done I know. There is often a reason why places are cheap. The first example above is also true of this, when I arrived there the first night I found that it was on a dual carriageway, opposite an estate of tower blocks (that looked run down) and a long way from any facilities like shops and restaurants (as well as the transport links I already mentioned).
  • Read the reviews. But don’t get hung up on them. It’s my experience that as long as the reviews aren’t a complete horror story then it is probably just about acceptable for a short stay, as long as it’s cheap :) Bear in mind that everyone has different standards and expectations.  I have seen a number of poor reviews for places that I have stayed in and thought wonderful. Bear in mind the age of the reviews too as things change, a review from a couple of years ago may bear very little relation to what is there when you arrive so give more weight to the most recent ones.

Medium Term accommodation in Brussels

If you are going to be staying in the city for more than a few weeks, but you know that it isn’t permanent then Brussels being the centre of business in Belgium and the home of the EU does have some added bonuses.  There is the concept of the aparthotel which I know you can find elsewhere too, but this was really my first experience of them, they tend to be found in the bigger cities. An aparthotel is a fully furnished apartment, bigger than a normal hotel room, usually also fully serviced with cleaning etc, often with internet included, but without the hassle of a long term contract or of sorting out TV subscriptions, utilities, insurance etc. There are quite a few of these in Brussels and this is what I went for in the end. It varies from company to company but you can get these on a rolling one month contract, or by the day/week like an ordinary hotel. Obviously the longer you can commit to the better rate you are likely to be offered. There are a number of larger operators providing these in Brussels, all over the city, with different sized apartments and with a wide range of prices.

A couple of the chain operators are Brussels Business Flats and B-Aparthotels but a google search shows a lot of options, they often also come up on the tripadvisor and booking.com results too. A friend of mine here recommended Brussels Business Flats to me, but I went with something smaller and cheaper in the end as I’m here by myself.

Longer Term accommodation in Brussels

If you are staying here permanently or semi-permanently then you’ll obviously be engaged in doing some research of your own! To be honest I don’t know too much about this, having never intended to be in Brussels forever. A couple of snippets I did pick up though. Leases tend to be really long, like 3, 6 or 9 years! The longer the lease the lower the rate usually. Obviously it’s a much bigger area than I can do justice to, but at least you now have a starter for 10.

What are your experiences of accommodation in Brussels?  What do you think the overall standards are like? Do you have a recommendation you’d like to share? Please let me know via the comments.

Best Burger in Brussels – Part 3

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Hemgies

Hemgies restaurant

Inspired by reading about a fellow blogger also in search of the best burger in Brussels I decided to give Hemgies a go. This of course being the third installment of my search for the best burger in Brussels. You can read about part1 here and part 2 here.

I initially had a little trouble finding it. I knew that it was near to the Royal Galleries, but spent a fair amount of time wandering around looking for it. So in order that you don’t make that same mistake, when you are walking down the main section of the Galleries, the Princes Gallery leads off to one side.  Hemgies is directly at the other end of the Princes Gallery.

The restaurant itself is very tastefully decorated in understated colours, I loved the vertical striped wallpaper, which worked well accentuating with the long thin room, with essentially one very long bench down one wall, with only a few tables on the other side with the bar.

The menu does have a few choices other than a burger, but they are claimed to be the ‘signature burgers’ and after all I was there on a mission! The full menu is available on their website too.

Kappitel Blonde

Kappitel Blonde

Lovely soft warm roll, and a new to me very tangy soft cheese drizzled with olive oil to welcome me.  There were only a handful of other tables occupied, but it still felt a warm and comfortable atmosphere, especially compared to the bitter February cold outside.  Winter is not over in Brussels just yet, it’s just being spiteful because I left my proper winter coat in England last weekend!

I chose a beer called Kappitel Blond, not one I’d heard of or tried before but it was really good. Definitely on a par with my current favorite Affligem Blond and a similar taste.

There were a few specials to choose from, including a tex-mex burger with guacamole which was very tempting but I plumped for the

Hemgie's Burger

Hemgie’s Burger

Hemgie’s burger

Beef meat / Belgian « vieux Bruges » cheese / Salad / Crispy Collonata bacon / Tomatoes / Pickles /
Oignon rings and slightly spicy homemade ketchup

 

Overall the quality was very high.  The beef was succulent and tasty and the whole thing was delicious if a little overwhelming when I first saw it arrive!  A lot of that height came in the form of the onion rings and a thick slice of tomato so it wasn’t quite as large as it appears :-)  The frites were good too, light and crispy, excellent flavour as well. It was slightly let down for me in being slightly under cooked for my taste, and it could have done with being a bit hotter in the middle; the two factors are probably related.  I still very much enjoyed it and it is a minor thing and of course very much a matter of personal preference.

So back to the question at hand. Is this the Best Burger in Brussels?

On reflection, I think I still prefer Ellis Gourmet Burger.  The overall combination of textures and flavours was fractionally more balanced in my view; there was just a bit more oomph. Saying that, I thought that the ambiance in Hemgie’s was more to my liking.  Still very much recommended by me though.

Hemgie’s Restaurant
Rue des Dominicains 12
Galerie des Princes
1000 Bruxelles

www.hemgies.be they are on facebook too www.facebook.com/hemgies

Have you had a better burger?  Do you have a recommendation for somewhere else I should try? Let me know in the comments.