Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

The French excel at administration. If there’s something that can be documented, it is required to be documented. Or, to put it another way, this section of the guide will be long.

We’ll be covering the more essential areas of French administration and will cover the areas of health, education, social security and tax of course but will also be touching on other areas such as employment in France, retirement and the like plus other aspects of French life such as the electricity company, mobile phones, TV, the electrical system and so on. We’ll also touch on a number of aspects of what to do about your life back home’ as these also impact on the administration that you will come across in France.

The number of abbreviations and terms in French administration is astronomical but don’t worry as we’ll define the terms required as we go along.

Finally, in this section of the guide, we’ll be moving further into the topic of how to settle in France although we will also cover the issues involved from the point of view of those who are buying a holiday home in France. For example, with a holiday home you deal with the health system in a totally different way from that if you are living in France.

To begin with, we’ll be starting with the most common sets of documents that you’ll be asked for: the ID card, Livre de Famille and proof of address.

This is how the Canigou mountain is supposed to look from around late October through to around April ie lots of snow all over it.

I’d planned to take a photo of it with the flowering fruit trees in the foreground and snow covered mountain in the background for over a year now. Quite hard to do actually as there are usually only a few weeks in which you can take it each year and, of course, you can’t really depend on the weather being perfect for your photos.

In fact, it wasn’t possible to take this year simply because it hasn’t been snow covered since March last year. Ever since then, it’s been pretty much constantly t-shirt weather where we are and the montain has only been mainly snow covered for stretches of a few days at a time over the whole of that period.

Funnily enough, whilst it’s been t-shirt weather all that time, now that we’re heading into Summer, we’re getting the winds that we normally associate with February (when we didn’t get them) along with the rain and generally dull conditions that are more a Winter-time thing here.

Is the freakish weather an aspect of global warming? It’s much too early to say that of course but one thing that people forget is that a “global warming” doesn’t necessarily mean that everywhere gets warmer and in fact many places would experience unusual weather conditions due to the changing weather patterns that a global warming would bring.

If you’re used to the wide variation of mortgage offers in the UK, the French marketplace is child’s play: as far as we can tell, all mortgages are either fixed or variable rate and they are all the repayment type.

If you are buying your house “subject to mortgage”, you will need to see the bank before you see the notary as you will need to say “subject to obtaining a mortgage from X bank at Y% over Z years”. If this isn’t added to the “compris” then you will lose your deposit if you can’t get a mortgage.

French investments are incredibly simple too. The only problem with them is that you need to buy them through an advisor which is even more of a pain than trying to do something banking-related through your bank advisor. Due to this and the very limited range available, it’s best to continue to do your investing through the companies that you are already using.

This is part of our series on buying a house in France; next week we start venturing into French administration.

If you are intending to buy a property in France at some point, it’s pretty much essential to open a French bank account before you get to the point of purchase. 

For non-residents, the internet banking companies are not an option. Indeed, they are, on the whole, not an option unless you have been resident in France for a year or two as they ask for proof of French income. An exception to this is Ing although that’s purely a savings account and also requires you to already have a French account.

If you bank with HSBC, the easiest option for you is to open an account with HSBC in France. Those with Premier accounts can ask their relationship manager to do this but otherwise it’s best just to pop into an HSBC branch whilst you are in France (they’re not currently set up to open non-resident accounts outside the Premier arrangement). Although with Premier accounts in two countries you get free transfers between them, HSBC France is one of the highest charging banks in France so this may not be the best option for you.

Before starting the opening process, you should have a look at the French banking practices section of our Living in France guide.

Both Barclays and LloydsTSB offer a French service. However, their branches are clustered around Paris and the Cote d’Azur and not particularly cheap.

A number of French banks offer English speaking services and, on the whole, these are much cheaper than those on offer from the British banks (the American banks in France only cater for high net-worth individuals and not suitable for most people).

Of these, the most popular is Britline which is a English speaking phone & internet banking branch of Credit Agricole based in Normandy. The service from them is excellent but the services of most other branches of Credit Agricole is between dire and truly dreadful; you can however use the Britline across France so usually don’t need to bother with the local branches. Credit Agricole is a regional bank so, unless you live in Normandy, your local Credit Agricole is a different bank from Britline which limits the facilities available in branches if you’re using Britline as your bank but in practice this merely means that you can’t use the automated deposit machines.

More generally useable is Banque Populaire which has a number of English speaking branches in various regions around France although the most targetted at the English speaking community is that in the Cote d’Azur. This is also a regional bank so you can expect some limitations to the services on offer through your local Banque Populaire. The biggest plus of this is that the service in the branches is, on the whole, much better than Credit Agricole and the charges are significantly less too.

The two national banks,  BNP Paribas and Societé Générale, also have a number of English speaking branches but they don’t promote these actively. An account opened with any of these can be used anywhere in France with the same level of services as they are not regional banks. The other plus point is that they are much larger banks and therefore offer a much wider range of services.

To open accounts in any of the above, use the contact details here and they’ll send you the necessary forms (you can’t open any non-resident accounts online in France). In terms of documentation, all that is normally required is a photocopy of your passport and an original electricity bill. If you are opening the account some time in advance of needing to use it, don’t bother getting a debit card as these cost from EUR 20 to EUR 200 per year. It’s quite easy to stick to using cheques in France as everyone takes them with proof of ID (passport or driving license). Finally, don’t be caught out by inactivity fees which are around EUR 50 per year if you don’t use the account.

If you are moving to France, do not wait until you are in France before you try opening an account here as you won’t be able to provide the proof of address required for several months. If the account is opened before you move, you can simply change the address which in turn will provide you the required proof of French address required to get a French mobile phone. Opening an account whilst you are living in France is, for the most part, a nightmare best avoided involving making appointments with your conseilleur and getting signed up for expensive and useless additional services which are next to impossible to cancel afterwards.

Before opening your account, you should read the French banking practices section of our Living in France guide.

This is part of our series on international banking which covers how to open and use accounts in various jurisdictions around the world including America, Switzerland and various offshore banking centers such as the Channel Islands, Isle of Mann and Bermuda.

It’s time for the fields to be sprayed locally with fungicide and, as usual, we’ve all coughing and have sore throats even though we’re quite a bit away from where the spraying is being done at the moment.

Naturally, the concentration of the spray is a good deal higher around those doing the spraying but, of course, they’re wearing masks, aren’t they? Well, since it is France, no, they aren’t wearing any masks or other protective gear. This photo shows that there’s a mild breeze blowing which is great when the guy is driving the direction in this photo. I have a photo of him driving in the other direction but you can’t see the tractor in it as it’s totally enshrouded in the cloud from the spray.

Incidently,  in case you were wonder, yes, the packaging that the spray comes in is marked with untold numbers of warnings about the necessity of wearing protective gear when using it. Not that you really need to be told that working in a cloud of fungicide is not a good idea.

This total disregard for health & safety is typical for the area. Granted, the guy doing the spraying is making his own decision to ignore the warnings as it’s his field but even in the supermarkets you constantly come across wet and slippy floors that are ignored by the staff. In the UK, they have 2 minutes to clear any spillage or they’re legally liable, here it seems like hours are fine (and, yes, we have been in a supermarket a few hours where a spillage we saw on the way in was still there as we went out).