Definitely Scottish ![]()
Funny on the accents…I said the same thing yesterday….he slowed down to a glacial pace that was even harder to understand….and then we had a nice chat about Edinburgh, where they are based, and we have been many times, then he disclosed he had a great time in Paris a few weeks ago….lovey lovey convo, warm buzzy feelings…Wife wasn’t keen on it being on the loudspeaker as it was doing her ears in….so I turned it off….but pressed the wrong button…and cut him off, just as I was about to get into the meat and gravy….so had to start the whole process again…….and then, the rechargeable batteries on my landline phone gave up…so had to start again for the third time and with a different person every time.
Let us know how and what you did to get your money back….it’s meant to try us these things!
Courage!
Michael
ReAssure took 9 months to give me my money.
If you are not a UK taxpayer then you can get back all tax levied on the 75% left after the 25% lump sum. It’s what the Form France Individual (FFI) is all about.
To repeat, you can claim back the emergency tax that has been levied on the 75%.
I’m a Canadian citizen, moved from the UK 23 years back. I went through this a couple of years back. I had a SLAC pension that I moved to Europe and changed to euro. That was the only way I could draw down from it over a period of time. The cost of transferring it was worth it. I moved the funds from GBP to euro because of the state of the pound and it was the right decision. It’s lost quite some ground ground to the euro since. The Wealth Genesis was the outfit who helped me. My contact is based in Nice. Message me if you want his contact details.
I would always recommend talking to a financial advisor, but you need to be careful. I had recommendations for a particular advisor who advised me and did the consolidation of three pensions into one. His advice has already earned me many times what I paid him and he made the whole process very painless. Some advisors can levy an annual charge for future advice but I chose to make a one off payment, which he was completely fine with.
Hi Badger
Just to let you know that the UK gov has given me back the emergency tax deduction which it had originally taken after settling my claim from my pension pot with Standard Life - as you said they would. I am very happy with this, as you can imagine.
A word of warning.
A UK pension commenced last year and after being insistent HMRC paid back my money within three months, however I have just cashed in a SL pot after getting my S1, even though I had an NT code, HMRC have put me back on an emergency tax code. I have to go through the whole process again.
Luckily it took only 3 working days to get an appointment with the local impôts annex office to get the double taxation documents signed and stamped.
Yep, found an even more subtle need for a new France -Individual Form when the company handling my UK pension was changed.
Apparently NT only applies to those incomes you detail on the DT form.
I have pensions from 3 different countries and I have a frequent visitor card with the impôts.
Thanks for the reminder, I need to get an FFI done for a pension provider but was going to leave it until next month when things return to normal.
I wonder how @Jennifer11 is getting on with her attempts to persuade the French tax office to sign the form.
All I do is to go on my espace impôts to book a rdv, enter the reason for the rdv, select my preference of where and select a time. I made the booking on Friday and the rdv was on Tuesday.
Thank you both for asking.
I was all set to send a message to les impots today but my espace personnel isn’t working today. I’m waiting for an email to arrive so I can reset my password but I have a nasty feeling there won’t be one.
How frustrating. Hope you manage to make some progress soon.
I’m afraid that’s par for the course by HMRC standards. Frustrating but unless you’re applying for more than 1 pension simultaneously (ie on the same FFI) they will indeed invariably put your new pension on emergency code, irrespective of whether you have an existing NT code for your other pension. A variant HMRC sometimes like to do is to remove your existing NT code for the original pension at the same time, which only adds to the stress and frustration.
Yes, I spoke with HMRC and they confirmed that I would have to apply to recover that tax that they have got their grubby hands on; given it is a lump sum it is an important amount. So far I have not seen that they have pulled the second trick. If so do I have to reapply to recover the tax?
The only good point about the 25% tax free is that it diminishes the portion taxed.
It was my understanding that if you are resident in France there is no 25% tax free ?
Correct, but the emergency tax that HMRC take is based on the lump sum minus the 25%.
It is just a temporary advantage, but given it could take a year to get the money back it helps.
At that point, you “simply” (
) call HMRC and ask to speak to a ‘technician’ to reset the code back to NT.
Glad to hear that ![]()