Foreign Perspectives

Whilst we expected to have admin hassles when we moved to France in that we didn’t understand all the intricacies of the French health, social security and tax administration, it’s not necessarily so easy to both get out of the French system and into the UK one.

On the health side, it’s very easy to get into the UK system. Essentially all we need to do is go back to our previous GP and fill in a form for everybody and we’re in. We’ve already done a “temporary resident” form when we’ve been over on extended trips to the UK so it doesn’t seem difficult and since it’s not an insurance based system there’s no possibility of any debate over pre-existing conditions as happened in France to begin with. However, I’m not so sure that getting out of the French system will be so easy: after all, almost five years down the line they still haven’t got our bills correct!

Social security requires co-operation with the French authorities. We need a form from the benefit office in France to say that they’ve stopped paying us child benefit as the UK won’t start paying it ’til they get that. That’s not really a big problem though as the French seem to pay more than the UK do ie no big deal if they delay sending the letter. Getting out of the contributions side of things should be easier (can’t see it somehow) and getting into the UK National Insurance system is automatic once I start getting money from there.

Which leaves the tax system. After almost five years they have only just started to post the tax letters to us here so I suspect that it will take quite some time for them to correct their information. The UK system is simple: start work and you’re in the tax system.

That just leaves the small matter of the overpayments of social security and taxes that we’ve made over the years. Two years after making the first claim we’ve still not received anything from them so I think it’ll be some years before they pay up.

I’ve been plugging away with the language courses from the OU for, it seems like, forever now so I’m finding it a bit of a jolt to get into the way that their psychology course works.

Since it is psychology the education psychologists have obviously had their hand in with the course design. Thus you get a small guidebook to the course which leads you through the various components that make up the course and is as a side-line also the course workbook.

Whilst I know that the business of having everything in separate books is to draw you into the course as a participant, at the moment it’s a bit of a nuisance having to go from that course guide, to the course text, back to the guide and then off to the methods book before getting to the audiovisual component (which isn’t as well integrated as it was on the languages courses). Personally, I’d prefer one book to carry around but, like I say, it’s designed to get you drawn into the course.

At the moment I’m a little bit ahead of my own schedule (one month ahead of the official one) but I’d say that’s likely to change during the week of the move. I’m also running at around the same speed through the course as I did with the English one last year which, at the moment, means about 10 pages of reading at a stretch before my brain overloads.

After much debate last year I finally signed up for the psychology course which I’ve just started looking at.

So far, the biggest difference is in the organisation of the materials. Whereas the language courses were essentially organised around a fairly large workbook with, for the English, an accompanying textbook, the Child Development course comes with a fairly small course guide (essentially the workbook equivalent) for each of the textbooks. There’s the usual DVDs of course though slightly more up to date in operation which is a nuisance as they automatically select the DVD drive and it doesn’t seem possible to just run them from the hard disc.

Overall, it seems a much more professionally produced education package. Of course, you would expect that in many ways as clearly some of the psychologists involved are in the education area thus you get all the appropriate comments through the course as to how to study it. The downside of that is that it’s a course that seems to take itself very seriously.

It’s supposed to take something like 12 hours a week to do but with just starting it this morning I’m getting on for half way through the first weeks worth of work which implies that it could work out similar to the English course I was doing last year although ’tis early days yet.

If you wanted to send a small amount of money to someone, for most people the simplest thing to do is to either pop a cheque in the post or simply to post the cash. If it’s a large chunk of cash then cheques and bank transfers are the way to go normally.

However, what if it’s a sum that lies in the middle ground and you want to send it internationally? For most people the answer isn’t nearly so cut and dried there. For instance, if you were sending EUR 200 from the UK to France or vice versa you’d be looking at around £25/EUR 20 in bank charges for the cheque or transfer and that’s before you factor in the tourist rate of exchange that you’d be getting.

If it’s a company you’re sending it to then you could use a credit/debit card of course, but that’s not really an option for an individual, is it? Well, actually these days it is as the person you’re sending it to could have a paypal account in which case, if they upgrade it to a premium account, then they could take the money off you at a cost of around 4%.

However, if it’s a family member a more practical way is to pop into the post office and pick up a travel money card and just post it to them. There’s no security risk as you can wait ’til it arrives before enabling the card. It costs around 4% to exchange the money from sterling to euros or dollars and it’ll be £5 or so two years later to renew it.

Although we set off for France with the intention of spending the rest of our lives here, in practice I left on a career break which left open the chance of me returning to work at any time up to five years from my departure from work way back on February 20th 2004.

Whilst at the time we thought of it as essentially free unemployment insurance, as y’all know we’re currently in the process of returning and with the global economy being in the current mess that notional “free insurance” has turned out to be quite valuable to us now. Not only do I have a guaranteed job waiting for me, but it’s a nice safe one at that and seems a good place to be sitting to ride out the coming recession/depression for the next year or two.

Although obviously not everyone will have the opportunity to leave on a career break, it’s definitely worth taking that route just in case things don’t work out. If they do work out then there’s no downside as you don’t have to return from a career break but on t’other hand if they don’t or your plans change as ours did…