Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Places’ Category

Whilst we had loads of housebuyers staying with us in 2004 and 2005, 2006 saw none of them at all.

Who knows why? The UK interest rates weren’t much higher than they were the year before nor did there seem to be a big difference in the UK house prices.

It’s the same this year too ie no big difference. Yet, we’re just into the main house-hunting season (usually October to March) and already we’ve had three separate house-buying families call in with us. Whether this is the sign of a major buying spree is a good question but at least it’s a sign of the start of a movement in the French market.

Although I’ve been plugging away with a series on living in France and you’d think that it would be something French that would be the most popular post on the blog, in fact it’s a post that is solidly in the expat finance field that is by far the most popular.

It’s, of course, our article on opening a bank account in America as a non-resident. Why? Well, for those that are running a small business on the Internet, the preferred way of getting paid is via PayPal which is brilliant for a small business as you get to accept credit card payments with no hassle at all. However, obviously you need to get the money out of PayPal and into a real bank account at some point and that’s where the problems start.

PayPal is basically an American payment scheme and only lets you transfer money out to a fairly limited number of countries. Crucially, that range of countries excludes quite a lot of Asia who are, of course, one of the most active business communities on the Internet.

If PayPal don’t support bank accounts in your country they give you only one other option: transfer money to an American bank account and so opening a bank account in America has become very popular. Unfortunately, the tightening up of security checks after 9/11 means that it’s quite difficult to open an account there or at least the options have closed up somewhat.

What’s happened then is that there has been a massive growth in websites offering to sell you the information for anything from $5 to $1000. Yes, up to one thousand dollars! Since I don’t charge anything for somewhat better information, the post in question has steadily moved up the rankings in google and indeed the corresponding entry in the expat resources section of the Whole Earth Guide has soared right up to the top of google too.

In fact the post has become so popular that I’ll be rolling out a similar guide for other countries which have been requested (Switzerland is next in line, the Channel Islands after that).

We’re sort-of looking for somewhere outside France to live at the moment. Not in a “lets’ go right now” kind of way, but in a considerably more musing about it all sort of way.

Initially, areas of Spain were first into the frame. It’s another European country, so that makes it relatively easy to move to. No real hassles about residence permits or such like things, same electricity supply and we can, once again, stick our Sky box under our arm and watch our normal programming.

However, Norman has suggested that Canada would be a much simpler option than we’d ever thought it would be. In fact, we never even considered it, thinking that it would be a rather difficult place to move to. Even our first playing around with the immigration points calculator throws up that we’re sitting at 80/100 with no problems and that’s well above the required level.

Very early days of course and we’ve not even ordered, still less read, the Living in Canada book.

One of the problems with working in the tourist industry is that you’re really busy right through the main holiday season and therefore need to take your own holidays out of season.

That tends to rule out some types of holiday. For instance, many beach destinations are out as they’ll be closed down for the season by the time we’d be able to go. The weather isn’t so dependable out of the holiday season either so we need to take more care about the type of destination we consider.

At the moment, we’re looking into two quite different holidays for ourselves.

The first will probably be late October/early November and for that we’re aiming to do a mini-citybreak. Flight prices drop dramatically by then so we’ve quite a wide choice in principle though as it’s just a short break we don’t want to pay a fortune for the hotels at the other end (which ruled out Venice: the prices were unbelieveable) and also it’s a lot cheaper if you don’t need to get a hotel at the airport so that knocks out flights leaving early in the morning.

The second is Christmas which may surprise you. In fact, we are usually empty over the Christmas period as the locals don’t “do” Christmas. Anyway, the net effect of that is that we have a window of around 7-10 days and we’re hoping to go somewhere “Christmasy” for it. Options for that one include Brussels (surprisingly cheap on the hotel front as the bureaucrats have, of course, left for their own holidays) and southern Germany. In principle, we’d have liked to do Edinburgh or London but the flight prices knocked both of them out of the running.

After that? Well, we’ll be full in early January but would like to get away somewhere warm sometime in the late January to early March period to break up the Winter for us.

You might think that the south of France would be ideal for walking holidays and it is, but the Summer months are just too hot for any kind of strenuous activity. There are some walkers around in the Summer of course but generally they have to severely curtail the range that they walk each day.

However, once we get into September it’s one of the best times of the year for it. The days are generally sunny right up until December although the majority of walking holidays are undertaken from around mid-September to the end of October. It’s still warm enough for walking after that but you need to consider the areas that you’ll be passing through as those at higher altitudes can have snow after October.

We’ve just said goodbye to our second party of walkers this week who have just started off on their walk towards Queribus with a view to stopping in Duillac this evening and hitting Peyrepertous tomorrow.