Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘UK’ Category

We’re looked at French housing, but what about your house in the UK?

Even if you are absolutely certain that you are going to spend the rest of your life in France, it’s best to retain your house in the UK if you can so that you have a fall-back position in case things don’t work out in France or you change your mind about living here. Not everyone is able to maintain houses in two countries of course and it will probably make finances a little tighter in France than they would otherwise be. However, once you sell your house in the UK you can find it very difficult to get back into the housing market. In our own case, our UK house went up over 40% in less than three years and effectively beyond our reach had we sold it when we moved.

If you are lucky enough to be able to keep it, you should try to rent it out. Not only will this keep the house occupied but it will help pay the mortgage etc. without needing to rely on income from France to pay for the various bills that will arise in the UK.

If you are going down the rental route, you will almost certainly need to change your mortgage to a buy to let one as few normal residential mortgages allow you to rent out your property easily. Your house insurance also needs to change to reflect the fact that you will have tenants in the house and that it may be unoccupied for extended periods of time between tenants (don’t rely on 100% occupancy!).

Although you could try to find tenants yourself, it’s much simpler to arrange the rentals through a letting agency as they can arrange for work to be done and to inspect the house before during and after each tenancy. This service usually costs around 10% of the rental income plus advertising costs of around 100 in advance of each tenancy.

Costs will continue during periods that you don’t have tenants. For instance, you are still liable for aspects of the electricity, gas and water bills. Throughout your ownership you also need to pay council tax / rates and, of course, insurance.

It’s difficult to be definitive about this decision. Keeping a house in the UK does entail a lot of costs from insurance to mortgage not to mention the additional effort that you need to put into managing your house (even if you have a letting agent). However, selling can be quite a permanent thing to do if you live in an area where prices move quickly and, to my mind, it’s best to retain your house as a fall-back should things in France not work out as you expect.

If you do decide that selling is the best option for you, it’s best to get this in motion before you leave the UK as otherwise you could find yourself liable for French capital gains tax on the proceeds of any sale.

Separately, but related to this topic, is the issue of maintaining a UK postal address. This is one thing that is definitely advantageous to do. If you can change the address for several credit cards to that of a friend or family member before you go, this will effectively move your credit history to their address which we have found to be very useful over the years.

Next week, we move onto French banking.

Seeing as SuperFrenchie thinks I’m “just” anti-French, I thought I’d redress the balance a little and point out one area where the UK is anti-European too.

I was in getting my driving license renewed last week which is something of a hit and miss affair as the explanatory leaflet leaves a LOT to be desired in clarity. Even though the thing was in English and, one would assume therefore that I’d understand it, the opening paragraph on what proof of ID was required was totally incomprehensible and appeared to be totally wrong too.

It opens by saying that if you have a colour photograph on your existing driving license then you don’t need to have someone certify your photograph nor to present a passport. Except, that when my father presented his renewal application complete with his old driving license with colour photo, they wouldn’t renew it without his passport.

It then goes on to say that you always need to have your photo certified yet they happily renewed mine with only my passport.

Then it says “digital photographs are not acceptable” yet they DO accept them, mainly because all of the photobooth machines only produce digital photos these days.

The best bit is perhaps their definition of residency. Despite living in France for three years, I still qualify for a Northern Ireland driving license as, according to their definition, I am still resident there!

However, none of that’s anti-European….

Whilst we were there, one of the increasing number of Polish immigrants arrived to exchange his license for a Northern Ireland one. In theory, he doesn’t actually need to change it at all but the lady in the office reckoned that he had to change it within six months (anti-European point 1). He presented his Polish ID card. Not acceptable: we need a passport (anti-European point 2) which isn’t actually what it says on their website. What she said he needed was to have his photo certified by someone in Northern Ireland who knew him for two years.

Emmm, so he MUST change his driving license within six months and, because you won’t take his valid ID card, he must find someone in Northern Ireland who knew him 18 months before he arrived?

St Patrick’s Day is an odd sort of day in Northern Ireland.For one thing, although St Patrick is celebrated as an Irish saint, he was actually British. Naturally, he was Catholic as there wasn’t anything else in terms of Christian religions in his time.

Belfast has always had a slightly rural feel about it. The countryside isn’t far from anywhere in the town and you can almost always see the green fields that surround the city. In other ways too it has never been terribly cosmopolitan with nightlife being relatively quiet for many years.

All that is changing though. For a number of years the nightlife has been getting considerably more lively and the city centre remains busy in the evenings these days with the increasing number of nightclubs and the like opening around the city not to mention the massive increase in city centre apartments that have been constructed over the last ten years or so.

A striking example that I found in my recent trip was the appearance of Anna Lo’s face on an election poster. You’d never have seen her before not because there was discrimination against non-whites here but rather because there weren’t any non-whites. Yet another welcome indication of the settling in of peace.

Although MI6 was less than pleased (to put it mildly) when Bond zoomed right past their real-life headquarters on the opening sequence of “The World is Not Enough”, just a few years later and we find MI5, their internal security counterparts, advertising for spies on the Internet and indeed even MI6 now feature a nice photo of said headquarters on their own site. Of course, “we” have agents (or, rather, Mobile Surveillance Officers), it is “they” who have spies.

In days gone by, recruitment was by way of the old boy network. It was more than enough for X to say that you were a “reliable chap” for you to find yourself asked by someone in “the Service” to help your country. Unfortunately, the days when the British Empire was mainly up against the Soviet Union are long since gone and the threat is much more from the likes of Muslim extremists these days. The old boy network certainly never included ethnic minorities and, for that matter, rarely extended outside the public school network so they need to look for new ways to find people who can infiltrate the organisations posing the present-day threats.

The more paranoid of you will realise that this entry has so many trigger words that my ‘lil ‘ole blog is sure to attract the interest of MI5. Given the “request” by MI5 some years back to have their routers installed directly on the networks of all UK based ISPs, the paranoid amongst you are more than likely right this time. Sadly, I just can’t see MI5 appearing on the site stats somehow but hopefully I’ll keep one of the chaps or chappettes in ****** ***** or  **** amused now and again in the future.

I, of course, have shot myself down re applying by way of this post as I’m fairly sure that posting such discussions fall well outside of the guidelines they quote, namely “Discretion is important to the Service, so please only discuss this application with your partner and/or immediate family.”. Although, for the true conspiracy theorists, I could be an MI5 plant and double-bluffing the lot of you!

Seriously though, if you’re British and have lived in the UK for most of your life, it is one of the ways that you could help to defend the British way of life in a very constructive, if usually unseen way.