Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

Whilst it’s peculiar to think of the difficulties faced when immigrating to the UK, that’s a situation that we will be finding ourselves in within the not too distant future so we’re considering some of the logistics.

Even for “native” English speaking children it’s not as easy to do as you might expect.

Why? Well, in our experience most people returning to the UK are doing so after they’ve been abroad at least two years and normally it’s more than five years. For simplicity, let’s take the case of a five year stay abroad of a British child who then returns to the UK schooling system.

If they were just born when the family emmigrated, then the child would be about five and therefore be starting primary school. You might think that would be fine but if they’ve been playing with non-English speaking children for those five years it’s not quite so simple. For one thing they won’t know the english words for all the toys nor the name of the TV shows. That’s even if they speak english at all of course because some emmigrants try to immerse their family in the local culture and language. However, this is by far the simplest point.

What about, say a six year old, moving back at age 11. They will find it fairly difficult as they’ll have picked up a lot of the foreign language in school and will need to learn the english words for all those terms. In fact, it’s generally the case that kids of that background can only speak english to their parents and other english speakers find them virtually impossible to communicate with in english so you can imagine the problems they’ll have in their initial period in an english speaking school.

The worst ages come later though. Someone trying to start A-levels who’d been abroad since they were 11 would have severe problems. They’d not know any of the specialised vocabulary in english for the various subjects that they’d studied. In fact, they’d almost certainly have to go to english classes before trying to get into a school. These problems are magnified a little more if they’re trying to get into a British university but haven’t gone through British A-levels.

So if you are planning on returning to the UK after a stay abroad of more than a few years, don’t just assume that your kids are english speaking because, in most cases, they are far from fluent in english and certainly very far from fluent in academic english.

We are just rubbish at choosing accountants. It’s not that we don’t ask for recommendations because we do.

It’s that the first accountant recommended as “brilliant” to us turned out to be fine when they did the work but they just never got around to it with us.

The second came with an even more glowing recommendation and indeed she was that good. What she didn’t tell us was that she was going to be leaving the firm just a matter of months later and that the firm (apart from her) left quite a bit to be desired.

In fact they were so bad that when she left they never even bothered to open the files on her clients that she, of course, left behind. Net effect of that was that we (ie all such clients I imagine) only found out about her departure when we started getting threatening letters from the tax people saying that they were going to apply all kinds of penalties.

That was in September of last year. They finally completed the 2005 accounts just a few weeks ago (ie two years late) and still haven’t completed the 2006 accounts which is, of course, bringing in more penalty notices and quite laughable demands for money.

Normally it gets seriously cold here in February and even then it’s not every day but recently it’s been absolutely freezing for days at a stretch.

It’s actually so cold at the moment that snow has been spotted about 30 minutes along the road to our west which is much earlier than it would normally be there. OK, not a whole lot of snow but even so.

But it’s the wind that’s really getting to us. For several days now it’s been blowing something of a gale. If you were to throw some snow into that equation, we’d be in big trouble I suspect. As it is, it’s darned cold here in the office where I normally type this stuff (no heating as it shouldn’t really be required in here).

I think we’re in for a darned cold Winter!

Even before Schengen came into force, most of the borders around Europe had very little in the way of immigration control. Bit slow in getting out the passport? You were just waved on.

Yet, that doesn’t happen to some people apparently. One British/Russian couple are stopped at every border post and told that the wife needs to have a Schengen visa. How come?

Simple really. They offer up their passports at every border post and thereby give the border guards something to do. Everyone else just assumes that they’ve the right to go over the border and just keeps going anyway.

One of the chief characteristics of French tax and social security administration is that when you start out in business they send you bills based on an estimate of what an established business would be earning, not what a start-up would be bringing in.

Although typically a new business will earn very little after start-up expenses in its first year, it will typically receive bills for thousands of euros no matter how small it might be. Clearly that’s something of a drag on start-ups in France and the effect is that considerable chunks of business activity are done on the black ie without registration. This, of course, helps nobody in that the businesses which do register have to shoulder the tax burden for those that don’t which forces many down the unregistered route or alternatively into bankrupcy, neither of which is beneficial for the country.

Take for instance Marcus who’s done some calculations as to what tax a start-up could expect to be paying in the first couple of years. His example was of a business making EUR 5000 per year right from the start and includes just the social security contributions (ie there would be addition taxes). Year one bill: EUR 4914, year two 2780, year three 2183 ie over 98% tax on the first years income.

Even if you change the parameters of the calculations to reflect zero income in the first two years followed by EUR 5000, the bill for the second year is EUR 4080! Still, at least in the third year you get a refund of EUR 281 in that case, which you could put towards the wind-up costs of your business.

Is it any wonder why the black economy in France is so large?