This is not intended as a rude question but … are you a robot?
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No I am not a robot Karen, just a very tired old geezer who lost his French-speaking wife nearly 2 years ago and has since been struggling to ‘survive france’.
Everything was in our joint name, and after she died everything became inaccessable to me and I lost acces to all records.
After several months I was able to get UK Pensions to start paying my severely reduced pension into my Halifax account, which I would periodically move to a newly opened Wise account, then convert to euros when the exch rate was favourable, and finally transfer to my CA account - doesn’t take long to say but was a never-ending nightmare to do.
And then recently the Halifax was taken over by Lloyds - and despite continued emails saying I would receive an ‘invite’ to transfer my Halifax account to Lloyd, it never materialised.
So I’ve just had to go through the rigmarole of getting UK Pensions to change payment from Halifax to Wise before I lose access to my pension.
But during that process, UK Pensions made a cockup inputting our wedding date - which is one of the security questions.
We were married nearly 50 years (she died 10 days short of our 50th anniversary).
It appears that whoever updated my pension bank record missed out the 2 from 14/12/1974 … so their records now say 14/1/1974. Now that want me to send a copy of our wedding certificate … after my wife of 50 years is dead and gone.
Which was sufficient for the Irish pensions jobsworth to tell me I had failed security test therefore she could not proceed.
.
So no I am not a robot, but it must be lovely not keep having emotions stirred up.
Regards,
Robin Baker.
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How completely horrible for you @Electroguard I’m so sorry, that’s really grim.
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So sorry to hear your story. This must be very tough for you.
For the sake of others who may at some time face similar issues, can I just check, were your accounts in your joint names as M. Baker ET Mme Baker? Or M. Baker OU Mme Baker? Over the years, on here, I have been told it must be OU and not ET if one is to continue to have access to accounts after one’s partner has died.
Again, just for anyone who is reading this at an earlier stage in life (sadly we need to make these decisions early on when they may not seem to matter) we each took less pension, making the other a beneficiary, so that when one of us is left the other will continue to have a reasonable standard of living.
Robin I do hope you can get these things sorted, so that your life gets easier.
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It gets easier I can assure you but you have to make the effort not to dwell on things. I was considerably younger when widowed and had my children around me although they were young adults and yes, it was a struggle especially all the paperwork as we had a business that had to be resiliated officially. You do need to keep all your important documents even with being widowed, they are often asked for here in France as proof when required. If you are having trouble you can ask for an Assistante Sociale to help you either in your home or at their local office, they are worth their weight in gold if you get a good one I can tell you and do you know, even after four years of moving away from up north, the AS I had from the beginning often sends an email asking how things are going down here. Never be too proud to ask for help either.
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It does and can I add my encouragement to you @Electroguard , my wife died just over 2 years ago and I thought I had all our ducks in a row, Except for thr individual LEPs which the bank had assured us were open to either of us. They forgot to say the magic words ‘until the moment of death’. Then it is frozen while the lazy notaire sorts it out with my wife’s kids, who are not cooperating. So that’s 9,000 odd euros I’ll never see again.
Thanks Sue and others,
Being 3/4 of a century old, ours were old values - I was the man of the house (actually a mobilehome which we had shipped over from UK just before Brexit) and Margaret was the glue who held our lives together.
She made all the arrangements, while I (who never had a french lesson in my life) did the hardware type things.
So I can’t remember the exact previous joint names, cos I lost access to it all after her death and had to open new accounts for everything in just my name.
She handled most of it online, using a password vault, which could not be accessed after her death, so I had no access to things like our impots, EDF, Orange etc, nor French or UK banks.
I’m fairly sure we both had life insurance, but It’s not something I’ was able to find, so without help from my son and daughter in England to get me through 5 months without pension I could not have survived, and did so mainly for the sake of our 3 cats and the kids (and cos I didn’t know where to get any horse tranquilizer).
The car was in her name, so the insurance company said to get it registered in my name, which opened another can of worms.
The car had more than a year of CT remaining … but evidently the registration cannot be changed unless the CT has been renewed within the last 6 months, which meant having a new CT. But the CT failed on front suspension and other stuff which I need to sort out myself before it passed on the retest … a stressful and lengthy name change which cost almost a grand.in total just to get the name changed from Mrs Margaret Baker to Mr Robin Baker, same address.
The combi boiler packed up some time during all this - but with scorching summer I didn’t need central heating, although it would have been nice to have a hot shower occasionally instead of flannel washes.
Couldn’t repair the old combi boiler (tried long and hard). and couldn’t source a new bottle gas combi over here, so ended up replacing with a gas hot water heater and creating a 2nd 16A campsite supply to the mobilehome just for using electric heating.
Almost done now, just need to patch up the skirt to stop cold winds sucking out all the heat from underneath.
Loads of other little things to do, but nothing like what I’ve had to go through, and still have a month to do it in.
December has always been a busy month for me, and based around Margaret- our anniversary on 14th, her birthday on 17th, Christmas 25th - now is added her death on 4th and funeral on 10th… new year can’t come fast enough.
But it’s easier to reserve December for her and be able to get on with things all the remaining time.
I’m not sad and lonely BTW, I speak to my daughter on Viber for free every night, and have a handful of French friends I know I can call on whenever needed … and I tell Margaret about everything noteworthy as if she was in the next room - such as I’m so happy I got my wish of her going first rather than her having to survive without me, and how the 50 years we shared together more than makes up for not having her now.
I am so content with the life I’ve had with her that I would not change anything that was bad in my earlier years in case it would jeopardise the life we were able to share.
My only regret is… perhaps I should have replied “Yes, I am a Robot’ to the previous question”, cos I could have got a lot of strimming done.
.
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Welcome to SF Electroguard. Firstly I’m sorry for your loss. It never really goes away.does it. But hopefully gets easier over time.
We’ve been plagued by un-genuine posters of various sorts, increasingly using AI often producing ‘lists’ of suggestions out of their LLM’s.
But hearing your story it’s clear you have lived it, devised the strategies you mention and that above all you do have a heart.
I hope you’ll stick around Survive France as while there’s debate, there’s always room for lived experience that can help others.
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There was your problem David-having your ducks in a row…french hunters would have loved that (when was the last time you saw a duck lazily paddling on a duck pond, or flying, or anywhere).
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Thank you so much for sharing this Robin. And if you don’t mind putting your strimming to one side occasionally, please do let us know how you get on. Your experience is so common - where one person has the language skills, manages the finances, etc, etc. We have acquaintances who on widowhood have had to borrow money from friends, couldn’t drive a car (never learnt/ never needed to), had no access to passwords. Also, everything is doubly difficult in a foreign language and different culture.
It’s important for people to hear these stories while they have time to do something about it. And you are reminding me - OH is finding living here increasingly difficult and so we are heading back to UK, but, in the meantime I need to get our C/A accounts in our joint (OU) names so we each can have access - who knows who will go first? We (I) have always been fiercely independent, but that doesn’t work any more.
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I have either read it or heard it (too long ago) but I remember with regard to UK state pension payements abroad that HMRC was able to benefit from preferential exchange rates from sterling into whatever currency owing to the huge volumes involved each month - a sort of economies of scale. To the extent that it challenged the view that sterling being paid into a UK account and then converted at the pensioner’s own time of choosing to a French account when GBP to EUR for example was at a good rate, was the way to go.
I would be grateful for some actual experience here if someone has made the comparison, and it there are pitfalls for either method.
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I did, but it was 20 odd years ago and beyond my ken now. I always keep a self imposed minimum in my French bank and top it up whenever the rate is right, not whatever the rate when I need it.
Mines a public sector pension and I’ve only ever received it into my UK account.
Sue, on my Thunderbird email calendar besides putting in the daily/weekly/monthly tasks that we need reminding about, I also put in birthdays, anniversary dates, jobs to do at certain times of the year (e.g. clean wood burner pipes, PC backup, clean PC, update Android auto etc. etc) and UK & French bank holidays. Years ago I could remember things like that but these days, it’s a different matter ! 
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