My wife and I are planning to move to France late 2027. I’ll be retiring my wife may continue her self employed business, recognising it needs registering in France. We both have EU citizenship and have no children. Have done a lot of recon and looks around northern Charente maritime/charente as our target. We’ll look for somewhere semi rural - edge of village type thing for core amenities and less than 30 mins to a larger town. Reasonable budget of approx 700k euro
Will be selling our UK house in 2026 and using time this year for more recon, planning and improving our french .. aiming to be working on B1 by time we move.
We’re currently working on a list of things to consider. Eg renting for 6-12 months before buying… the order we can rent/get a bank account/sort medical insurance/enrol with a doctor/etc and considering what we need practically to rent and so store items from our sold UK house.
We also have a motorhome (LHD) which we can alo use for extended periods of need be to test areas .
Really keep to hear others experiences, thoughts or pointers to any resources you have found useful
Hello Stephen.
I’m first to reply, so welcome to the site. I’m sure someone else will be along soon to give you advice but all I will say now is get as close to the coast as you can, to avoid the cold winters. I am currently spending January in Spain for that reason. When we left home on Friday morning it was minus 5 and had been hovering around that and +8 for a few days.
FYI we are between Niort and Poitiers which is further north and inland than you hope to be, so a bit colder.
Doctors and dentists can be difficult to find, so make that a priority when you have decided where to stop.
edit to add something else I just thought of. We know a couple who stored their furniture in outbuildings while renovating their house. Whole families of wildlife set up home in their chairs, sofas etc. They just didn’t think of the difference when living rural/semi-rural, be aware.
Sorry for giving such a dismal first response, but it’s not ALL Champagne, brioche and cheese.
Hi Stephen, you can open a French bank account from the UK, and indeed it may be a little easier with a fixed address. I highly recommend Britline, the bilingual service from Credit Agricole. You can keep any relationship with Britline, regardless of where you move in France, or switch to a regional branch of CA at a later date. Britline works well for people that don’t need to have face to face contact - it’s all online, or via real humans on the end of a phone or email.
I also highly recommend getting a French SIM eg from Reglo, Leclerc’s own brand (as in the supermarket chain) - available online and in-store. Good value deals and v useful if and when you come to need to open utilities accounts in France.
At least you both don’t have to bother with obtaining any carte de séjours - that’s significantly easier for you to make the smooth transition to France.
+1 for Britline, I’ve found them excellent, as have quite a few others here. Their attitude when you talk to them is more like the British one that I remember than the French call centres, plus you’re doing it all in English so you can make sure you’ve understood.
Two sites that I have found very useful. One is French-property.com which contains excellent, up to date reference material on many of the issues that are helpful for those moving to France.
The other enables you to see - if and when you find a home - what others have recently paid for houses in the vicinity.
Bear in mind that the only French bank that is truly national is La Poste which is also the one with longer opening hours.
Also be aware that if you have individual savings accounts and one of you dies, it will be frozen from you, apart from funeral expenses, until all the kids have accepted or denied the inheritance. Can take up to 10 years.
There is also a 2 euro per month sim from Free, which gets you a French number with 2 hours of calls per month and unlimited texts, only within France, as well as 50 Mo data. Which is pretty restrictive but gets you a French number to supply to any services requiring one, at a very cheap rate. I have a secondary UK phone number which never gets a call back if supplied instead of my French one.
Note that I said Mo, not Mb. The French use octet instead of byte. Mo and Go for data instead of Mb or Gb.
Don’t know whether this has already been mentioned but my top tip would be to open additional current & savings accounts in the UK BEFORE you leave. Obviously make sure the institutions concerned will allow you to keep the accounts once you’re non-UK resident.
Make sure any accounts you open in France are in the name of Monsieur OU Madame. And not ET. So the survivor can access them if one of you dies.
Obviously this doesn’t apply to individual savings accounts such as Livret A which you may want to open in your separate names to maximise the benefits.
Make sure any house you buy will be fully inherited by the surviving spouse if one of you dies.
If I were moving to France late in life, and could afford to do so, I would keep a UK property. A large number of people ultimately decide to move back and the process is much easier if you already have somewhere to move to. I’ve lost count of the number of people here in their 80s who want to move back but can’t because the task is too daunting. It’s especially difficult if you don’t have kids to come over and deal with everything for you.
Bear in mind that getting your French to a level where you can function is not the same as having the sort of mother-tongue proficiency where you can banter and joke with people and argue on subjects that matter to you. Exchanging niceties about the weather gets old very quickly.
There’s some snootiness among the British expat community about living in areas with a high concentration of fellow Brits. Personally I think it’s a good idea if you’re moving to France late in life with a readymade partner because realistically you will probably never learn French to a really good level wherever you live. If you have English speakers around you’ll be less likely to get lonely. I just got back from Northern Ireland where I had more satisfying conversations with complete strangers in one weekend than I’ve had with my French neighbours all year.
All I’m saying is don’t underestimate the isolation and muteness that can come from not being a native speaker.
Have just realised the above sounds terribly miserable. Moving to France - and indeed any new country- is actually great fun.
My top tip would be to buy Quality and NOT quantity where property and amount of land included is involved. We bought our first French property 37 years ago and I am still here but have seen over those years, so many people regret buying huge properties because they couldn’t in the UK and for a few of those, it killed them as they became slaves to gardening and property maintenance. Think of getting older and what that will entail such as having nearby neighbours in case of emergency, not being too far from shops, banks etc as eventually driving may become impossible. Sounds all very miserable and daunting but a lot of us have been there and done that and found things can become difficult especially if you don’t have family close by like I have which is a big blessing when things happen both sides of the family. People used to buy houses here near to airports served by the low costs, forget that idea, they don’t hang around but a good nearby railway station is a far better option these days. Good luck but remember things take time here and you need patience.
Bank accounts. Hang on to your UK bank accounts for now (difficult to re-open from a French address).
BUT… be aware that EVERY account you have which can receive money and then return money must be declared in your French tax return (filled in May 2026 to cover all world-wide income jan-dec 2025). You must list all accounts that were open at any time in 2025… even the dead ones you don’t use. This includes PayPal, Share dealing accounts etc. (money can go in… money can come out.. list them). You could start collecting the information you need now and shutting the dead ones… (make notes for the ones you shut down … including date of shut down). It matters not one whiff if the accounts have/had money in them they also need to be listed. Failure to declare is a fine of over 1500 euros each account.
Also… get the best printer, copier you can and learn how to make pdfs from documents. The bureaucratic mantra in France is ‘Save Every Document’.
If you are eligible for a UK state pension you should be eligible for that jewel of the British retirement scene.. the ‘S1’. If you don’t know about it… smiles. Mine covers me and my younger spouse.
We moved to France at the end of 2020, rented for the first three months (be aware that AirBnB are not allowed to do long term rentals but in France you can cancel a 6 month rental contract mid-contract if you give proper notice). I recommend renting from a Brit who has lived here for many years.. it helps.
Finally… and something that tripped me up several times over my years here - Never assume that the way things are done in France is the same way things were done in the UK.
We very much enjoyed the challenge of the move and have enjoyed, very much, our time here since.
Noel’s advice is good. This will save a lot of online form filling. We had LOTS of savings accounts due to the non-existent interest rate after the financial crisis. Banks only offered the best rate if you opened a new account, with a maximum of £1500. We didn’t need to have a huge amount of savings to end up with a dozen or so accounts. Each. Real pain when filling tax form.
Definitely keep UK accounts open, but slim them down as much as possible and as Noel says, keep a note/copy of EVERYTHING.
I mentioned the surprisingly ( to me) cold weather in my earlier post. That has really hit hard this year in Deux Sevres. We are currently on the Costa Blanca to escape it. It won’t last long though.
The sea front has lots of motorhomes parked up, so yours will be useful. I read somewhere that modifications can be problematic when importing.
At all costs avoid gifting/transferring substantial assets or cash to each other once you become French resident. There is a mantrap waiting to catch spouses who do this for amounts above about €80k in the form of (usually) 20% gift tax. Easy trap to fall into it if there are substantial property proceeds or pension lump sums.
Do consider obtaining French wills once you’re settled/have a French property. Your notaire will help you with these, usually at no cost.
I take slight issue with this as we deliberately bought somewhere with lots of space as that was the experience we wanted. It really does depend on age. We knew it would be too big for us in old age, and that we would have to move again but we have thoroughly enjoyed the last 20 years. We are now moving (a bit earlier than we imagined for health reasons) but I don’t regret for a second having bought a large property.
Of course if one does, then one shouldn’t expect to get back the money invested in the property! Fingers crossed as still a month to the actual sale, but we will get back the capital investment we have made in the place, but zero profit. Which doesn’t matter as it has been our home for so long which is worth a lot to us.
Thankyou - very salient - and yes very mindful of the challenges which will come with the language irrespective of how ‘good’ I get. it’s a big consideration as is future plans and any potential return.
It won’t last long though. 