Does anyone have advice on getting a visa to visit Spain for 6-months? My family and I are US citizens that have been living abroad (Eastern Europe) for nearly 10 years. We finally plan to go back to the US, but we want to take a 6-month break and relax a bit in Spain before doing so. I don?t meet the requirements for a non-lucrative visa, as I would have no acceptable source of continued annual income.

It seems to me the only option we have might be a student visa. I don?t want to study 20 hrs/week for the 6 months though. I just want to relax and enjoy life for a while. I assume that I could pay for the courses in order to get a visa support letter and then just not attend the classes, but it seems like a pretty high entry ticket just to get the visa then.

I’ve read lots of forum entries here and elsewhere about the 90/180 rule and various visa adventure stories, but I’ve read too many different things to understand what is best. I’ve also contacted the local embassy. They advised the student visa route, which as I said is not perfect.

Any advice? I don?t want to work. I don?t want to stay permanently. I just want to contribute to the Spanish economy for about 6 months!

This is the exact sort of situation the non?lucrative visa is for. If you can’t afford it, however, you’ve really only got the student visa option. Unless you have family already in Spain, there’s really no other simple way to get around the non?lucrative requirements. Everything else would require getting a visa to work either independently, for a company, or for charity.

The thing is though, I can afford it! I can show bank statements that would more than satisfy any concerns about my ability to finance a 6-month stay (or a 1-year stay since the non-lucrative visa is for a year). However, the problem is that I want to spend 6 months in Spain between leaving my job now and returning to the US. I can’t therefore show that I have continued annual income of $75,000/year because I would officially be unemployed during this time.

I think you may have misunderstood the requirements for the non?lucrative visa. First, the $75k figure is no longer applicable. Current requirements include the ability to subsist on a certain level of spending denominated in euros, but in the ballpark of $35?$45k per annum. You don’t need to show any income to meet this level of cost of living, but you need to demonstrate that you can afford it. That means you can show you have sufficient assets to pay for this even without receiving any additional income. IE if you have a bank account with more than the $45k in it, or you have stocks surpassing this amount, etc. you still fulfill the requirements. If you can demonstrate you have assets that you could use to pay for the cost of living and still have plents of money left over (for instance, demonstrating total assets between bank accounts, stocks, credit, etc. in significant excess of this minimum) then you’re very well on your way to getting the non?lucrative visa.