Foreign Perspectives

Or rather, it SHOULD be a commercial loan.

The problem is that for it to be a commercial loan rather than a personal mortgage, the business would have needed to be created no later than the day that I signed to buy the place. After all, if the business didn’t exist before then, it wouldn’t be possible to make the loan to it, would it?

Seems obvious, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t obvious to either our former accountants nor the bank. Net effect being that the accountants didn’t register the business ’til about two months after we’d bought the hotel and therefore the loan is a personal one and we can’t count the loan repayments as business expenses.

Actually, we can but only if I rent the hotel to the business so I’ve started billing myself rent each month.

This is a bit of a nuisance as I need to write out a cheque from the business account, deposit that, wait a week for it to clear then write out a cheque to the business account. So, I thought I’d ask the bank if we could set up a standing order to the personal account and move the direct debit for the loan to the personal account.

As it’s France, that requires a meeting with our counsellor so three weeks went by as I was off in the UK and he was on holiday.

Nope. He won’t do it. He insists that it’s a commercial loan and that can’t be paid from a personal account. The only way he’ll do that is if I set up a company to run the hotel and do it that way. Unfortunately, that’s rather expensive and besides it won’t work so I’ll just have to continue with the cheques each month.

Of course, the reason that he insists it’s a commercial loan is that, if it is a personal loan (and it is) then he and everyone in the bank associated with granting it will be suspended from work by the Banque de France for providing an illegal personal loan. So, for once, we understand his reasons (even if he won’t state them).

So, if you are getting a loan to buy a business here, make sure that your accountant has actually set up the company before the day you sign to accept the loan.

What is it? Well, it’s the French response to CNN and BBC World ie it’s a 24 hour French news channel. The thinking seems to be that the anglophones have had it too easy for far too long and it was high time that the French view on world affairs received a wider audience.

Initially, it was to be primarily a French language channel but seeing as the objective was to spread France’s world view to a wider audience, they bit the bullet and it will initially be offered with French and English on equal footing. Knowing that France often sees the English language as “the enemy”, I’m sure that was a far from easy decision to take but it just goes to show how seriously they are about getting this channel onto a the world stage.

At the moment they’re supposed to be starting broadcasting towards the end of the year but that date will probably slip.

One thing that we’ve noticed here is that the world seems a whole lot more violent in French than it is in English which is a side-effect of France concentrating more on their ex-colonies which are mainly in fairly violent African countries. It’ll be interesting to see if this view is reflected in the English version of France 24.

Unlike in the UK, you can’t just lift a leaflet, fill it in and post it. You have to queue up at the customer services desk and most of the time they require proof of ID and often proof of address before they’ll issue you with a card.

Although they have the cards, they don’t use them to promote the various shops nearly as much as they do in the UK. For instance, whereas when you get your Tesco statement, there are perhaps a dozen different offers on products, in Carrefour you just get a voucher to spend in the shop. Leclerc and Auchan don’t even send a statement as the money accumulates directly on their cards (which therefore require a PIN).

In fact, to date the only shop that seems to actually use the information is Auchan which managed to issue us with a credit card based on next to no information.

At least this is one area where we’re quite grateful that the French are a little backward!

Most booking sites send contact details for the guests when the booking is received but this one doesn’t and in fact all we get is an arrival date and a name.

When this couple arrived they started by complaining that I didn’t know the flight arrival times to Girona airport. Actually, we do. They’re from about 7am to midnight every day and we even check actual arrival times for guests as there have been considerable delays of late. Still, they didn’t accept my explanation that we’d not been told of their arrival time so added that to the complaint letter. We’re still at a bit of a loss as to how anyone would have told us though as they booked the flight separately from the accommodation so the place they booked us through didn’t know when they were arriving either.

But then it gets a bit surreal. They’d asked me after checking in about eating that night and I’d said that they’d have needed to eat in Spain as all French restaurants stop serving around 8.30pm and after that it’s McDonalds or nothing. Quite a big part of their complaint was that I didn’t give them any information about eating out that night. Of course, that’s because they couldn’t eat out that night as it was about 9.30pm by the time they arrived. However, as they’d not adjusted their watches they figured that it was only a little after 8pm.

It’s even worse than that though as they somehow managed to stay most of a week in France without adjusting their watches so had quite a run of difficulties over that time, most of which they seemed to be blaming on us. When they came down at 11am for breakfast, it had been cleared away (that being 10am for them, of course), when they went for lunch at 2pm (1pm for them), the restaurants were closed, etc. Actually, they STILL haven’t realised that they were running an hour behind the rest of France despite having to run for the plane as they arrived just as the checkin for their flight closed.

Slightly more comical was their complaint about the antiquated hairdryer being a bit smelly. In fact, it was the room heater that they were using and the smell was the burning of their own hair.

So when you get off a flight, do check what the local time is.

However, during the last year we happened to get an Auchan loyalty card and about a week ago received the French equivalent of a pre-approved credit card application from them. It said on the letter that all we needed to do to collect the card was to bring along the letter with the attached sample card to Auchan with proof of ID and bank details. Frankly, we didn’t believe that it would be that simple. Besides this being the land of documentation mountains, we had previously tried to open a savings account with Auchan and couldn’t provide them with enough documentation so we figured that there was no way they’d actually issue us with a credit card.

Anyway, as the offer expires in a week or so, yesterday we went to Auchan (similar to a really big Tesco) out of curiosity.

They took the letter, asked us how long we’d been living here, how long we’d been working here and in under 20 minutes we walked away with a credit card with a EUR 7500 limit on it!

Given the lack of credit referencing facilities in France, this seems incredibly stupid of them. After all, the only information that they could check was my passport, address (from the loyalty card letter), and bank details. They didn’t even ask anything about our income or even proof that we were working here for that matter. Also odd is that whilst we use Carrefour every week and have had their loyalty card for well over two years they haven’t come out with any invitation for their card yet we’ve had the Auchan loyalty card for under a year and only go there maybe once a month.

As it’s a French card, the facilities that it has are quite different from those on offer elsewhere in the world. We kicked off with a 10% discount voucher for our first trolleyload put through the checkout plus a EUR 15 gift card so we’re already ahead. As it’s an Auchan card, it also comes with a 10% discount on any Auchan products bought on Tuesdays. Naturally, it comes with a charge: EUR 8 per year from next year which is about typical for store cards issued here. Other odd features are that after 3 months we can get a EUR 300 bank transfer from the card to our bank account and after 6 months we can use it in the ATMs in Post Offices here. Interestingly, there doesn’t appear to be a cash advance fee for that though obviously there are interest charges.

However, by far the biggest advantage of the card is that we can now use the checkouts reserved for Auchan cardholders. Thanks to the loyalty that the French have to their own banks, these particular checkouts rarely have any queue at all.

Our next challenge is to get it upgraded to a proper Visa/Mastercard.