Mynie.co.uk review – My Barcelona NIE experience in 2019

I first landed in Spain about two months ago. Since then I’ve been testing a few services to make settling in and setting up essential services easier.

One of these services was mynie.co.uk. A service that is meant to make getting your NIE number a lot more straight forward.

For those who don’t know, the NIE number (Número de Identificación de Extranjero ) is the ‘Foreigner’s Identification Number’, which allows non-Spanish citizens to perform legal and tax related activities in Spain. Among other things, having an NIE number allows you to open up a bank account, set up a phone contract, buy/sell property, open a business etc.

When it comes to setting up a permanent residence in Spain, getting an NIE number is a MUST. I may have only been here a short time, but I’ve already seen how setting up basic services becomes significantly more complicated without one.

 

Who are mynie.co.uk?

According to their website, mynie.co.uk are Spain’s No.1 budget online NIE number service.

Following my own research I would argue they are the ONLY budget online NIE number service. I did find one more service called NIE Spain, but their booking website was not working when I looked. Their Facebook page shows recent 5 star reviews though, so it may just be that I was out of luck at the time.

From what I saw, there are also a number of other NIE services available online. However, most services were around 100-150€ per person, which is far from ‘budget’. They did often include in person assistance though, which would explain the additional cost.

What do mynie.co.uk offer?

At the time of writing, the mynie.co.uk website offers three standard services:

• NIE Number Only – £29.99
  • They will book the NIE appointment at your local police station
    • Internet Cita Previa
  • They will complete the necessary NIE number forms for you
    • EX-15
    • EX-18 (for municipalities that do NIE+Residency together)
    • Modelo 790 código 012

 

• NIE Number + Social Security – £39.99
  • They will book the NIE appointment at your local police station
    • Internet Cita Previa
  • They will complete the necessary NIE number forms for you
    • EX-15
    • EX-18 (for municipalities that do NIE+Residency together)
    • Modelo 790 código 012
  • They will complete the Social Security form for you (after you have an NIE)
    • TA_1

 

• Residency Service (Only available after you have an NIE) – £69.99 or £29.99 (for prior NIE customers)
  • They will book the residency appointment at your local police station
    • Internet Cita Previa
  • They will complete the Residency forms for you
    • EX-18
    • Modelo 790 código 012
  • They will book a telephone consultation with you to discuss evidence needed for residency
    • Example – You may need health insurance, income statements etc.

 

It appears to be a 100% online service, so in all three cases the client would need to print out the papers and personally attend appointment(s) to complete applications.

My personal experience with mynie.co.uk

When I engaged mynie.co.uk, I booked their NIE Number + Social Security service for £39.99.

I have to say I felt pretty excited about the service. Principally, I decided to engage them because I had been sitting in front of the computer for 3 mornings in a row trying to book my Cita Previa at the police station.

I was having no luck whatsoever doing this and kept encountering the ominous message:

“En este momento no hay citas disponibles. En breve, la oficina pondrá a su disposición nuevas citas.” (At this time there are no appointments available. In short, the office will make new appointments available to you.)

I had read online that this was by no means a rare occurrence either. Since I felt I had better things to do with my life than sit in front of a computer refreshing, entering and re-entering data I, therefore, decided to hire mynie.co.uk to do it for me.

 

Ordering via the mynie.co.uk website

My first impression, when landing on the mynie.co.uk site, was that there was A LOT of text on the site.

Granted, the text is useful when you actually take the time to read it, but it’s still a lot to process. I really think it could have been displayed in a more user friendly way and to greater effect. There was also no clearly visible ‘Order Now’ button, which is unusual for an online page selling services.

As I scrolled down the main page, I eventually came to a link in the text which said ‘NIE Booking Page‘ and from there I was taken to a new page. Once again it had A LOT of text on it.

Instructions at the top of this new page told me to scroll to the bottom, choose my desired service and enter my details. Once submitted, a little message popped up on page to let me know my details had been sent.

Looking for a way to make a payment, I scrolled down further and then found a Paypal payment button. This process step seemed simple enough, except it made me slightly nervous seeing that the Paypal payment looked in no way linked to my order. I did, however, receive a confirmation email letting me know that my online submission had been received and would be processed within 24-48 hours.

Since my Paypal email address was different to the one I submitted with my details I, therefore, decided I would contact mynie.co.uk directly to let them know.

Contacting mynie.co.uk

Normally, contacting a company about a service is fairly straightforward. You go to the website, find the contact page and then email, call, submit a form etc. as needed. It would seem for mynie.co.uk, that is not the case.

Due to not having a Spanish number at the time I needed the service, I was looking for an email address to write to. Getting that proved next to impossible.

The mynie.co.uk contact page did have a telephone number, but an email address was nowhere to be found. When I first visited, there was a contact form hidden at the bottom of the page too. However, since then the form seems to have mysteriously disappeared.

Personally, I did end up using the contact form to let mynie.co.uk know of my differing Paypal payment details. However, I never actually got a response from that contact form, so I have no idea if they actually received my contact form submission.

I eventually ended up calling them two weeks later, after I hadn’t received any kind of response from them.

The website did say it could take longer than 24-48 hours to process depending on appointment availability, however, two weeks without news still seemed excessive to me.

When I called, I was originally told that my appointment had already passed. It had apparently been scheduled for that same morning on the exact day I called.

However, I then explained to the man on the phone that I had not received any paperwork, nor email or call confirming the appointment. At this point he suggested they must be having technical issues.

He then said he would re-schedule the appointment, and I could expect to receive a police confirmation and my paperwork on the following Monday.

This time, I did and I was super happy about it too – yay!

 

Receiving the NIE paperwork

Once I received my NIE paperwork, I made sure to check through it with a fine comb and realised that it had been incorrectly filled out by mynie.co.uk, as it was applying for residency based on me having lived in Spain for 5 years or longer.

Since I have not lived in Spain for 5 years though, this was definitely a mistake. Furthermore, the format of my address also turned out to be incorrect once I got to the Police office, so I needed to redo the forms.

I decided to go online to complete and print the EX-18 forms again myself. Since it had taken so long for the service to send me the papers to begin with, I didn’t trust that I would get the correction in time for my appointment. Since the mistake was small, this also proved to be a short exercise of 5 minutes, which was great!

Mynie.co.uk service experience

I wish I could say that I was impressed by the mynie.co.uk service offerings as, in theory, it provides a useful service model. However, unfortunately, in my case it seems that the service offering was more than lacking.

None of the processes ran very smoothly and I kept having to follow up with the company to get what I ultimately needed from them. In fact, I am still waiting to receive my Social Security forms from them now – more than two months after my initial order! We shall see what happens there. (Update: After following up on my missing social security forms, I did receive them within 24 hours of the follow up email)

I created a flowchart to visualise the journey below.

 

Would I recommend mynie.co.uk?

I have mixed feelings about this service.

On the one hand, I would recommend this service based purely on the price.

At £29.99 for the NIE appointment booking service only, it is by far the cheapest service on the internet. It’s not cheap in itself mind you, but still cheaper than everyone else.

If you do not wish to spend days endlessly refreshing website pages to try and get an NIE appointment in or around Barcelona (or any other area in mainland Spain you may live), then that alone may be worth the price. That was the case for me at least.

However, in and of itself I would not recommend the service. Throughout my experience with them I personally found the service to be terribly unintuitive and somewhat annoying. Apart from the fact that I had to follow up with them three times across the space of three months (because they either had not provided me with status information or followed up on required actions), I also found they were of very little help when asking specific NIE related questions.

Personally, I ended up going to the Police office three times before I was able to get the correct paperwork in place to process my NIE. This, of course, is not at all the fault of the mynie.co.uk service itself. However, given a very generic email response to one of my questions on the paperwork received from mynie.co.uk, I do not suppose they would have been able to help me get it correct the first time.

 

Verdict

Given my own experience with this service, I would say only use this service if you want a surefire way of getting an NIE appointment within a reasonable timeframe (1-2 weeks). I would not recommend paying extra for upgraded Social Security/Residency services.

If you are short on money and/or have the time and patience to get an NIE appointment yourself, bearing in mind that it could take you several weeks of trying, then I would recommend skipping paying the extra money altogether.

I know a few people who have had success in this when being flexible about their police station location (for example heading to a neighbouring town or barrio instead of the one they lived in).

If you do decide to order from mynie.co.uk, I would also definitely recommend double checking the paperwork they send you.

You are ultimately responsible for submitting accurate details to the police, so it’s worth verifying them. Rest assured, however, that you can also easily make the changes yourself online if needs be. It really doesn’t take very long.

Lastly, do try to find the correct document requirements for your region before your actual appointment. Else, be prepared for multiple Police station visits and no NIE number until you get them right.

I’ve now posted an article on gathering the correct NIE documents for Barcelona, which you may find useful. Do check it out.

Other than that, do feel free to leave a comment below and have a great day!