Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

The landscape around us has remained stark since the last of the grape bushes were prunned at the end of the year but it’s all about to change.

As you can see the first shoots have started to appear on the grape bushes just beside us but already the landscape has taken a greener appearance. The various types of grape start growing at different times so we’ve been watching as the greenery has been sweeping towards us over the last week or so and we noticed the first signs of growth in the plants beside us just a few days ago.

What’s very surprising is the sheer speed at which the plants grow. Once they get started, you can find a small bush appearing within just a few days of rain. The climate locally is pretty dry so most of the growth happens in very short bursts after each day that we get rain. 

International banking raises issues that rarely arise when you confine your transactions to one country and we’ll be covering these over the next couple of weeks.If you are moving to France to live, you might think that you may as well either close or at least tidy up your finances in the UK before you leave. Resist this temptation! It can be much more difficult to open UK accounts when you are living in France and if you have closed everything you may find it virtually impossible to open any account in the UK.

Although Northern Ireland is definitely cooler than the south of France, one surprising difference is that Northern Ireland has icecream vans at just about every possible location that you’d find crowds of people whereas France seems to have none of these.That’s indicative of quite a different attitude towards the climate in general between NI and France which we’ve seen illustrated numerous times whilst we’ve been here.

An Australian, an Irishman and a Frenchman were sitting in a pub.

Australian: Gee, it’s wet today.

Irishman: Sure is, almost as wet as we get in the west coast of Ireland.

Frenchman: You’re not French. You’re not allowed to criticise the weather in France. I’m going to start a poster campaign against you and have someone come round and smash your place up.

Australian: Wow, do you mean that the weather in France is just the same as it is here in Belfast today?

This one is specially for SuperFrenchie 🙂

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.