Thank you for your comments and yes 100% I shall run this past my financial advisor. However my goal is to obtain French citizenship not to optimise my investment portfolio!
My plan is not money laundering because the money comes from legal, declared UK pensions, is transferred through normal banking channels, and is fully declared and taxed in France inside a regulated French investment (the Assurance Vie).
I am not hiding m — I am simply moving declared funds intoa French-taxed account to show my income in France.
It’s completely transparent and lawful.
All French people have an Assurance Vie and use it as an income source in their retirement.
I doubt your financial adviser would know the answer. I bet there would be some prefectures who would accept it. And others who wouldn’t. As you say, uncharted territory but maybe worth a try, especially if one were considering taking out an assurance vie anyway.
Costly, and inconvenient. Also isn’t there something about age 70 bringing AV limitations.
Also in other contexts such as applying for visa, this looks more like a drawdown from capital (not regarded as qualifying as income for a visa as capital can disappear) and you have no French source of income feeding this - as at the AV end it could be switched off tomorrow and is not a guaranteed steady income generated from a Frenxh source.
So hard to see it working to qualify. It’s close to money laundering / rinsing in look and if France has put in this requirement I can’t see them accepting this as a way of fulfilling it
I did not mean to suggest that it is illegal, but the true source of the income is not France. Hence, for purposes of citizenship as it now seems to be construed, it is, in a sense.
What I am trying to do is comply with the new directive in any legal way I can. I repeat : The source of the funds is totally transparent and it is a legitimate source of revenue that the French use all the time. That is all I shall do.
Again the cost is irreleavnt in the short term. If one manages to get to the interview stage with everything else in order then, hopefully, it’s a relatively straight path ahead. Obviously, what one then choses to do with one’s money is your own business.
For me, it’s a means to an end to surmount a definite hurdle.
Well, for them to reject it, they will need to have legal reasons. Why it is legitimate under French law :
My Assurance Vie is: Declared to the French tax authorities (DGFiP), Taxed in France on the gain portion, and Held in your my within the French (or EU) financial system.
That means my income from it is legally recognised as French-source income, according to both the Code général des impôts and the Retailleau Circular (May 2025) on nationality.
Only in terms of the financial abattement which is limited to €30,500. You can still put unlimited amount of money in.
But surely the income from it is the miserly interest, not the capital you have deposited? The French make a big deal about provenance of funds. By all means try it of course, but I would not be optimistic. Sorry.
You’re absolutely right that, strictly speaking, only the interest element of an Assurance Vie counts as income for tax purposes. But the nationality team doesn’t analyse it that way — they’re not the tax office. What matters to them is that the money is declared, taxed, and paid regularly in France. Regular monthly withdrawals from a French-declared Assurance Vie are treated as stable French-based income, even if part of it comes from capital. It’s really about showing that your financial life is anchored in France.
I shall remain very optimistic
How can you be so sure? I’m not trying to kibbitz you, but that was not my experience e having gone through this. Even pre-Retailleau my Agent crawled over my finances very carefully, focusing on my French income from our business, and in terms of AV was only interested in the annual interest. Which if you are putting money in and taking it straight out will be insignificant.
I think, generally, it is but the Prefecture always makes clear that the decision is up to the Interior Ministry and they can block it.Unusual though, so you are right to be reasonably positive about that. It didn’t work for my partner who got through his interview fine and then the Prefecture lost the dossier… Took us a long time working out what had happened.
Yes they have already been through much of the detail of our other income. I am basing my new approach on the actual wording of the Retailleau Circular of 2 May 2025, which sets out how prefectures assess financial independence for nationality applications.
It specifies that applicants’ income must “être stables et suffisants (niveau déterminé par rapport au SMIC et à la composition familiale), être hors prestations sociales, et ne pas provenir majoritairement de l’étranger.”
It also explains that professional and financial integration is judged over time:
“L’insertion professionnelle s’apprécie sur une durée de cinq ans et doit dès lors permettre au demandeur de disposer de ressources suffisantes et stables pour assurer son autonomie financière…”
No worries. This is new to everyone. Few have experience of this new post Retailleau situation. Those who have appear to have been rejected because they have relied upon UK pensions. I am trying to change my situation such that it complies.
By the way; it won’t be the first time that I have drawn monthly income from my AV. I had to do so some years ago before our (then) gîte income had taken hold. It was easy to do and provided monthly income. I plan to do the same thing but will keep toping up the AV via monthly investments in my AV from yes, my UK pensions. It’s all very transparents and totally legal. It will hopefully keep me on the right side of the Retailleau hurdle !!
I do admire the creativity! However I don’t think it is correct to state that all your income would be from AV. The UK pension income you are receiving remains fully taxable and declarable - just as before - in France. What you are presumably hoping to do is create (some) additional French source income. Surely this won’t help you demonstrate that your main income is from France??
Similarly I think it would increase your overall income IF you succeed in generating any taxable income from the AV (in addition to the UK pension).
My other concern is that you are only taxable on the income from the AV. The withdrawal of capital - which would be most if not virtually all the amounts withdrawn for the short and possibly medium term -is not taxable at all. I struggle to see how you can possibly generate any substantial taxable income from capital recently invested, short of investing huge amounts - it defies financial reality in the short term!
You may be aware that France is “famous” in the tax world for its extensive, robust, aggressive anti-tax avoidance legislation, and its proven willingness to use it against artificial tax schemes. I wouldn’t want to be the shoes of anybody whom the authorities decide to investigate, using the powerful legal tools at their disposal. I can’t help wondering how counterproductive this would be, from an official standpoint, in respect of somebody trying to obtain French citizenship?
It’s not at all a given that it would be considered French-source income. While I applaud your creativity, you’ve taken foreign-source income and basically recycled it.
I can see that a prefecture might fall for it, though. Ours seems to make up the rules as they go along.
If you were considering taking out an assurance vie in any event (and I know lots of people including immigrants in France who do, for reasons of tax efficiency) then, sure, give it a go. You have nothing to lose.
Provenir has strong connotations of “originate” in French. It’s translated also in English as “come from” as well as” originate from “. With “originate from” pretty much clearly being the requirement intended by this French text.
Your proposal “routes” the money from abroad via an AV. So this income of yours definitely comes to you in France from an AV, but it does not originate from it.
To be fair to them, they’d mislaid it and retrieved once we asked them what had happened to it. They had originally told us that the linked dossiers were both going to the Interior Ministry at the beginning of November. We stupidly thought that because mine clearly had done that and they were supposed to be going together, that it was a recording fault in their (appalling) on-line application system, which had already given misleading information before. We should have chased it earlier.
Unfortunately, my partner’s dossier is still stuck at the Prefecture and is showing no signs of moving. Ongoing saga which we are tackling…
