Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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.

One of the questions that’s in the back of our minds at the moment is “where should we go after here?” and the answer is far from simple.

Our first complication is that since we’re selling both a business and a home at the same time and likely to be moving to another country, the synchronisation of the move will be quite complex. Consequently, our current thinking is that the bulk of our possessions will go to storage somewhere whilst we rent an interim home elsewhere. To simplify our lives tax-wise, it’s probably going to be a little easier if the interim spot isn’t in France as that’ll create a clean-ish break from the French tax system sooner than if our interim spot were in France.

With the sedate pace of French property sales, we’d have anything from three to six months from the “I’ll take it” until the cheque clears in our bank account so there should be lots of time to arrange that interim move. In fact, probably enough to skip the interim stage but synchronising a sale in France with a purchase elsewhere would be next to impossible hence the interim stage.

Where to go after that though? Whilst we’ve not yet settled on a single spot, a number of requirements are already apparent:

1. We’d like the kids to grow up english speaking;
2. We want a country that is broadly pro-business.

The first point doesn’t actually rule out non-english speaking countries as you might think as there are many countries with bilingual schools and in fact the possibility of a bilingual education would be quite a plus point for us.

We’re saying pro-business basically because we’ve experienced a broadly anti-business environment over the last four years and it makes life a lot more difficult at every stage of running a business. France is changing, but not quickly enough for us.

I’m sure that we’ll add many more requirements over the months to come!

People seem to be moving online in droves in search of holiday accommodation if the stats on my own accommodation listings sites are anything to go by.

Whilst ordinarily, I expect to have to upgrade the hosting for the collection of sites once a year, I’ve already had to upgrade it three times since Christmas such is the rush of people looking around for summer holiday accommodation. The increase in traffic from December looks like coming out around eight fold which is a major jump by any standards.

Whilst financially it’s no problem in that hosting costs have dropped like a stone in recent years, technically it’s heralding a problem that may arise this summer, somewhat ahead of my expectations. That problem is that I’ve only one more upgrade that I can do before I have to move from a shared hosting plan to a VPS hosting plan that essentially provides me with my own virtual server (actually shared by around four others).

Plus points of that upgrade are that it will give me the extra bandwidth that I’ll be needing by then and that the websites should run a lot faster but on the downside it costs about five times the price of the service that I’ll be using just prior to it.

As we’re edging into the main booking season for the summer, the number of travel advertisements is increasing quite dramatically as you’ve probably noticed.

Although the world is obviously pretty much the same as it was last year, the emphasis on particular holiday destinations seems to change from year to year. So far this year, the emphasis seems to be split between Costa Rica, Canada and Carribbean cruises which are three very different options.

At first glance Costa Rica seems to be primarily an ecotourism destination with rain forests, exotic animals and so on. However, whilst making a point of ecotourism the tourist infrastructure in other areas has been built up substantially in recent years and you now have a very complete offering under most types of tourist activities.

Canada is, for the moment, concentrating on luxury ski vacations both around British Columbia at the west and Quebec in the east. Luxury seems to be the common theme for both sides of Canada with a lot of emphasis on personal service and fantastic meals.

The Carribbean cruises being pushed this year are also generally at the luxury end of the market but emphasising the discounts available from a number of cruise lines. Very substantial discounts too in some cases, notably from SilverSea which is very much a personal service cruise line.

Of course, where they want you to go will probably change as we move further into the year. For one thing, the Canadian ski resorts will be dropping out from around April/May as the snow starts to melt although those areas are very attractive in the summer too.

As we’re confident that we’ll be on the move at some stage this year, we’ve started thinking through some of the logistics of the process.

Our first problem is that we don’t know when the sale will go through and therefore we can’t currently go out and buy somewhere else. Also, given the slow pace of sales here and likely delays in the process, it would be quite difficult to synchronise the sale here with the purchase somewhere else and especially so as each trade is separate here ie buyer/seller chains don’t exist.

That lack of synchronisation means that we’re almost certainly going to need an interim place to live in between living here and living in our new permanent home (where-ever that may be). Although simplifying the logistics of moving out of here it adds some other complications for us in terms of schooling for the kids and where to tell the removal truck to go. In that the interim place isn’t going to be our permanent home and may not even be in the country that we’ll finally settle in, it’s also looking likely that we’ll be needing to store the stuff from here somewhere but, of course, we’ll need some of that stuff whilst we’re in our interim home which means that we’re going to have to sit down and work out what we’ll need to take with us rather than put in the truck. That’s not so simple in that there’s a whole lot of kiddy stuff which takes up quite a volume not to mention items like the computer I’m typing this on, bedding and so on. Now obviously we could do without some of that stuff for a “while” but here too we don’t know how long we’ll be in the interim spot.

Far from simple, eh?