So far -
De-cluttering mostly done at our house in UK
Said house on the market and getting plenty of interest
Gîte hivernal rental arranged with start date flexibility - hopefully January
Storage place checked out in France.
Now where do we go from here? I’ve read all sorts of advice of the last couple of years. Have re-read this Séjour en France de la famille d'un citoyen européen | Service-Public.fr.
Anyone got a check list please for (both retired)EU citizen and spouse (me) moving UK to France? I’ve received copies of my birth and our marriage certificates.
Not seen many removals firm recommendations in recent years.
I have a house rented out in the UK. Any problems declaring that the house we buy will be our main residence? We plan to to begin legals on house we’re interested in on arrival, or if that goes awry look for another. We’ve been so busy prepping the UK house for sale we’ve only now started navigating the French bureacratic jungle. I’m of state pension age so S1 should be ok. I believe we will need to kick off with private health insurance but not sure how long for. I know I will need to register within 3 months of arrival at prefecture.
Need to find out if despite our EU helping hand we will face delays being able to enter France as immigrants.
I am of course exploring SF for signposts concurrently.
You can register your S1 straight away. No need to wait as you are covered by another country. In theory this should give you cover from the date of your S1, and although it will take longer to get the actual carte vitale you can pay for treatment and claim back. But it depends how risk averse you are as may not work smoothly!
Depends how familiar your CPAM is with international procedures.
For your EU family member carte de séjour you will need copies of you and your wife’s passport (only the first couple of pages), you already have your marriage certificate (which does not need translation if in English), proof of your accommodation ie EDF bill, water bill etc, proof of your and your wife’s medical cover, and technically her financial resources (but in practice joint resources) to prove you won’t be a burden on the French state. Apply within 3 months of arrival. You use the online ANEF platform to make your application (no visit to the prefecture now to make it).
You might want to get your state pension sent straight to your French bank account - some of us on here do. Better exchange rate than we can get.
Also, leave your UK bank account(s) open. You may need them in the future and once you close them it becomes increasingly difficult to open new ones, especially if you’ve been living abroad.
Yes, state UK pension direct into french bank, no hassle this side then about transfers etc. As you say, better rates possibly plus if the french impôts wants to see proof of where money comes from, its clearly marked on french bank statements.
I’m surprised @SuePJ and @Shiba at that advice. When I retired we suffered with exchange rates which were subject to whatever the rate was on the date of transfer. So we changed to having all Engish pensions paid into our English bank and then transfered ourselves when the rate was good. Never regretted it.
Don’t have an english bank account after 30 + years here, no point as have nothing to do with UK any more, so pension transferred direct here where I live and have direct debits to pay each month for utilities and insurance etc.
Thanks all for the information.
Here is the step by step online ANEF guide that explains how to get your CdS for an EU family member…no physical visit to the prefecture to start the process…
If your EU wife wishes to get a CdS (entirely voluntary) it’s exactly the same platform (ANEF etc).
My ‘EU wife’ has occasionally regretted not getting a CdS, as she has no “official” proof of being in France, ie not having a French ID document. It means she needs to produce her passport more often than she’d wish. I’ve suggested she gets one… Both the EU family and citizen CdS are of course free of charge.
1è demande membre de famille UE avec numéro étranger (1).pdf (3.5 MB)
Final wider point - you can never do too much advance research!..I wish I’d gone further on things like better understanding the French tax treatment of pension lump sums, and very surprising taxes on the transfer of assets between spouses for example…
If you haven’t already done so, do some research into French inheritance rules.
When I moved to France for work and we bought our flat here nearly 30 years ago it had never occurred to me that if my husband died, I would get only half of the property and that the other half would go to his family. And likewise if anything happened to me, he would get only half and the other half would go to my family. So we had to do a change of marriage regime through a notary.
We don’t have kids so that makes things simpler. If you do have kids, look into the implications for them if you both die in France. Be aware that the inheritance tax bill has to be paid by the heirs (unlike in the UK where it is paid out of the estate). And that it has to be paid within 6 months after the person’s death.
French people often take out life insurance to help their kids with future inheritance tax bills. Otherwise the kids sometimes have to approach their bank and take out a loan. The French banks are well used to this scenario. But kids living in the UK might find things more difficult.
Indeed, having just had a British friend die here, it was sobering to see how stressful the whole process of dealing with the administrative aftermath of her death has been for her English son. Who speaks no French.
My friend never actually had to go into a care home but that would have created a whole other set of problems for her son. She had had a sudden stroke a year before she died and, while she was still able to return to her flat and sort of pick up her life again, she really struggled in the last 12 months with stuff like mobile phones and anything administrative. With no family nearby to help.
She would have gone back to the UK but had sold her house there years ago and couldn’t afford to buy another one or rent. And in any case, from being fully functional one day, she was suddenly no longer really capable of coping with everyday life, never mind organising a move to another country.
Also, make sure both you and your spouse can speak and understand written French and are sufficiently digitally literate to be able to cope with tax, renewing driving licences, etc. So that if one of you dies or falls ill, the other one will be OK. Make sure your French bank accounts are in the name of Monsieur OU Madame so either of you can access the funds if something happens to one of you.
Keeping a property in the UK is a great idea. That’s what I’ve done. Unless he copped off with a nice French woman at my funeral my husband would really struggle with everyday life here (terrible French and slightly dyslexic) so the little house in Northern Ireland at least gives him an escape route.
Sorry to sound so negative. But it’s best to have a few plans in place because none of us live forever and getting old in a foreign country where you don’t have a perfect command of the language or French-speaking family to organise things and advocate for you is no picnic.
One of the peculiarities of French administration is that they want copies of documents that are only up to six mo ths old, unless they are apostilled.
Could you please give some more details of what you did and how this affected the inheritance rules? We seem to be in a similar situation, and I’ve not yet understood all the niceties.
I am wondering what you changed to because we knew that when we moved here in '99 and so followed the advice for a Donation Entre Epoux. I am glad we did now as it secures eveything in my possession 'till I die but it still allows Fran’s 3 children to ‘own’ half of the property. I can sell if I want without their permission but still have to give them half the proceeds if I do.
Not a problem for me, I do not want to go to the UK, but if I did I wouldn’t be able to afford it.
Sure. It was nearly 30 years ago but I doubt much has changed. Also, bear in mind that we have no kids.
We were married outside France (in the Soviet Union in fact) and, as the notary explained it at the time, therefore deemed to be married under the separation of property regime.
On his advice, we changed our regime to “communauté universelle des biens avec donation entre époux”.
Hope that helps.
Hi David
We moved to France in our early 30s but didn’t find out about the issue until, after renting for a couple of years, we finally bought a flat. We then discovered that, in French eyes, we were considered to be married under the “séparation des biens” regime. So we then changed it to “communauté universelle des biens avec donation entre époux”. It took a while (during which time I was slightly worried in case he died and psycho mother-in-law in Moscow got half the flat) but the process was straightforward.
Are you saying then that if you have no kids then half of your estate would go instead to other members of the family (brothers, sisters etc) but that Donation Entre Epoux somehow prevents that when it wouldn’t prevent it going to other half’s children?
In other words, if my wife had not had children, her half would have gone to her surviving sister on my death.
Nothing like that was mentioned when we made our Donation, we always thought it was only kids that would succeed.
Our replies have crossed, but if I read yours correctly, if Fran had not had kids then her half would not have gone to her sister instead, because we had a DEE?
No, if no kids to inherit it goes to the bloodline of the deceased including parents if still alive and then siblings or their children if siblings are dead. If no family whatsoever, it goes to the state but they have inheritance investigators of vacant successions to find out first.
If you have Donation and even just recognised as Séperation des biens, no one else can take the property from you as long as it was bought in joint names - that is the important part. I know, having been through it all as has David.
That’s most interesting @Shiba, I had no idea, so if Fran hadn’t had those kids her last surviving sister would have taken their place. Fran was totally estranged from her for more than 40 years and would not countenance a re-union under any circumstances. She would have been most bitter had she known.