Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Society’ Category

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?

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.