barksducks

I’m writing from Canada and looking for advice regarding a move to France that my wife and I are planning for June of 2007. We, with our two sons (7 and 5) have been discussing a temporary move to France for quite some time. We’re motivated in the main by the opportunity to expose our sons to another culture, and because the both of us are francophiles and it is a dream to live in France. All four of us are bilingual, and my wife and I are self-employed, so our main concerns are not about employment, but rather where it might be best for us to settle. We have Paris in mind, but we know how unrealistic that is. We’ve been talking about Montpellier and Marseilles as well, but neither of us have ever seen these places. Ideally, we’d like to be, if not in Paris, then a mid-sized city, somewhere safe, with good access to the rest of the country. We’re interested in hearing from people concerning underrated spots in France, places maybe a little less known, but fantastic. Also, advice on housing (we’re planning on swapping, if at all possible, and we’d like to be in France for two years), any issues you may be aware of in getting our sons into a school, and other possible snags it’d be good for us to foresee. Note that I am likely to have EEC before we go – does it help much? Many thanks for reading this far and lending us your expertise. Michael

Alec

First, don't make a move until you get your EU passport if I have understood you correctly. EU citizens (except from newer members from Eastern Europe) can freely move to France and take up employment or set up in business or self-employment without needing visa or special permission. Non-EU/EEA citizens need both, which are quite hard to obtain. Remember the cost of living in France is higher than in Canada (much higher in Paris than elsewhere) and in the current depressed French economy, making enough money to support a family will not be easy and you are unlikely to qualify for any state help as you haven't paid into a social security system in France or another EU state. Enrolling your sons in a French state school is pretty simple. Take your papers (passports, children's birth certificates, vaccination certificates, health certificates issued by a doctor in France, residence permits etc) to the local Mairie and apply for a certificat d'inscription to the local school (Ecole Elementaire for ages 6-11). Sometimes you can apply direct to the school of your choice. This must be done by June before the September start. Mid-term admission is at the school's discretion.
I don't know about a house-swap (most are arranged as a holiday swap, not over 2 years), but rental properties big enough for a family in a good area of Paris will be very expensive. It will be a lot cheaper elsewhere, but your (self-)employment opportunities and earning potential would be lower too. Cost of living in France will be quite a bit higher than in Canada.
I suggest you go for an extended holiday first and think out all your options before actually moving to France.

blackduff

Hi Michael
This is a very large question. I have some answers but maybe there's a way we could email direct. I'm not sure myself how this can work.

Anyway, let me know some of the answers. Paris is lovely but expensive. Housing is hard to find and it will be extremly dear.

Outside of Paris, there could be Lyon, Marseille, Montpellier, Orleans, Bordeaux, Toulouse and maybe Perpignan. I live in Perpignan, so I'm prejudiced for the Medi climate.

Montpellier is known as being nice and it's nice for younger people. Marseille isn't my choice but I really know enough to say more. Toulouse is becoming very expensive. Airbus is the home of Toulouse and consequently the prices have jumped the cost of living.

I haven't marked Colmar, Reims, Le Havre, Rouan, Lille, etc. all of which are north of Paris. It's colder and for some reason it's more expensive.

Check with the French Consulate and see if you can get a carte de sejour or carte de residence. The carte de sejour doesn't allow you to work whereas the residence will permit working. I'm not sure how self-employed works into this requirements.

We had to fill out the paperwork and show that we had a way of supporting ourselves. Plus, we had a way of showing health insurance. This is how the French consulate could help. Maybe Quebec (If you are from Quebec)you might find some special treatment but in our case, we had to meet all requirements.

A little about living in France. There is full internet broadband throughout the country. I live in a small village in the mountains and I can access 8 mega ADSL lines. There are cheap flights from France toward into the UK now.

Most French take a vacation in August, if possible. I'm pretty sure about 50% are on the beaches near where I live.

I'm going to show a web site I started to prepare but it never finished. Yet there are some good photos of this area and check out the links. There are great links about this region.

http://www.pyreneesmediterraneanproperties.com/

I live in the small village called Sorède. I can see the border with Spain. Being near to Spain gives some bonuses too. Barcelona it two hours away. Toulouse is two hours too. Montpellier is two hours, etc., etc..

The accent in this area has a Midi dialect mixed with the Catalan hardness. This is the French Catalan region.

This year we had snow-one day. It is all melted the next day. Yet, we have very good ski areas which can day ski. It takes us (yeah, it's the same time)about two hours to get to the slopes. The Pyrenees are quite nice. If more runs are wanted, Andorra or Spain has more pistes.

Anyway, this area pleases me a lot. Let me know if you want more information.

Blackduff

barksducks

Thank you both (that was fast) Blackduff, you can correspond with me via [email protected]. It's a public address, and if you do, I'll give you my personal one so we can talk more -- you sound very knowledgeable. FYI -- we are going to France this summer to case the joint as it were. I'm asking around this way to help build an itinerary. Alec, THANK YOU for the insight into the schooling -- I had no idea we'd have to register the June before.

Dave_in_Paris

Cannot contribute much on the logistics front, as our route to residency was much more traditional, paved by employment. Suggest you take a look at Angers, which has landed atop lists of the best towns in France. I don't really know it, but did visit a decade ago when we were considering real estate. It's a lively, elegant smaller city.

hhildebrandt

hello barksducks,

just in addition to Alec and blackduff:

There are French magazines where you can get information on real estate prizes (and their change too)

Le Nouvel Observateur (aka Nouvel Obs):
http://immobilier.nouvelobs.com/

L´Express
http://www.lexpress.fr/services/immobilier/

Le Point
http://www.lepoint.fr/special_mieuxvivre/doc_1689.html

Cicerone

Just to clear up any confusion the above post may have created, there is no such thing as an "EU passport", passports are still issued by the individual countries which make up the EU. It is unlikely that France is going to issue you a passport until you have lived there for some time or unless you have French ancestors. However, if you have Irish or Italian ancestors it is possible that you would qualify for an Italian or Irish passport. For info on whether you qualify for Italian citizenship, take a look at the website for the Italian Embassy in the US at http://www.italyemb.org/. I find this site hard to use, but you may have more luck. For info on obtaining Irish citizenship, look at http://www.irelandemb.org/fbr.html.

Holding an Irish or Italian passport would indeed qualify you to live visa-free in France.
You probably do NOT want an Italian passport for you kids, as that may obligate them to serve time in the Italian armed forces at some point. (Depending on your age, you may also qualify for the service.) I would look carefully into this before you get any EU national passport for your children, i.e., France still has compulsory national service, albeit you can often do it by doing an internship with a company overseas.

If you don't want to or can't get a passport from an EU country, as you are self-employed and therefore won't be taking a job from a French person or be likely to become dependent on the state, you should be able to apply for a long term visa. The best one would be a long term tourist visa, but you cannot work on one of those, although with self-employment, if you work from home via a computer, etc. it may be hard for the French authorities to actually know what is going on. (They would like the taxable income however.) You may also be able to get a long stay professional visa. In any event, you have to apply for this BEFORE you arrive in France and according to the website this visa can take 4 months to be issued.. You need a "long stay visa", take a look at the info put together by the Toronto office of French embassy in Canada at www.consulfrance-toronto.org, in particular at http://www.consulfrance-toronto.org/...d_rubrique=176.

Make sure you have private health insurance, as I am not sure you will quality for any sort of French national health insurance and I don't know if your Canadian national health insurance covers you outside Canada.

There are many websites that are helpful for tips on expat life. Try the following titles for searches, this may lead you to links for France. What you really need are links to websites for housing costs in regions you are considering, hopefully one of these will work:

www.expatexchange.com
www.expat-essentials.com
www.expatforum.com
www.expatnetwork.com
www.escapeartist.com/expatriate1/expatriate1.htm
www.outpostexpat.nl
ebusinessnomads

Of course Paris and other local newspapers should have apartment listings, that might be a start.

If you want to send your kids to an English-language international school, take a look at the various websites below. However, be advised that there are often waiting lists for these schools, so you might want to contact them ASAP to get your kids on them. (I live in Hong Kong and just moved here from Switzerland and this is a big issue in both places.) Tuition is often fairly expensive, usually starting about US$15,000 a year and going up. As noted above, as long as you have the proper long-stay visa, you could put your kids in the local French school, quite an immersion for them, but it is possible to do.

http://princeton.iss.edu/displaydire...country=France
http://www.cobisec.org/bsop.htm (British School of Paris)
http://www.frenchentree.com/fe-educa...icle.asp?ID=96

Also try the website for British Council in France, which has a ton of info (http://www.britishcouncil.org/france)

Also the Canadian Embassy in Paris has some really useful info about Canadian nationals living and working in France, their website is http://www.dfait.gc.ca. Look especially at http://www.dfait.gc.ca/canada-europa...sulaire-en.asp and
http://www.voyage.gc.ca/main/pubs/working_abroad-en.asp

I agree that if you stay towards the south and west of France you will find costs lower than you will in the Paris, Provence and Marseille areas.

CotswoldScouser

I'm assuming your sentence "I am likely to have EEC before we go" means you'll have citizenship of an EU country.

If that's true, do remember that the automatic rights of residence and work in France don't apply if that country is one of the ten that joined the EU in 2004.

Your citizenship doesn't automatically confer the same rights on your wife or children unless they are citizens of that country in their own right. If they're not citizens of an EU country, they'll need to get themselves the appropriate long-stay visa BEFORE arriving in France.

If you haven't got citizenship of an EU country before arriving in France, you ABSOLUTELY MUST obtain the appropriate visa before leaving Canada. This can be tortuous, and it's a great deal more difficult to do it once you're in France.

Access to non-emergency free medical care, even for citizens of an EU country, often requires some period of contribution into a state insurance scheme somewhere in the EU/EEA. If you're going to be self-employed, you may need to ensure you provide for this.

Therese

Montpellier's lovely: close to (but not on) the beach and the adjacent Camargue, great rail and air access, great climate, reasonable arts and social scene thanks to presence of university, lots of biotech and IT industry, historical center of town, great public transit via newly constructed tram system.

I'd move to Montpellier in a heartbeat.

barksducks

Thank you everyone for the marvellously detailed posts. They are extremely useful.

kenman

Michael, I can't give you a huge amount of info you don't already have, but just thought I'd weigh in to applaud your decision. My wife and I just spent two years in Geneva (and in France, just outside Geneva), and it was really the best experience of our lives. You'll have some culture shock and frustrations from time to time, but in my view it's absolutely worth it. We miss it every day. Best of luck, and enjoy.

As to where to go, it depends hugely on your finances and what kind of climate you like. Paris is tough to beat anywhere in the world, in my view, although a bit pricy (but we found it no more expensive than San Francisco, where we live now). But from Biarritz to Villefranche, Chamonix to Lyons, Annecy to Blois, Bordeaux to La Rochelle, Aix to Beaune, there are so many fabulous parts of France. Good hunting.

mpprh

Hi

There is information about Languedoc, Montpellier and expat advice here : http://www.the-languedoc-page.com

Peter

Art_Vandelay

FYI, Cicerone (and Michael), it's been ten years since France has abolished compulsory military service...

The issue has been tackled by several posters, but in your shoes I would be very worried about health cover. The problem is, if you are not receiving any salary/fee in any EU country, basically you don't qualify for the French Sécurité sociale. And if you are not having any basic cover, private medical insurances will be very relucant, to say the least, to cover you too. That said, there might be a similar bilateral agreement between France and Canada or, more likely, Québec. But please check, especially with kids.

kerouac

Paris and suburbs is the most likely area to find a house swap, and all of the bunk about things being more expensive in Paris (except housing) is rather tiresome. Food costs (not restaurant costs) are cheaper in Paris than any other French city (tourists could not possibly know this) and many of the city services are cheaper or even free.
If people spend more money in Paris, it is mostly because there is so much temptation and so many things to do. I do not really think that the point of moving to France is to be bored and to have to plan trips to Paris to do things or see movies in original version or a major show of exhibit. Living in France is totally different from visiting it. Paris is the only realistic choice if your main objective is culture.

CotswoldScouser

Art's contribution about healthcare might be easily misunderstood.

France isn't awash with window cleaners or IT consultants dying through absence of medical treatment. Self-employed people like barksducks aren't a great deal rarer in France than in any similar country, so there's obviously a variant of the state system designed for them.

Barksducks simply needs to sign up with www.urssaf.fr, where the site will calculate the contribution he'll need to make. If he's going to be in the country for only a year or two, he'll be pleasantly surprised at how little that is.

The expat sites will help explain how you actually go about the messy business of signing up. But looking at some of my ex-neighbours who've gone and done it, it really can't be that difficult.

ira

Hi B,

You might want to look into Auxerre - a very pretty town about 1:30 hr from Paris by train.

When we were visiting, we noted that real estate was about 40% of the cost in Paris.

Dijon is also worth considering.

Let us kow how it goes.

Art_Vandelay

Living in Auxerre is akin to enduring a slow, painful death. Dijon is better already, but still downright provincial. Having said that, it is Michael's choice to decide what kind of lifestyle, city size, climate, etc. he wants for him and his family.
Going back to the healthcare issue, CS, you are right in saying that one can contribute to URSSAF being self-employed. There goes half of your income (and that's before income tax). But, more importantly, if you go legal, you have to be legal, that's the chicken and egg dilemma. And, if I have understood well, Michael says he doesn't need a work permit because he'll get his income from, say, Canada. But no EU generated income means no access to URSSAF. And here we go again.

hanl

"Paris is the only realistic choice if your main objective is culture."

Lyon also has a lot to offer, culturally (and gastronomically) speaking. Plenty of cinemas showing films in original English, English bookshops, opera, museums, concerts, theatre, etc.

Rents are definitely a lot cheaper than Paris and houses in the immediate vicinity of the city would be a lot easier to find than in Paris. The rental procedure is also easier and less stressful (though I have no idea about long-term house swaps).

Lyon's an excellent base for visiting the surrounding countryside (Provence, Alps, Burgundy, Beaujolais, etc.) and has good train links with Paris (2 hours by TGV) and the Med, as well as Italy, Switzerland, the north of France and Belgium. It's easy to get away into the surrounding countryside and you don't have to deal with those hideous traffic jams that you get around Paris on Sunday evenings as everyone returns from their weekends away.

Much of the city is very pretty and highly pedestrian friendly, and quality of life is very high (in my experience you do get more for your money than Paris, especially if you take housing costs and square footage into account).

I lived for several years in both Paris and Lyon so I'm speaking from experience.

HTH

Geordie

<<<The issue has been tackled by several posters, but in your shoes I would be very worried about health cover. The problem is, if you are not receiving any salary/fee in any EU country, basically you don't qualify for the French Sécurité sociale. And if you are not having any basic cover, private medical insurances will be very relucant, to say the least, to cover you too. >>

I've found the complete opposite to be true.

Health Insurance is very easy to get, you can choose from a variety of companies, personally I've used www.expacare.com, no examination required, the rates are displayed on their website and www.allianzworldwidecare.com

They don't care which country in Europe your in, whether you work or not, they only want to know your credit card number!

I pay around 1500 Euro per year but it depends on the options you select and also this is likely to be tax deductible.

I'm sure there are many French companies like AXA who would also be willing to offer insurance.

Geordie

barksducks

Once again, profound thanks for all this input. One of the reasons for this post is that Anne (my wife) and I will be going to France this summer for two weeks to visit the likely places. Of course, we will be spending a few nights in Paris an environs, but the information we glean from your posts, as well as links to other sites, will help us decide how to spend the rest of our time there. It's becoming clear that we have to go to Lyon, and we've always planned on seeing Montpellier (we'll check out Le Grau de Roi and Port Camargue while there, both places that we've heard good things about). We've scratched Marseilles off the list for now. I think we'll check out Angers and Bordeaux as well. I'm interested in hearing more suggestions!

A note on citizenship for clarification: my father was borning in Manchester, so I am in the process of applying for my British Citizenship, which I understand confers EEC citizenship on me and will obviate the need for me to get a Visa for France. If I am wrong about this, someone please correct me. The issue that I'm not clear on is if Anne and the kids will have to get Visas. Anne and I are commonlaw, not married, so there may be an issue about this and if necessary we will make it "official" before we go, but again, anyone with expertise on this is welcome to tell us what to do.

We are on the health-care issues; thank you for all the good info and links.

A couple great sites I've been alerted to while posting on tripadvisor are www.bonjourparis.com, www.livinginfrance.com and www.pap.fr, which has a clickable map showing rental costs in different areas of the country.

Encore, milles mercis à tous! We'll keep you all posted on our progress through this thread.

Michael