Will I Earn Enough to Live and Save in France
June 7, 2010 by tony · Leave a Comment
This is a recent exchange of mails I had with a newsletter reader who wants to come to live and work in France. I can only make comments based on my personal experience and observations and would welcome any input from other readers.
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Hi Tony,
I just discovered your site via a link from http://www.moving-to-montpellier.com/, which referenced your recent post about renting apartments in France.
I am an American software engineer living in Minneapolis currently. My wife and I are interested in moving to France, and I am currently interviewing with a company in Grenoble.
I just wanted to write and say “Merci” for the great website(s), I’m looking forward to reading your other posts this weekend.
I really enjoyed your post, I can’t remember the link, but you had written “Wisely, Paris built their Disneyland outside the city & they plan to keep it there.”. You articulated in that article exactly what my wife and I experienced in France at different times and exactly why we want to move there- in France life is not always judged in terms of money value.
I have one question in particular I’m trying to answer to help assuage some anxiety I have about this move:
I get the impressive that the French generally save a lot of their paycheck, I think I read somewhere that they saved 10%, which is about 11% more than what the average American saves. I also have the impression that food costs are rather high compared to the US, and rent seems a bit higher too (in Grenoble I’ve found 800 Euro seems to be the going rate for a one bedroom place). I have contradictory impressions; a lower salary, a higher cost of living, and yet higher savings rates than in the US.
The approximate salary I have found for my work is about 50K euro in Paris, and less in the provinces, although I’m not sure yet how much less.
Would this be enough to provide for myself and my wife, own a car, and still save money?
Thank you,
Jeff
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Hi Jeff
Income in France is low – average is about 22,000 euro a year – you can get a better idea about income from this site – http://www.worldsalaries.org/france.shtml
However a salary has a lot of social charges paid by the employer – it virtually doubles the cost of employing someone – for this you get the best health care in the world and excellent social services, education etc.
Housing is,expensive, the rent for Grenoble sounds about right, 800 euro a month for an apartment.
Cars are comparatively expensive, as is fuel, about 5 euro a gallon
Food I am told is more expensive than the USA, quality is good and the French are very careful shoppers.
The French are traditionally savers and the 10 percent or so of earnings does not surprise me.
You hit the nail on the head – it is impossible to put a value on the quality of life. With the sort of salary you have been offered you would be considered a wealthy person in France and could live comfortably, but never luxuriously.
Hope this helps
Best wishes
Tony
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Hi Tony,
Thanks for your response. So far my job hunt has yielded nothing. I realize this is a pretty general question, but do you have a suggestions for finding a job in France?
So far I’ve been sending out emails in response to job site listings. I’ve had a couple of calls, but no offers. Some contacts I’ve discussed this with have said the key is to be in France, rather than in the US. Others say the immigration rules in place now will make getting an offer very difficult in France. Others say I should be able to hire myself out as a consultant. Some say I should stick looking for jobs with larger corporations, although my preference is to work for smaller organizations.
If you have any suggestions you’d care to share, I’d be grateful,
Jeff
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Hi Jeff,
It is difficult to find work in France, most companies only recognise French qualifications and it is a fact that they will prefer to employ French nationals, there is supposed to be equal opportunity for European countries, but this is not apparent – for non- European it is much harder to get employment unless you have a skill which is badly needed and not available in France.
To have a chance of getting employment in France you will need complete mastery of the French language and be established in France with good references. French companies generally only recognise an education based on the French baccalaureate.
All I can suggest is reading through as many forums and adverts you can, in French, to explore opportunities – I think it would help if you were based in France. Some areas, like Nice and Grenoble claim to be centers for IT businesses, but in my experience the French are a long way behind other countries in software and IT development – it is not just a language thing. There are many reasons why companies keep their payroll down and automate as much as possible, it is why their industry is the most efficient in production per employee in the world, but service industries lag far behind and are generally inefficient.
I will post on my blogs and see if I can get some more feedback.
Tony
The Cost of Living in France
February 14, 2010 by tony · Leave a Comment
For the fifth year running, France has been voted the best place in the world to live by some magazines and journals. This is the reason why hundreds of thousands of educated and qualified people are moving to France to live or to retire.
Being the best does not mean it is perfect, there is a cost, not only in the cost of buying food and shelter, but adapting to a different culture and values.
Comparing income and expenses is simple, there are many websites offering this service such as the one I mention in this reply to a letter today ( http://www.worldsalaries.org/france.shtml ) – but if you need the adrenalin buzz of wheeling and dealing, building a business or developing new ideas – France may not be the most fertile place for your skills and imagination – in fact it is hard to succeed in business anywhere, but just nigh on impossible in France.
It all comes down to the unmeasurable “quality of life” – (if you know parameters I can use to quantify the quality of life I would like to learn)
Her is the mail I replied to a few minutes ago……
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Hi Tony,
I really enjoyed your post, I can’t remember the link, but you had written “Wisely, Paris built their Disneyland outside the city & they plan to keep it there.”. You articulated in that article exactly what my wife and I experienced in France at different times and exactly why we want to move there- in France life is not always judged in terms of money value.
I have one question in particular I’m trying to answer to help assuage some anxiety I have about this move:
I get the impressive that the French generally save a lot of their paycheck, I think I read somewhere that they saved 10%, which is about 11% more than what the average American saves. I also have the impression that food costs are rather high compared to the US, and rent seems a bit higher too (in Grenoble I’ve found 800 Euro seems to be the going rate for a one bedroom place). I have contradictory impressions; a lower salary, a higher cost of living, and yet higher savings rates than in the US.
The approximate salary I have found for my work is about 50K euro in Paris, and less in the provinces, although I’m not sure yet how much less.
Would this be enough to provide for myself and my wife, own a car, and still save money?
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Hi,
Income in France is low – average is about 22,000 euro a year – you can get a better idea about income from this site – http://www.worldsalaries.org/france.shtml
However a salary has a lot of social charges paid by the employer – it virtually doubles the cost of employing someone – for this you get the best health care in the world and excellent social services, education etc.
Housing is,expensive, the rent for Grenoble sounds about right, 800 euro a month for an apartment.
Cars are comparatively expensive, as is fuel, about 5 euro a gallon
Food I am told is more expensive than the USA, quality is good and the French are very careful shoppers.
The French are traditionally savers and the 10 percent or so of earnings does not surprise me.
You hit the nail on the head – it is impossible to put a value on the quality of life. With the sort of salary you have been offered you would be considered a wealthy person in France and could live comfortably, nut never luxuriously.
Hope this helps
Best wishes
Tony
Why I live in France
December 6, 2009 by tony · 3 Comments
I wrote recently about the ‘flip side’ of living in France. Today is Sunday and it is the end of a frustrating week, dealing with French bureaucracy as well as trying to help with the problems of Paris apartment rentals. But Sunday morning is the end of the week and I look forward to bringing Carole breakfast in bed, reading the papers and getting bread from the Boulangerie warm on the table.
The boulangerie is the real heart of a French village – we must be from Gallifrey, the planet of the Time Lords as we, Like Dr Who, have two ‘hearts’ in our village of Montblanc. The one at the top of our high street had a ‘degustation’ of their bread this morning and were giving away balloons and samples of their produce, they also sell their own wine. With over 15 different varieties of bread baked continuously every day, it is a precious resource and makes a big difference to the quality of life and a very good reason to put up with the tribulations of paperwork.
www.EpiMontblanais.com
They have their own website which has a brief history of bread-making in Montblanc, the medieval oven is still in the center of the village (photos on their website), not in use today, but once it would have been the place where most of the village gathered each week to cook their food and exchange gossip – in a way this is still the tradition as the village boulangerie is as much a place for meeting people and hearing the news as for buying bread (or wine).
This is one reason why we have lived in France for 20 years.
France the Flip Side
I am a fan of Jeremy Clarkson, his column in the Sunday Times may be the only floppy copy I read each week, apart from his motoring section which rates the Lada higher than the Audi (so do I and I love the Dacia)
He got a column ‘pulled’ recently for suggesting the tying of some chap called Mandelson to the front of a van and parading him around the UK in an attempt to cheer up the increasingly fed-up population of Britain. It seems that this chap Mandy is an unelected lord of all things and responsible for supporting rich people and generally being important. There is also a Mr Brown somewhere and another chap called Darling – it all sounds like the cast of a Blackadder farce, but it isn’t.
Basically the censored article said how fed-up lot of people are with Britain and would love to live somewhere else, France for example, but JC pointed out that there is a teensy problem with paperwork and bureaucracy in France which an Englishman would not get on with.
I am an Englishman and I do not get on well with French paperwork – actually I do not get on well with any paperwork, but I get it in spades in France and really do very badly.
But this is the point – it seems a universal truth that the ‘quality of life’ in France is recognised as being among the best in the world – millions of people leave their own countries and come to live in France. More people come to France to experience the French lifestyle and culture than to any other country in the world.
Yes France does have a horrid number of civil servants, a low income level, privacy and secrecy laws to stun a goldfish and a reputation of being cheese eating surrender monkeys – I refute all of these (well not all, there are a lot of civil servants and a lot of cheese).
On another blog I started at http://2337.com I am presenting facts and opening discussions relating to some legislation affecting short term rentals in Paris. I am doing it because for over a year I have been anticipating some public announcements which will affect anyone who is involved in renting private apartments in Paris, owners, agents and tenants, many of whom read my newsletter or write to me.
Sadly this will inevitably affect some good agencies, some owners who have invested their savings in rental properties and many years of hard work. By my publishing this now and by trying to present the true facts, the good guys could adapt their services and do well – the bad guys who have robbed and tricked people will, I hope, be made to pay.
But what I found interesting in the debates underway on that blog is the assumption that the City of Paris is shooting itself in the foot and that this is ‘bad for tourism’ and will ‘lose Paris income from tourists’.
My belief is that the people of Paris do not give a fig or a tuppenny damn for tourist income and this is the point I am trying to make in this post.
The quality of life in France is good exactly because the French national character values a human lifestyle with values expressed in conversation, food, local shops, affordable homes and which respects a philosopher above transient celebrity. Whereas many other societies establish the value of everything in money.
This explains to me why there is so much control, why I have to do everything in quadruplet and in black ink yet also why health care and education are brilliant. It is because people care about their cities, villages, homes and family life and prefer to have local shops and Parisians living in Paris than chase the quick shilling/dollar/yen/whatever.
The people of Venice are protesting in the streets about the circus their city has become, the city of London is a derelict wasteland in the evenings (I lived in the Barbican for a while).
Wisely, Paris built their Disneyland outside the city – they plan to keep it there.
Now I must get back to filling in another form to wind up a company I have never wanted, never used and which has cost me a fortune but is still there because I missed a dozen pink forms which I only returned in triplicate when everyone knows they have to be in quintuplet.
Post Script…
I am delighted to see that the censored article is back on the Times online site at Tie Mandy to a van Perhaps there is hope – Yogi Blair is not president of Europe and Oz the Rupe did not tug his whatnot for Mandiavelli
French Letters
October 26, 2009 by tony · Leave a Comment
Alexandra, my daughter, helps me a lot with translations. I am impressed with the letters she has composed for me. However she has a secret weapon there is a website www.Conso.net which gives help and one of their services is a set of standard letter templates for all manner of things.
Interestingly I also picked up a reference to this site on my Facebook pages today and found links to this site posted on other blogs and websites.
Starting a Business in France
October 17, 2009 by tony · Leave a Comment
Carole and I are back into the maze of French paperwork to get our gites and chambre d’hotes registered as a business – a new system, Auto Entrepeneur, now exists and we found an excellent site run by a charming lady which helps you get a business sorted in France, aptly called http://www.startbusinessinfrance.com/ – as an added bonus her husband has a business selling curries by mail – we bought some and they are divine
A Plague Upon Their Houses
October 13, 2009 by tony · Leave a Comment
I had a mail from an associate asking about real-estate advertising websites and earning commissions – I have been deeply involved in this over the last ten years and have strong feelings about it.
In my blogs, I have been less than polite about realtors dealing in France, I have had some of these parasites threaten me with legal action – but I have also met a few, very few, (in fact one), gentleman I would recommend .
Here is a reply to an email today, it is at the end of a thread about realtors etc, but it has encouraged me to set out a little more clearly what I am trying to do – Vlad, if yo are reading this we must get this software sorted, if you don’t have time then Richard and Raj, please work with me to make this your next app !!
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Hi Steve,
My feeling is that real-estate dealing, and all aspects of property sales in France, is, at present, a “commoditised” business and is only attracting a rats-in-a-cage scenario. People will always make money out of selling what is to be sold, but, for-me, this is a bad/dead business.
As all property in France has to be sold through a Notiare, the value of an immobilier is zero – they do not act as true brokers, they do not assist either the buyer or seller, their only interest is to get a mandat and/or get a bon de visite and ensure an immoral level of commission for nothing – a plague on all of them and away with the scoundrels.
What is needed is a true brokerage service (buy it and resell it) or a true marketing/sourcing service (act for the buyer/seller) which clearly sets out the service offered and charges a fair price for the work.
However, to be able to offer any sort of viable and useful service in this area in France, a universal listing facility is needed and the corrupt and disgusting cartels done away with. Dream on.
I am working (too slowly) on software to scrap the useless listings of myriads of agents and simply give a complete “mashup” of all properties listed from existing Internet sources – then use techniques to identify these properties and give information about the seller/owner/agent dealing with it.
So in simple terms, anyone looking in a specific area or for a particular property can see, in one search, all properties, in detail, with full contact information, everything on the Internet which is relevant – this will represent about 80 percent of the relevant search criteria and be many mny times more relevant, efficient and time saving than trawling through the thousands of uninformative agency sites and for iPhone or Facebook would cost a user a very small amount. This concept is an “app” costing from zero to perhaps 4 euro. There are over 500,000 target clients for this.
OK, that is my aim – I cannot see any viability in any “new” listing site, only heartache and wasted time – those early Internet days are nearly gone.
Fractional Ownership is mostly marketed for the “almost” rich people who want a slice of something they cannot really afford – interestingly, in my opinion, it does have a place and is a good product and I would like to find the right marketing angle for this.
Without a license or correct registration, any commission you get on a sale is discretionary – 10 percent is the usual for a non-registered person, you can only do this two or three times with impunity – as an agent commercial I would demand 50 percent of the commission, most gave me 60 to 75 percent of their commission.
Lots to talk about
Building Work in France
August 31, 2009 by tony · 2 Comments
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I try to answer all mail I get, a lot is asking me about moving to France or getting work in France – when there is something which may be of interest to others, I publish them in my blog. This came in today.
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Hello Tony and Family,
 I would be grateful if you could tell me what are the possibilities of work for an  53 yr old ‘fit’ carpenter. I have a wide experience of house building gained over the many years of living and working in the UK and Ireland and even a short spell in Brittany. I am very capable at brickwork , block work stonework, I can roof almost any type of house and finish carpentry is my trade anyway. I am very experienced in Groundworks from setting out for excavations to laying all services and pipeworks.
My wife and 11 year old girl(who absolutely adores dogs ,and has 3 little terriers) are probably less enthusiastic than I, but given the right area(we live in the countryside ) the may be for turning.
We have our own house here which we would have to sell or rent, but could look at that down the road.
I would be very much appreciate any advice you have to offer.
Yours sincerely
Michael
Ireland
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Hello Michael,
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Paris is Planning for the Future
June 8, 2008 by Tony · Leave a Comment
A recent article in the Telegraph by Henry Samuel, announced Sarkozy’s ambition for a new Paris – President Nicolas Sarkozy of France has tasked a group of top architects, including Britain’s Richard Rogers, to dream up a Grand Paris to rival Greater London that could stretch as far as the Channel – Read the Full Article.
I find this very interesting and exciting – Paris is forced to be a small city, the peripherique is a beltway containing the posh and touristy bits inside and much of the real world outside. Public transport is absolutely brilliant inside the peripherique but poor to non-existent outside.
Over the next few months I am going to be spending a lot of time in Paris on some new projects, so the opportunities simply thinking and planning an initiative like this open up are perhaps those which come only rarely in a lifetime – watch this space.
Come Up and See Me Sometime
April 22, 2008 by Tony · Leave a Comment
I think the biggest pleasure in writing any blog like this , perhaps in writing anything, is getting feedback and comments from readers . A lot of my stuff is about our life and experiences in living in the South of France and the reasons why we moved from the UK nearly 20 years ago. Many of the things I say are replies to questions I get and I often publish these to help others.
When we moved to the Languedoc, we adapted a large rambling old ruin in the village of Nizas and to help pay some bills made two apartments for vacation rentals. Over the five years we did this we made a lot of new friends and we now plan do a similar thing with our home in Montblanc and expect this to be sorted out for next year, so book now.
Luckily a lot of readers do come to our area and some ask me for information, often about finding a home or starting a business – I am happy to do this, so if you are in Languedoc drop me a line.
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Dear Tony,
We were considering coming to your area this coming weekend…not quite decided yet, but if we do, would you be able to meet for a drink or something. Maybe we could pick your brain a bit, or just get to meet the person who has helped us a lot!
Also, if you can suggest a chambre d’hotes or a hotel in the area…
Best regards, Maryvonne
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Hello Maryvonne,
I would be delighted to meet when you are in the area – I suggest Pezenas on Saturday which is a big open market and if you have not been before you can discover the old medieval city.
Next year we plan to open our own guest house, but there are several excellent places near here to stay – in Pezenas there is..
Hotelde Vigniamont tell Rob and Tracy I recommended them (I may get a free drink)
or a smaller place is La Dordine both are in the old town and charming.
A bit further out, but very special is Le Couvent which is one of the best in France according to the Sunday Times.
My phone numbers are in my signature at the end of this mail – call me when you are nearby, I look forward to a coffee (or glass of wine at sundown) – what is left of my brain is happy to be picked.
Best wishes
Tony