Foreign Perspectives

Bonsoir!

It’s been pouring all day. Yes, folks, it really does rain in the south of France.

Anyway, seeing as the weather wasn’t great, we thought we’d have a bit of lie-in so it was a bit of a rush just after 9am when the doorbell rang. That was our first potential employee. By the time I managed to get downstairs, the French was operational enough to tell her that we might be looking for people around the end of June.

We had another bin-trip over lunch to clear out another trailer load of junk left by the previous owner. At the current rate, it’ll be the end of the month before we’ve gotten rid of it all.

Since it’s the start of the month, it was time to drop off the first pile of invoices with the accountant so that’s where we ended up this afternoon. Unfortunately, it’s mainly bills that I need to pay rather than bills that people have paid me but all being well that split will change by the summer. Time too to see what’s involved in employing someone. It seems simple. The minimum salary (SMIC) is ‚€7.19 an hour but that’s gross, of course, so they end up with about 80% of that and employers taxes mean that it costs about ‚€10 an hour for me to employ someone. There’s also the complication of the 35 hour week here with a maximum of 48 hours. In practice, the hours we would need someone would be a bit bizarre: probably about 2/3 hours in the late morning/early afternoon to make the beds etc. and the same again in the evening to look after the restaurant. I suspect we’ll need at least two people to do that.

That’s the gorge around the corner that we were at yesterday.

A bientot,