Foreign Perspectives

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It sometimes seems that every aspect of French life needs to be documented and, for the most part, by documentation that doesn’t exist outside France.

When you move to France, you will continually be asked for your ID card which isn’t issued (yet) by the UK and quite often for your Carte de Séjour (residence permit) which, if you’re European, you’ve not been required to have for several years now. In the absence of those, your passport will obviously suffice and sometimes even a driving license.

The Livre de Famille or family book is given to those who marry in France and contains, in effect, the birth certificates of the couple and any children that they have along with the marriage certificate. Almost every contact you have with French officialdom asks you for this mainly because the French don’t issue birth certificates and the documentation that they issue instead is only valid for three months. In practice your own passport and the birth certificates of the children are the equivalent. Since the French documents expire, many people will assume that your documents do too and keep them as is the practice with the French documents; if you point out that they are certificates they’ll usually photocopy them instead.

Proof of address is obviously difficult to provide when you first move to France and in some circumstances later on too. To get around this, the French authorities will normally let you produce an “attestation” that states you live at your current address. The “attestation” is effectively a letter (in French) saying that you live there. Even the French recognise that it’s not always possible to prove that!

One oddity is that the French will often ask for the amount of income that you had in France before you came here. Now, for the majority of people the answer to this will obviously be “nothing” but that doesn’t stop the French using that information and paying you assorted social security benefits on the basis that since you didn’t earn anything in France, then clearly you didn’t earn anything elsewhere. Yes, I know that’s crazy, but they definitely pay out money on that basis. What I’m wondering is what they’ll do when we leave France as they can hardly charge us tax, social security and health insurance if we’re not here, although you never know with the French.

 This is part of our series on buying a house in France.

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The French excel at administration. If there’s something that can be documented, it is required to be documented. Or, to put it another way, this section of the guide will be long.

We’ll be covering the more essential areas of French administration and will cover the areas of health, education, social security and tax of course but will also be touching on other areas such as employment in France, retirement and the like plus other aspects of French life such as the electricity company, mobile phones, TV, the electrical system and so on. We’ll also touch on a number of aspects of what to do about your life back home’ as these also impact on the administration that you will come across in France.

The number of abbreviations and terms in French administration is astronomical but don’t worry as we’ll define the terms required as we go along.

Finally, in this section of the guide, we’ll be moving further into the topic of how to settle in France although we will also cover the issues involved from the point of view of those who are buying a holiday home in France. For example, with a holiday home you deal with the health system in a totally different way from that if you are living in France.

To begin with, we’ll be starting with the most common sets of documents that you’ll be asked for: the ID card, Livre de Famille and proof of address.

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If you’re used to the wide variation of mortgage offers in the UK, the French marketplace is child’s play: as far as we can tell, all mortgages are either fixed or variable rate and they are all the repayment type.

If you are buying your house “subject to mortgage”, you will need to see the bank before you see the notary as you will need to say “subject to obtaining a mortgage from X bank at Y% over Z years”. If this isn’t added to the “compris” then you will lose your deposit if you can’t get a mortgage.

French investments are incredibly simple too. The only problem with them is that you need to buy them through an advisor which is even more of a pain than trying to do something banking-related through your bank advisor. Due to this and the very limited range available, it’s best to continue to do your investing through the companies that you are already using.

This is part of our series on buying a house in France; next week we start venturing into French administration.

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