WE’VE BOUGHT!

NOW WHAT?

   I’ve walked you through manner in which we found our little village house to buy in France. I think that our example was fairly typical and that it serves as a decent model, but I’m not going to pretend that I can provide a comprehensive summary of the legalities of the purchase process itself. It is controlled by French law that I didn’t quite understand then and don’t quite understand now. If you’ve ever bought a house in the States, you know how confusing the process can be… how many clauses there are in the contract…how many pages have to be initialed and signed. We were lucky that in pretty much every respect, things turned out OK. But if I were doing it again, I would have found an attorney – before we signed – to keep an eye on things on our behalf.

   All of that having been said, we had two more tasks to perform as we took ownership.

   First, we had to open a French bank account. Our mortgage bank was just that, a bank that originated mortgages, not a bank with private deposit accounts. They required us to have a French deposit account from which they could be authorized to electronically receive our monthly mortgage payment. Had we known that before we returned to the States, opening such an account would have been relatively easy. We didn’t know and that caused complications.

   Fortunately, we found a woman in a branch of a French bank in New York City that was willing to help us even though the branch handled only commercial accounts and opening private accounts wasn’t a part of her job description. She told us what documentation we would need, walked us through the application, helped us find the branch in France closest to our house and faxed all of the paperwork to that branch for us. We are forever in her debt.

   (There’s something that you should know about French banking. Here, if you have an account in one branch of a bank, you can pretty much have all of your banking needs handled whenever you want, in any of the bank’s branches. The French system is a bit different. In our ‘home’ branch, we have a conseilliere, our own personal banker. We can make deposits at pretty much any branch…I think…but withdrawals can be a problem and activities such as applying for our carte bleu – credit card – and other routine banking activities had to be run through her.)

   House? Check.

   Mortgage? Check.

   Bank account. Check.

   Credit Card? Check.

   What’s left? Property manager.

   We’re not moving to France full time for a few years. We’re going to rent out the property as we can to provide some revenue. We need someone to help us market; someone to do security checks and handle repairs; to meet and greet clients; to arrange for cleaning before and after a rental.

   Stay tuned.