First, if you allow me, a little back-story. My girlfriend and I (both French natives) are currently living 20 kilometres South of Paris, with the high concentration of people, lack of space, total absence of night sky, and all the noise and pollution that you can expect from such a place. Originally, her family is from here, but since we moved in together, her father and brother have moved out to the countryside, leaving us with no real incentive to stay (apart from the comfort of her job and its more than decent salary).
She did law school (stopped before the “becoming a lawyer stage”) and right now she works legal advice for an insurance company (has been for the past 10 years). Basically she knows the French administrative and legal systems as well as I know the back of my hand. I mean, she digs this world and knows her way around the multiple twists and cul-de-sacs like… like a remote Amazonian tribe member knows his way around the rain forest.
It’s been a long while since we started considering moving out (seriously, this place is not for us. We need trees and pastures and river banks and animals and quiet and the lowest possible human to square mile ratio) and after careful consideration, we settled on the Limousin (where, incidentally, a respectable number of English speaking people are living).
Until recently, there were too many things preventing us to act on this desire, but then my girlfriend’s employer announced that the company intended to downsize a bit. Long story short, for those among the employees who volunteer to be laid off there is a significant amount of money involved. And even more for those who would be willing to start their own business.
I consider myself to be fairly fluent in English, well, not at the level of a sworn translator of course, but more than decent enough (aaaand now I’ll be double-checking this post for grammatical mistakes for weeks in my head while struggling to fall asleep) and my girlfriend is fluent in administrative language (she also speaks and understands English quite decently although I sometimes find her lacking in nuances and subtleties).
I’ve been lurking around this forum (and other expat support groups) for almost a year now and noticed from the get-go that a huge lot of you regularly express dismay at the complexity of the French administrative system. I myself am no stranger to that feeling (whatever the occasion is, I never seem to fit in any of the pre-established administrative categories) and have long since developed a sense of dread whenever I am confronted with papers to fill.
And so here we are, about to take a decision that has the potential to change our life a great deal:
-either accept the deal offered by my girlfriend’s company, sell our apartment, buy a country house with a respectable piece of land, and start our company helping English speaking folks succeed in their epic battles with the Hydra that is the French administrative system and accompanying them through their legal difficulties,
-or pass on this deal and keep living in a place that holds little to no appeal to us until we find another golden occasion to relocate to the place we love.
So, as many of you have guessed, my question is as follow: would you seriously be interested in a company that would provide such a service?
Many thanks to those of you that will take the time to read this post and answer it.