Lost en France

Today was the day for our telephone appointment with BritLine. You may recall we had submitted, over the internet, several documents they required and they had very  quickly confirmed all was in order and that a telephone interview was the next step. So, just a few minutes beyond the appointed time the phone rang and Mégane  introduced herself as our personal advisor. She asked us to describe our project and, based on this information, proceeded to explain how the account would work. The main points were: Credit Agricole is a regional bank and BritLine are based in Normandy. As we are in the Limousin, we will be able to use local branches for deposits and withdrawals but they will have no access to our account information - I was aware of this so it was not a problem. The chequebook was free, there is no maximum limit but we must have the funds to cover any cheque(s) issued - and they don't need to be presented for over a year (one year and eight days to be precise). If a c

I stumbled across something online which stated that prior to completion it is necessary to have insured the house. Whilst this is clearly sensible, no one had told me that it was a pre-condition for completion. So next step was to find out how to go about getting a quote. There is the choice of insuring with a UK company or a French one and there are pros and cons with both. I'll post later on what I find (once I've gone through the process), but for now I will share the fact that you will probably need to know: When the property was built How many reception rooms it has How many bedrooms it has How many room are over 30 square metres How many rooms are under 30 square metres The area of the cellar The value of the house If you're like me you probably only know the last of that list for sure. And as we're not planning to go back until it is time to sign the act de vente,  how do I get the info I need? By looking at the diagnostics report I was able t

Well, I've just completed ' Walk and learn French #Beginner #2' on Youtube. This lesson was two hours long and, like the first, I found it both easy to follow and useful. Victor, the presenter, perhaps laboured some points a little  longer than I needed - but I did reflect that this boded well for when things got trickier.  As I watched there were just a couple of sections where it felt he was developing a topic which he had  not  introduced elsewhere. This led me to wonder whether this video was built in a modular fashion. Nothing wrong with that even if that is the case - but see below. Having completed the second video my appetite for the third was well and truly  whetted. But where was it..? No sign on YouTube, nor from a more general Google search, nor at French4me.net . The latter is the site with paid for content provided by Vincent. I'm guessing he posts free 'tasters' on YouTube and then hopes you'll buy the paid for content - not an unreasonabl

Sally and I have very limited French - normally just enough to make ourselves understood if the message is fairly simple - but trying to understand what is said to us is a challenge. We're hoping that having the house in France will see our French improve, but we also want to give it a kick-start with a bit of study. We've missed the opportunity to sign-up for the current term of night-classes and, besides, we'd ideally like to attend together and with me working away most of the week our options would be very limited. We do have a Hugo CD/Book 'Learn French in 3 Months' course we bought several years ago and have been studying that over the past few weekends. Weeks 1 and 2 went well but we struggled with Week 3, it took us 3-weeks to get through that alone. Sally has also been talking of taking a look at Babbel. Yesterday I was Googling 'French courses', or some such term, and came across 'Walk and Learn French' on Youtube. Less

So, the application for the Bank Account was submitted late on the Friday and before noon on the Monday (an impressive response time by anyone's standards) I received an email saying that the submitted documents had been accepted and could I call them to arrange a mutually convenient time for a telephone interview, with one of their representatives, to complete the process. I called and the lady I spoke to had excellent English. Unfortunately there were no interview slots available this week but she could offer next Tuesday. A nuisance as I can only take/make calls on Fridays during the working week - and so we're scheduled for a week on Friday. That's more of a wait than I would have liked (especially as the £ rose against the € today on the news that Brexit transition terms had been agreed), but to be fair to Britline, they were able to offer an appointment within 6 working days, the fact I'm waiting 9 is down to my limited availability. The good news is that I&

Chasing the Completion Date Its the 16 March. The immobilier had told us to expect to be signing the final contract (and collecting the keys) anywhere between mid-March and the end of April. Well, mid-March is here and we still don't have a date. Its not that we are especially in a hurry to complete (though it would be nice), but we need to know the date to allow us to book leave from work and to book flights. The only date we have is a 'deadline' of 30 April - even here I'm not clear on what that deadline represents 😕 I dropped the immobilier an email this morning, and to her credit she did respond quickly - but not with a date (or even a date by which we'd have a date, but to tell me that she expects it will be in the second-half of April. Not a lot of use really 😟 Opening a Bank Account I've also started the process to open a bank account. As predicted in an earlier post, we have chosen to go with Britline . We had a good experience with

I've been preparing the blog over the last week or so. Today the content is published 😃

Transferring the Balance - Where to Find a Good Deal We hadn't adequately researched the options for transferring money at the point that we needed to pay the deposit (a little under 10% of the agreed price). Sally had spoken to both our bank (HSBC) and Foreign Exchange Direct (recommended by one of the Immobiliers in France) and was left, surprisingly, concluding that the bank would be the lower cost option. We went ahead with HSBC and ended up paying somewhere around 3.5% more than the Business Rate. Not too outrageous but I wasn't convinced that FED wouldn't have been cheaper. Today, Sally and I sat down together to doe more thorougher research - guided by  https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/banking/foreign-currency-exchange . Working through this and also guided my some earlier online research we drew up a shortlist of: HSBC Foreign Exchange Direct (FED) XE TransferWise (TW) Currencies Direct (CD) One of the key requirements was that anyone we went with wa

I'm still building this blog, setting up the 'Retrospective' pages which describe our activities between first embarking on this adventure  and finally deciding to create this blog. However, I've decided to create the first blog post as we've hit the first major milestone to occur since I started blogging - the receipt of the Compromise and the Diagnostic Reports. The Compromise is the first of two contractual documents and commits both parties to the sale of the property. The other contract is the main contract at the end of the process. Rather than travel to France we had decided to give the notaire (similar to a solicitor but working for the State rather than the two parties) power of attorney  to sign the Compromise on our behalf. This seemed seemed sensible as it involved no additional fees and saved us the journey. We would still have a 10-day cooling off period and, even if we had traveled there, the chances of understanding even a small part of what we w