CYPRIOT RETIREMENT
Main:
Latchi, the village in the north-west of Cyprus where Steve and Sue keep their boat;
Below:
Sue and Steve’s three-bed villa in Tala, near Paphos: Sue scuba diving in Cyprus; Steve on one of their many boat trips around the island.
“In fact moving the car over to Cyprus was more complicated than getting us over there!”
they wanted to walk to the shops and restaurants and not be reliant on a car – a mistake some retirees make.
Months of planning for the move Sue, who had already given up her job at the local council, now credits much of the success of their move to the year’s worth of meticulous preparation beforehand. T ey’ve seen people move over in a rush without organizing things properly, only for their move to fail. One of the most time-consuming things
to sort out was taking a car over to Cyprus. “T ere’s a high duty to be paid if you import a car to Cyprus but if you are retired you can get an exemption,” says Sue. But you have to have owned the car for at least six months before you export it and it has to have completed a certain mileage, and provide all sorts of documentation. In fact moving the car over to Cyprus was more complicated than getting us over there! “Essentially you need to show you can
support yourself so we had to show three years of bank statements, three years of utility bills, for example.” T ey also sorted out shipping their dog
over (“his fl ight was more expensive than ours!”) and getting their dive certifi cates before departure. “We wanted to begin diving as soon
as we arrived in Cyprus so we made sure we qualifi ed here in the UK,” says Sue. T ey also bought a 45-foot motoryacht
with two ensuite berths and shipped that to Limassol, fi lled with some of their furniture. T ey’ve kept it moored at Latchi, at a relatively aff ordable €1,900 a year fee. And so when they arrived they dived
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straight into a life full of boating, and soon made friends through the dive club, the local rugby club, the Paphos Tigers, or, for Sue, through horseriding at the resort of Aphrodite Hills nearby. “We’ve been very busy and made friends
with Cypriots, Russians and other British expats,” says Steve, who says their neighbours are German and English. “We eat out quite a lot, go off on the boat – we’ve been to Turkey a few times and spent six weeks touring the Greek islands – and sometimes just spend a weekend on the boat over in Latchi!” Even the banking crisis in Cyprus doesn’t
seem to have dulled the dream. “To be honest you wouldn’t know there
has been a crisis, although some smaller businesses have failed, the banking problems didn’t aff ect us. We had always been advised never to keep much money in Cypriot banks and we didn’t see any of the queues seen on the BBC news,” says Steve. “If we sold our home we wouldn’t be able
to take the money out of Cyprus but there are ways one can work around that, such as by conducting the transaction outside Cyprus. We did that when we our house – the sale being completed in sterling in the UK.” Daily cost of living is also cheaper –
assuming you don’t buy lots of imported Waitrose products available in the many “UK Shops” around Paphos. Do they miss anything about the UK?
“Of course we miss the family and we miss the green countryside of the UK but we might well end up coming back in the end,” says Sue. “We’ve got a ten-year plan and the game might change when we become unable to manage the boat and the diving. T e fi rst three years have just whizzed by.”§
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