Here is the translated transcript of a phonecall I just had from URSSAF, the body responsible for collecting social contributions in France.
URSSAF: Hello Boris, can you tell me why you have sent us a cheque for 2540 euros?
Me: Because you sent me a bill for 2540 euros and you charge me penalties if I don’t pay you
URSSAF: I see. Do you know what it relates to?
We are under pressure today – we have to decide whether the children should receive the H1N1 flu jab. The school have sent a letter home that we must return today marked with our intentions so they can go ahead with planning.
Does anyone know the ‘best’ answer? The risk of the illness turning serious or fatal is clearly greater for the very young and old, and for those with existing health conditions. But where does that leave the rest of us!
I just received this press release about pension rights for UK expats in France. I’m not fit to comment on it myself but it looks to contain important information about the age changes that come into effect next year so I thought I’d spread the word. Hope it’s useful for somebody, the entire release is shown below with no changes:
Clock ticking on pension cash deadline
UK expats in France who want to access their pensions before the April 2010 age changes cannot afford to leave it a day longer, according to experts at Expat Pensions LLP.
“The deadline for actions such as taking your 25 per cent tax free cash is April 5, 2010, but you must have actually completed the process by that date, and whether that can be achieved in time varies from pension provider to pension provider,” said Expat Pensions’ partner Steve Griffin, who is responsible for the firm’s French coverage.
It was more than 200 years ago in France that Marie Antoinette met an untimely end when she was executed by guillotine. Among other ‘crimes’ she had made herself supremely unpopular by spending great amounts of money on herself while the people of France were suffering from desperate poverty. Thank goodness that could never happen nowadays…
This month is ‘exorbitant taxes’ month in our household. We have handed across substantial cheques for both taxes and social contributions, and we also had to pay our local taxes (taxe d’habitation and taxe fonciere).
Because of these large bills we have had to spend less than we hoped on tidying up the bathrooms in our own house. They were fitted at ‘lowest cost possible’ about five years ago and not surprisingly are now falling to bits (we had already renovated both of the gites and didn’t have too much money left for our own place).
Both our daughters would be considered bi-lingual and chatter away or read and write in either French or English with no difficulty – preferring French with each other and English with us old folks who struggle to keep up with their teenage blabberings in French.
Eldest daughter is even doing a literary BAC, which involves reading and reviewing advanced books in either language – Gargantua and Pantagruel by Rabelais is the current French book being studied, for example.
Their English teachers have often had a strange desire to make sure they aren’t top of the class, with even the slightest spelling mistake getting enormous penalties, so ‘I got 12 out of 20 in English because I spelt one word wrong out of 40′ is a reasonably common story. When queried the teachers maintain that they should be marked harder because of their natural advantage.
Way back in the mists of time – well, about four years ago – I was part of a group of holiday rental property owners who created a holiday rentals company and website called Your Holiday Matters.
The goal was simple – to try and ensure a quality holiday experience for those booking a holiday rental property from the site.
This is harder to achieve than you might think, since everyone has different ideas about quality, but the general principle is that the properties listed are owned by ‘owners who care’ – so people staying in them can be confident that the owners really do want them to have a great time and a stress free holiday.
Looking at recent posts on this blog I can see I have been grumbling a bit too much, and not talking about the great reasons for being an expat in France.
So to stop readers thinking I’m a miserable old fool or that France must be a terrible place to live I thought I’d be a bit more upbeat today. It’s not hard to think of great reasons to be cheerful at the moment:
1) the south of France had the longest, best summer I remember (not the hottest ever, but temperatures over about 35 degrees start being a bit too much anyway), which is now being followed by the perfect autumn.
There’s been almost no rain since the end of April. Yesterday was about 22 degrees and sunny, today looks like being the same.
There have been various times in the last couple of years when I’ve complained about customer service in France.
One time it was Europiscine, who fitted a new swimming pool liner for us with an expensive ten year guarantee and then refused to put it right when it immediately developed big wrinkles. Another was Dell, who delivered a computer that just didn’t work from the minute it was taken out of the box – and charged us premium rate phone call charges while the problems were corrected.
So to counterbalance these and to provide evidence that good service is possible in France I thought I’d relate a diferent story. Unfortunately I can’t think of one so I’m going to tell you about my experiences with Trek France instead.
Episode 1
Last year when we closed the (rental) house up for winter I carefully emptied the hot water tank, turned off the electricity, closed the valves on the gas tanks etc so that we were confident that the house could be ignored for a few months. I also left all the taps open so that any water in the pipes would drain away rather than freezing. All very sensible I hope you’ll agree.
What I hadn’t realised is that the main water supply to the house had either not been completely closed or subsequently worked its way open slightly. So for a good deal of that six months there was a continuous slow flow of water running into the bath and out of the drain. Net result, an enormous water bill and a valuable lesson learned.
I’m not an expert on French business structures and setup but I have been through the process of starting and running a SARL for the last 16 months and thought a few comments might be useful to someone.
Bear on mind that you will always need legal advice before choosing a business structure in France, these are just a few of the things I wish I had understood better a couple of years ago – some things I have discovered along the way that might be useful in highlighting some of the issues you need to familiarise yourself, even if not resolving them. Of course your own circumstances and level of income are key to deciding the best structure for your own enterprise.
- A SARL is a limited company, much like a Ltd type company in the UK. It needs to be formed legally, a process that cost us about 2000 euros (not the £50 off-the-shelf’ price you might pay in the UK).
I would like to start today’s blog by mentioning my dreams for world peace, an end to hunger and by suggesting it would be nice to all hold hands and solve problems with global warming. Hopefully these good intentions are sufficient for the Nobel Prize committee to send me a nice medal and, more importantly, one million euros.
Unfortunately I’m not the first to have the idea. Carla Bruni, the multi-talented and very attractive wife of Mr Sarkozy launched her new blog this week – and within minutes it had crashed due to the enormous number of people trying to visit the site. Darn, why does that never happen to me!
Even more annoying the site looks very nice as well, and is largely devoted to charitable cause like tackling illiteracy and SIDA (AIDS), putting the rest of us even more to shame. In my defence I do wonder how much of it she writes herself? How many hours does she spend scratching her head trying to think of interesting things to write about without giving away state secrets or causing embarrassment to important people.
There is an advert running on French televison at the moment that amazes me every time I see it.
One of the leading opticians in France, Afflelou, has a scheme called ‘NextYear’ in which you can order a pair of glasses now and pay for them next year. Not very exciting and nothing out of the ordinary. It’s a fun, feel-good advert that makes you want to join in with the dancing – before rushing off to get a new pair of specs, even if you can see perfectly well without.
In our gites we have the usual challenge when things go wrong – our window of opportunity to put things right only lasts from 10.00 am to 4.00 pm on a Saturday, and only then if the problem is spotted quickly.
Unfortunately people don’t always rush to tell us that the dishwasher is playing up or a table leg is loose, perhaps for fear that we will try and charge them extra for it, or perhaps because they think we already must know and can’t be bothered to put it right. ‘How could they not know that the thermostatic tap sticks at 42 degrees…?
So sometimes it is only later when we learn of the problem. As a result this year I would like to give a special mention to a couple of guests who helped us out, and are especially welcome to come again next year:
In our third (when will it end) look at why you might be behaving illegally or at least be uninsured without knowing it, it’s back to drivers again.
You know already that your car insurance might be invalid if you are driving illegally, and we have already seen that a UK registered car without UK road tax and/or MOT is being driven illegally. So doubtless you have rushed off to start the process of re-registering your car in France.
But what about your driving licence? Still using that UK licence because it seems such a hassle to change it?
One of the big challenges of visiting places and writing about them for possible future visitors is striking a balance - should we be brutally honest if somewhere is, frankly, not all that lovely? What if it was raining when we visited, or we were tired and really it is a very nice place?
Likewise if someone writes an article for us how do we know if they are describing their local town as a visitor would see it, or through rose-tinted spectacles?