Prélèvements sociaux

I did come here because I was a Francophile...we came several times a year for 25 plus years. We bought a holiday flat first then a house, so we own 2 properties here...we felt we were investing in a place we wanted to live for ever.

I am never quite sure what people mean when they say a better quality of life...for me, life is better outside of a large metropolis. But I dont need to live abroad to achieve that. People often compare the misery they had living in London or Liverpool with the joy of living in the Loire...well...yes, of course...but thats not comparing like with like. Is life better in Marseilles than Liverpool?

I thought the same as you that the UK was disintegrating...but no longer! we have a flat here in the UK,..and after 3 years of living in France it feels like sanity. I pay less taxes, have good customer services, eat in cheaper restaurants and they serve better food than most of the ones we have near us in France. We also have pubs, which I missed in France.

My shopping is cheaper and I have more choice. The meat I buy has been hung and is tender. I have the NHS (Im a nurse and I know its not perfect, but its been good for me) my surgery which I was due to wait 5 months for has been brought forward by 2 months...a hip which is not urgent.

I have the theatre...actually 3 in my town, a 12 screen cinema, curry houses, chinese restaurants...well actually around 15 restaurants all different nationalities and great food. The downsides of the UK are the traffic jams.....more expensive wine, but I drink beer and its a similar price. In my market town violence is not rife; the weather isnt so good...but then 4 weeks last February at -15 and 3 weeks this past summer at +40 in the Dordogne were not great either!

I can work and earn a really good salary...even at 58 I was offered a pile of interviews and chose the job I wanted.

So all in all, for me life is sweet in the south west of England, and compared to the south west of France, I feel I have a better quality of life.

Bank accounts, I forgot that!


In the UK it's the rich that pay for 'premium' accounts, not in France, average people paying about 8€ a month just to have a current account.

If you want a card you have to pay, the charge varies depending on what type of card it is AND the latest outrage being charged a mis en place de prelevement, if you agree to pay someone by DD, like house and car insurance payments etc

That's true there is no NHS here, even the regime de base isn't free if you can get it and then you have to pay for top up insurance and still can't get 100% cover or sans reste a charge as they say here.

health is another thing. My 64 year old husband is expected to pay in full for his health in France...the quotes we received were horrific..thousands a year. I am classed as living in the UK now...having a hip replacement in 3 weeks...and I hadnt worked for over a year in the UK...but I am not made to suffer for that. I still get the NHS.

My car insurance in France goes up year by year....here its going down year on year as I get towards 60. Same with house insurance...our insurance has gone down every year for the last 3 years on our uk flat...in France...its gone up...no claims on either.

In France our bank charges us to have a debit card...in the UK I have credit and debit cards and pay no yearly amount for either...plus I pay in full when the bill arrives so no extras. We are also charged to view our account on line and do online banking in France, in the UK no charge.

We moved here not realising most of this..you dont when you just holiday here and as we hadnt intended working we didnt think it would be this tough....now we just have an unsaleable property in France...most people are not daft enough to spend hundreds of thousands of euros in France at the moment.

Hi Chris, well said.

(With regards to the EU, France wants to 'cherry pick' / to have their cake and eat it - They want what they want and don't want what they don't want)

If you mention European law, they act as if they can't hear you, or that they heard something else, they don't (want to) recognise it, simple.

To France, la France est le monde, no one rules France except France, but they don't say no to the EU handouts and subsidies - merci!



I'll go along with your feelings about France. I am not, and never will be a Francophile. I came her because it was a nicer place to live, with a better quality of life. It still is, in each case, but the daft bureaucracy gets to me, as does the incessant paying out for what appears to be very little in return. Now, either they are in the EU and obey it's diktats, or they aren't, but I do wish France would make it's mind up universally instead of doing everything independently and piecemeal. Maybe it should be taken to task more often in the European court, and a kick up the proverbial arse administered.

For me, I'd still far rather live here than in the disintegrating mess of a country the Former UK is becoming, expensive or not.

Chris

As my husband says 'drones' and 'machines'

The person I've been trying to help, seems to pay a lot of taxe fonciere compared to the other folks in his town and he only has a small 2 bed house - 1226€

I would add the taxe d'habitation on too more than 800€, but they're exempt now or for the time being.

Add to that the fact that they have now been charged 435€ PS/CSG/CRDS with a total revenu fiscal de reference of 5800€ last time and it's even worse!

He has a street light right outside his house, which isn't always appreciated as it lights his garden like a Christmas tree. Also, some of the neighbours kids have shot at it before...along with things in his garden!

Other than than that, taxes 'generally' are less in the UK for what you get and it is true that the French pay several times over for things, just look at the health service, mutuelles/insurance and forfaits. Where I live there isn't a single tennis court or outdoor activity place that can be used for free, despite the tax payers money, quite the contrary it's extortionate rates.

How about house insurance, there's no bonus each year for not claiming and the price goes up every year. Oh, you also can't claim for anything that you don't have the receipt for or that is over a certain age!

Look at what they do to the children, the people here, making the school days so long to enable parents to work the full day (which starts earlier and finishes later than most do in the UK) and conditions the children to do the same!


I've always tried my best to integrate, guess I will always have a love hate relationship with France, it's not just because we are expats that we complain, the French do it to and it's normal, it's human nature. It doesn't mean that we would prefer to be back in our country of origin, very often people's gripes are justified.

I'm actually married to a French man, he is as clueless as I am about the system, in fact worse!

Not the same everywhere Bob....in Newbury our library is superb. We have a local card that is used for everything, use of the local pool, library etc. We pay for CDs...£1 a week...but books are free (did you library really charge for books?) in France we pay to use a library, a year subscription. What weird organisations did your taxes go towards? In the uk when we lived in the countryside, our house taxes were a lot lower than those houses in the village as we didnt have street lamps or mains drainage. In France we are in the countryside, 1 mile outside of town. For a 4 bed house we are paying more house taxes than our friends in the village, they have mains everything, lights etc...we pay over 1500k more taxes than they do because, apparently we have another building on our land, its a falling down pigeon house, with no electricity or water...unusable as the toilet and shower have been ripped out...but the local council consider it rentable....they refuse to acknowledge it is falling down....which is a tad outrageous eh? our road to our house in the Dordogne is so pot holed we go up at 20 miles an hour trying to avoid the holes and splits in the tarmac....not so in Newbury where my flat is...so its not the same everywhere Bob...

strange..in London, I paid £1400 Council tax to have my bins emptied and street lighting, the rest paid for all manner of freaky weirdo organisations to leech the rest..my local library took some of the tax, and still wanted to charge me to borrow a book or disc 9% National insurance "tax.."for my "free at point of access health care".. "Road Fund licence"..tax to have my car on the road.. with nowhere to park or cameras and bumps every mile!!.. my water wasn't metered so too much went down the plug hole unused.. and a "TV tax" for keeping the dinosaur alive[BBC].. I chose to live here in France, a mile or so out of town, so I don't expect them to light every metre of my drive to and fro.. when I visit my neighbours, I take a torch. my tax hab and fonciere pay for my bins and what little lighting my pretty little village has..

Hi Finn


I contacted the tax office on the persons behalf. I told them that the person has an S1. They don't seem bothered. I had tried quoting artcle 11 of the convention to strengthen the arguement, but then they quoted it back to me to reinforce why the CSG/CRDS is due?

(It's a French resident that used an S1 form)

So, if I quote EU regulation 883/2004 this should help? I hope so.

Anything else I can do to sort this out?

By the way thanks for the extra info about property, only I thought they were bringing in another increase / tax on expats, with property or non resident properties (something to do with Sarkozy)

Thanks again

Hello Doreen,

It's ok, no one likes to trawl through posts! Having said that, this is a matter that I really wish to resolve.


When I said mixed source income I meant not just the sate pension, perhaps private pensions and investments too from the UK.


I see that you sold your company shares and that may make a difference, because now your only income is from pensions.

Lastly, very interesting to discover that there is a box online for E121 (S1), but not on the paper form - I did not know that! I wonder if that would've helped...

Yes, the French tend to get taxed 3 times over for things and still find the services lacking!

Que Sera Sera....or should that be C'est la Vie! its the same the world over. I dont like the way the tax system works in France, but mistakes are made everywhere, no one has ever wanted to pay a tax. I laugh sometimes when I read some of the Labour Party comments on line (UK) where there is huge anger about 'rich people' and their legal avoidance of tax....tell me that if any of them wins the lottery the are going to say to their accountant, 'no....I dont want to pay as little tax as I legally can, I want to pay the morally correct full amount' I rest my case....

My complaint about taxes in France is that we dont seem to benefit from any of the money taken in taxes...we dont have street lighting, bin emptying, main sewerage, children in school, medical treatment, a free library or anything else.....at least my taxes in the UK where we own a flat, see's me receive health care, street lighting, mains drainage,superb free library services, blah blah blah....all I ever seem to do in France is spend money on non existent services or dumb a*se ideas like breathalysers for my car that was a pup from the word go!

Yes Carol,

I would say that letting someone 'get away' without paying 30,000€ in tax should be much more of a concern for the tax office. Instead of squeezing 435€ of PS out of a retired person who declared less than 6000€ income!

Not sure that is sunshine Finn....just goes to prove what idiots they are.....when they miss it with one person, the rest of us make it up...though pleased for your friend!

Yes Carol, that's the thing they wanted the Euro instead of the Franc, but they don't care for EU regulations.

France has been outside of the EU regulations on various points....they make then break the rules.

n'importe quoi even!

Hi,


I understand what your saying, there are pros and cons living in France.

Personally, I don't just see this CSG/CRDS thing as a tax on foreigners. I see it more as an unfairly imposed tax, because in this instance it has been demanded from someone who declared half the non taxable income limit for a single person. Furthermore, the person joined the health system with an S1 form, is over 65, is not liable for taxe d'habitation, has the right to 100€ reduction on the taxe fonciere (TF 1226€ for a small house, despite income of arond 5000€) Doesn't seem right to me.

Article 11 of the convention between France and the UK is meant to state that people who are affiliated to the UK for health and social charges (with an S1 form for example) are not liable to pay said charges in France.

I don't believe that people are just trying to dodge tax for the sake of it, everyone knows that there is a possibility of being taxed, but it's the thresholds and percentages that are the issue.

It is scandalous that people can lose up to half of the value of their property if they sell or transfer it. It's an outrage that people should pay such significant amounts of tax on small to medium incomes.

Obviously in an ideal world there would be no tax to pay, but the general rule, as I understood it, was always the more money you have the more tax you pay...

Which is where France seem to be doing n'importe qoui.

Our dept is in the 80's as well. Its seems that some have & some haven't. Quite baffling? I thought they would be sent out in numerical order but speaking to others , it appears not. I suppose we sit biting our nails for a little longer.