Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘France’ Category

We’ve been without TV since December 31st when the satellite decided to down tools.

It’s not that we’ve not been trying to get it sorted but, until this evening, all our efforts were in vain. We changed the satellite dish from our trusty 80cm to a 95cm, we changed the LNB to a nice new one instead of our very weather beaten four year old one, we changed the coaxial cable and we even changed the satellite decoder. And nothing.

So we thought we’d go back to first principles late this afternoon. Within 30 minutes of going back to our old dish and old LNB we started picking up TV channels. OK, we’re not getting the right satellite just yet but we should have that sorted in fairly short order tomorrow.

However, we do need to source a new Sky box as the old one ain’t working anymore so, for the moment, we’re limited to non-subscription channels.

Once we get into the summer season, there’s really no chance of us keeping up with anything that isn’t essential to the day to day running of the place and one of those “non-essential” things is keeping the accounts up to date.

It’s not that we’ve no idea what money is coming in and going out as we go along, just that the formal accounts don’t get kept up to date over the summer period. This year is particularly bad as there was a lot of additional work needing doing with our UK side of the business and so it’s really only now that we’re getting settled down to get the finances up to date.

Naturally, that long period since the relevant transactions makes life more difficult as it’s that much easier to lose the odd document along the way of course and getting the whole lot into a sensible sequence takes a whole lot longer than it would do if we were keeping up to date as we went along.

Having said that, overall it seems to take us a lot less time to do when we do the whole lot in bulk. This morning we went through the majority of the receipts over a couple of hours for instance whereas doing it a little bit at a time would consume a lot more time when you added it all up. In fact the biggest downside is that the whole thing feels much more like a chore when you’ve a big heap of documentations to work through than when you’ve only a couple of bills to mark off.

Fingers crossed, we’ll have tidied it all up by next week and then it’s off to the accountant with it.

Once you’re in France for a while, chances are that you’ll come across a few “experts” that is somebody doing something or other that comes with the title of “expert”.

In fact, the meaning is somewhat different to the english word and equates to something along the lines of “senior” so that you find “Expert Comptables” ie Senior Accountants and so on. However, whilst the meaning doesn’t translate across to the word “expert” in english, in practice it seems to be taken as meaning that in many instances ie that the “expert” can’t possibly be wrong because they are an expert.

Even those who don’t regale under the title of “expert” in their profession are often taken to be essentially infallable when working in their field. So, for example, the assumption is that whatever comes out of an official channel is bound to be correct is quite common and therefore not to be questioned. Perhaps our own accountant provides the best example of this practice. In common with everyone else in France starting a business she received a bill from the social security people for around 3000‚€ when she started her consultancy business and in common with almost everyone else she paid it. In fact, it’s not actually necessary to pay it as it’s based on an estimate of what you might earn in your first year of business and if you tell them the true figure then their demand for payment drops around 90%.

Perhaps the worst example of this is in the area of estimating the value of a car after an accident. Obviously there can be a lot of uncertainty in any estimate as no two cars will have been used identically of course. Yet, the expert accepts no uncertainty: his price is the only price and must be correct because he is the expert. Except that, naturally, even experts make mistakes.

So be wary of the “experts” in France for they seem to believe that their expertise is carved in stone and unquestionably correct. Even when it’s wrong.

Whilst it’s easy enough to come up with a price for a house in a town where there are a lot of similar houses around and a regular turnover, it’s an entirely different matter in rural France.

For a start, once you get into the countryside, houses aren’t all the same. Even two similar looking cottages won’t come with the same price attached because they’ll be in different locations with different views and so on. And, of course, they’ll not be the same inside either nor will they have been equally well maintained. Finally, there just isn’t the regularity of turnover of housing in the French countryside as you get in a typical town in the UK.

So how do the French price their houses? Well, first off they look around at the various estate agent brochures that seem to be in every place you could possibily find them. The French don’t have a single estate agent selling a property usually so there are even more brochures than you might expect.

They look for vaguely similar houses to what they have to sell and take a view on whether their’s is worth more or less than the price being asked. What they don’t do usually is to ask the estate agent what the price should be and therefore the prices listed aren’t necessarily realistic. In fact, most are actually conversions from some relatively arbitrary figure in French francs with the estate agent commission being added on (hence the slightly peculiar sums that you sometimes see being asked).

So, don’t take the price in the estate agents brochure as gospel. It’s usually not based on any firm idea of what the house should be worth so you may well be able to negotiate either the price or what’s included in the price.

It’s back to school today for James which means that we’ve to start getting up at a fixed time yet again.

One of the oddities about this business is that there are no regular hours at all. During the summer we generally need to be up no later than 7.30am each day and often need to stay around the office until after 11pm each night. Once we get outside the peak period though there starts to be periods of a day or two when we’ve nobody in and can lay in a while and over the winter you often get stretches of a week or more at a time when you can take it easy.

Well, perhaps “take it easy” isn’t the right description as we use those times sans guests to get various bits of maintenance done, to catch up with the administration and move more into our little empire of online activities. Still, ’tis nice not to have both the early start and late finish for a while even if it is a little muddied by school days.