New ventures in France
February 12th, 2007 | 
Author: Almost the first thing that people do once they move to France is to look for something else to do. Many people come over with the thought that the income from a few gites will support them into their old age but, sadly, it’s not quite so simple as that. Self-catering just doesn’t seem to be capable of providing enough money to fully support a family and B&B can’t be totally relied on either.So, people branch out. Many of the gite people find that there’s quite a bit of spare time during the week and often start doing odd-jobs for other expats around the area. Others find the allure of the computer a great attraction and once they’ve polished up their website for the nth time they start considering other internet ventures.
Sadly we don’t have quite so much time to spare as the gite people but even so we’ve managed to clock up quite a few website sidelines for ourselves since we’ve been here. The first major one was our thriving B&B and gite listing sites which between them attract getting on for 1500 visitors per day, a number exceeding the number of visitors of many commercial listing sites.
Since then, we’ve separated off our regional guide into the ever expanding Pyrenees Themes and our transport pages into PerpignanFlightsAndCarHire. Of course readers of this column will know that Foreign Perspectives is also growing and branching out with our directory launched in January. Now that we’ve one directory on the go, we are making a start on another and hence the birth of the Whole Earth Directory recently.
Why bother though? Well, it turns out that some people are making a fair amount of money on some of these ventures and it looks quite likely that a friend of ours will be matching his real-world income with his Internet income within the next year or two.
So, if you do move to France, don’t expect your initial job to necessarily provide most of your total income once you’ve been here for a few years.
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We briefly considered trying the B&B business but finally decided that it would be alot of work. It seems like your time wouldn’t be your own. We are retired now and like having some leisure time. Company that you know is hard enough. Where exactly do you live?
B&B can be a lot of work if you’re doing it as your main occupation. Having said that, there are many retired people over here who don’t need to maximise their income and are therefore able to treat it more like a hobby. This can work very well and the wide variety of people who turn up can be very interesting eg in our own case we’ve had prominent photojournalists staying, American artists and many travellers with interesting tales to tell.
We’re about 20 mins west of Perpignan, way down in the south.