I wondered how other people dealt with the logistics of getting from the UK to France post-Brexit without a holiday home to move into.
I’m about to turn 66 and will start to collect my state pension in August which tips me comfortably over the SMIC threshold and provides me with an S1 for healthcare.
Assuming I ever get my house ready and get rid of all my possessions, I will have to move into rented accommodation for the first time in over 40 years while the house is being sold - from where I have to somehow book a rental in France and apply for a visa.
If successful, all well and good, if not, I have to somehow choose where in the UK I’m going to spend a lot more on a house while facing a life I don’t want…
We’re basically doing the same thing, just from the US side.
We’ve sold our house, and are about to move into temporary accommodation while we try to sort out the visa. The grand plan is to rent in France… assuming, of course, that France agrees to let us in.
And we’re doing it with two dogs, which really elevates the whole experience from “logistical challenge” to “lightly supervised circus.”
So yes, the whole “sell everything, become temporarily homeless, and hope it all works out on the other side of the Channel” strategy seems to be more common than anyone admits.
If this goes sideways, we can always form a small but distinguished international encampment of displaced would-be expats. I’ll bring the dogs.
It is frightening and risky, but may be the best way to do it. You might consider gifting your kids and heirs all you can possibly part with, while the French aren’t looking. Uncle Sam usually doesn’t care.
We kept the house as a lifeline and I returned within the first year to sell it. Knowing what I know now, I would have sold it before we moved to France.
We were fortunate in that we inherited a flat from OH’s mother and we’ve kept it all the years we’ve been in France. It’s given us two things: rental income while living in France (supplementing our pensions and giving us a financial buffer) and a property that appreciated in value and kept pace with UK house prices, whereas our French property, has not and is worth barely more than what we paid for it 19 years ago.
Three years ago, OH told me he would die in France and never go back. We are now going back to the UK. (Cancer and heart conditions and inheritance tax have changed our priorities.)
One can never say never. That flat in the UK is giving us our future in the UK in a way that our French property never can. I am so grateful we did not burn our bridges.
We were slightly concerned that we would not ‘stick’ in France and might have to return to the US. But we did stick, and, again,knowing that, for us the best path would have been to sell the house and gift the proceeds and the rest of our non-retirement investments (and even perhaps some retirement funds), to our daughter before we became French tax residents.. On the US side, there are no gift taxes. We (was we, now I) had plently of pension income.
From the happy position of having moved I would suggest that you need to re-qualify yourself as a rolling stone, not homeless.
Gift or sell as many of your possessions as you can bear to. And it will probably help to sell your UK house too. Not sure why you have to rent in the UK while you are selling?
Try to do as much research as you can about where you want to move to-so once you get an offer you can accelerate.
Many people spend many months (up to 3 at one place) doing seasonal rentals until they find and settle on their new home. And that’s ok for a visa.
We did it. Plus it was during Covid…! In fact, we sold the UK house just as the pandemic hit. We couldn’t delay it because our buyer had managed to get his mortgage based on a very lucrative year and was told he’d not be so fortunate if his Agreement In Principle expired.
So, during lockdown we moved into an Airbnb to allow the sale to complete. All our belongings then went into shipping containers. However, the border was still closed so, although we had found a French landlord willing to rent to a foreigner without an avis d’imposition, we spent a few months living out of a suitcase.
It was horrendously stressful at the time, but we can laugh about it now.
I’m with Sue. Why sell your UK house at this stage? Just find a good agent and rent it out. And rent in France.
You can always sell later if you want to.
Renting is very common in France (and becoming increasingly common in the UK by all accounts, at least among younger people).
I’m 62 and have a few friends the same age who have never bought a home for various reasons. The arrangement has worked fine for them until now but it’s true that as they enter their 60s, a few problems are starting to rear their heads. All are in Stuttgart or Geneva where property prices and rents have soared over the years. As longstanding tenants, the rents they are paying bear no relation to the market rate. But all need to move. One is in the top flat of a building with no lift. Others have had a change of landlord and the new owners aren’t doing repairs. Possibly as a deliberate tactic to get older low-rent tenants out so they can be replaced by new ones on much higher rents. Who knows?
Also, when it comes to finding a new rental, competition can be fierce and landlords may prefer to rent to someone younger who’s still working rather than an old person.
So there’s definitely a kind of insecurity that sets in after a certain age. The myth that landlords can’t get rid of older tenants is just that. Even if the law protects such tenants (that needs checking too - you might find the protection just applies to older people on low incomes), a landlord can make life very uncomfortable if they have a mind to.
Personally, I’d only be happy renting in old age from the state or a housing association.
If you had your house in the UK, though, at least you could always go back to that.
And of course if you did want to buy in France, renting for the first few years would give you ample time to find the right place for you.
To cut a long story short I have lived here 42 problematic years and for a lot of that time it was not fit for habitation .. after far too much expense, effort and heartbreak and minor physical injuries, it’s still unmortgageable and I’m almost certain to be giving up on it and pencilling in a very low figure - I don’t trust the generous numbers offered by the first two estate agents…
Luckily I have savings ..
I’m now engaged in the painful task of getting rid of everything - including some things I always thought would go into store and get shipped…
If I make it to France, I reckon that while I’m spending 12 months in a rental working on my French fluency, perhaps I could find myself a French therapist…
i am in very good health, there is nothing for me in the UK. and I could buy a viable house in France for the money I had to set aside to finish my nightmare project..
Fine but just make sure you’re going into this with eyes wide open. You’re unhappy in the UK but may well find there’s nothing for you in France either. In which it could be very difficult for you to go back because you would be priced out of the market.
At least think about selling your current place and buying an easily managed little bolthole in the UK that would give you rental income and a way back.
I don’t think tenant protection is quite as watertight in France as people think, though. I know at least one couple here who are over 70 and who are having to move from their private rental. The over-65s protection doesn’t apply to them because their income is above the threshold. But they’re by no means well off and will struggle to find another rental in the city.
I agree. My son’s in-laws were already owners of a holiday home nearby to us down here and were renting privately until their retirement was finalised. When the landlord of the apartment gave them notice they went looking in the same part of the city but because their joint income was over a certain limit, small and cheaper rentals which is all they needed as they moved everything south apart from a few bits and pieces, they were not allowed to go for those as they have to be kept for people on more modest incomes and not to satisfy people who already own property and have a very good income. In the end they found another smaller flat in the next block that came up on the gated community where they had been living for the past several years and took that for a year.
One of my nephews is on a scheme whereby he lives on a new estate built especially for tenants to pay half of the rent normally and the other half as a mortgage payment so that after so many years, they can make up the difference and buy the place outright at the original fixed price. Bit like car rental/ownership whereby you get the option to buy off the remaining value after five years etc
In France I can have a quarter acre grden near the seaside which is a decent start. Even with French property prices so low, what I had left would pay for a very small bolthole in a very poor part of the UK -and there’s no way I would want to be a landlord.
I would settle for not speaking to anyone there over the same in the country that voted for Brexit.
But I used to work with French people and have recently done quite a lot of language exchange. I don’t watch TV and many of my YT subscriptions are French.. (any subtitles are French and often inaccurate)
I have no “year in Provence “ delusions -or “Clochemerle” come to that and have likely deliberately chosen second home owners for neighbours in a tourist area…
French property prices are certainly not low around here I can tell you. Unless you go for inland ruins anywhere they are peanuts but coastal or very close, times have changed since we bought on the coast in 1989.
