Sorry for bombarding you with financial conundrums but am trying to work out what our finances will look like if I retire next year.
Here’s the situation.
When I retire, I can stay with my employer’s fully comp private health scheme. I can’t remember offhand what the premiums would be but will check.
It would cover only me, not my husband.
Once I retire, our only income - until our UK state pensions kick in at age 67 - will be:
Me: fairly good foreign-source pension from current employer
Husband: UK rental income which is subject to neither tax nor social charges in France + small amount of bank interest.
He is currently covered by my private health insurance but will cease to be covered after I retire. So at that point he’ll have to join PUMA (he will eventually be entitled to a teensy French pension but not for a few years).
Presumably - since we’re taxed as a single household - I will have to pay CSG and CRDS amounting to roughly 10% of my gross pension because husband will be with PUMA. Even though I myself will have private health insurance.
If that is the case, surely it would make financial sense for me to also join PUMA, rather than pay 10% of my gross pension in CSG and CRDS (for husband) + private healthcare premiums (for myself)?
The CSG/CRDS charge is going to stay the same, isn’t it, regardless of whether one of us is with PUMA or both?
Have just discovered there is a special PUMA tax, called the cotisation subsidiaire maladie. Which would be levied on husband’s portion of our « capital » income (ie income from rentals, bank interest) after applying a fairly generous allowance (around €20 000 per individual).
That still leaves me wondering though whether I’ll have to pay CSG/CRDS on my (foreign-source) pension income because husband will be a burden on the French health system.
Maybe you should also check that your current PHI will allow you to continue once you are a French resident? Some are a bit sticky about these sorts of things.
I can’t point you to a definitive guide, and it may be that you will have to argue this one through once you actually move. However in principle although tax is dealt with overall as a household it is possible to apply different exemptions to déclarant 1 from déclarant 2.
Alternatively you could ask the tax office that deals specifically with foreigners (hôtel des impôts pour étrangers). Telephone or post only unless you have your own tax account because of owning a house here?
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One other thing, until you receive your state pension in French terms you are “inactive”, not retired. This often causes confusion as French will not understand your situation accurately if you say “when I retire next year”. ,
Our situation is perhaps nonstandard because I work for an international organization and can keep full health cover after I retire (good point re terminology! I’ll remember that!).
Perhaps a more common situation would be where one spouse with a pension has an S1.
And the other - for whatever reason - does not and is à la charge de la sécu.
Would CSG/CRDS be levied on the couple’s total joint income? Or just the (burdensome!) spouse’s portion?
If you are resident then you have an espace particulier on impôts.gouv? So you can ask via your messagerie.
Since I don’t have direct experience and can’t find a specific legal text then don’t want to steer you wrong. I “think” you can be treated individually for social charges within the household declaration, after all there are different lines and boxes to allow you to set out the circumstances but can’t be certain.
Not really. In that circumstance spouse 2 would become a beneficiary of spouse 1’s S1, so no charges applicable .
That’s so interesting. Does that mean that in daily conversations with people (as opposed to perhaps with officials) it would be better understood to reply ‘je suis inactif’ when people ask me if I am either retraité/retired or still working? (at 60 I’m several years away from receiving a state or indeed any regular pension, but gave up work 3 years ago.) I had noticed general surprise amongst French people when I say I’m retraité. They ask - so you can receive your ‘English’ pension already? When I say no, I’ve stopped work and am living off savings, they look slightly puzzled…
Absolutely. In our case, we took 25% UK tax free lump sums from various pension schemes after stopping work in the UK , and just before moving to France. I need to bridge 8 years from stopping work to receiving a regular pension…it does mean you have to be a bit careful as the family ‘fuel gauge’ of savings goes down…and down! Zero other sources of income bar minuscule amounts of interest…
Like Stella, one of the very best decisions I’ve ever made (bar marrying my wife!). Ask me again in 5 years time when I will probably have zero savings left!
Others (family!) have been less charitable. To us the perceived (and we believe manageable) financial risks were far outweighed by the sheer pleasure of living in France. We don’t know what will happen in future, nobody can, so we want to enjoy life in this glorious country while still relatively young and healthy (ok, apart from the small matter of a bit of an accident recently )
We intended to join PUMA 3 months after arriving, but just couldn’t face the procedural hurdles at the same time as getting carte de séjour etc. We have continued with private medical cover (AXA International out of London), basically for hospital cover. This has been more than justified by a recent emergency hospitalisation following a fall down a steep slope clearing scrub. However in our case, you do get left with an excess that won’t be met by insurance, if like us you intentionally choose a high excess to reduce premiums.
Good to know we’re not the only weirdos living in France with private health insurance.
I’ve never come across anyone outside the international orgs in that situation.
Are you planning to join PUMA at some point?
There are quite a lot of people who use PHI. As a back of envelope calculation if one’s unearned income is around €100,000 then policy cost of PHI is probably cheaper than paying the CSM. And I believe there are many people in this category in Paris, Annecy, Nice and so on.
Interesting. Presumably having PHI would exempt you not just from the CSM (PUMA tax) but also from CSG/CRDS? ie you’d be able to tick the box in the tax return to indicate you’re not à la charge de la sécu?
I wonder, though, whether any of these commercial policies offer cover pretty much equivalent to the Sécu. My current provider (Henner) is fantastic but that’s a special arrangement negotiated by my employer and my husband would cease to be covered when I retire (although I can keep it).
It had never occurred to me to take out separate PHI for him with someone like AXA.
I’m almost 60, though, so approaching the period when we’ll be using healthcare more. Don’t really fancy having to think about franchises/excesses, caps, exclusions for pre-existing conditions and the likelihood of increasingly hefty premiums as we age.
Funny, I always had this idea that - with the odd exception such as the international orgs which aren’t governed by French law - it’s not permitted to have full PHI as a substitute for the Sécu. You learn something every day.
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