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Showing posts from May, 2011

RETURNING TO FRANCE PERMANENTLY – ARRANGING REAL ESTATE SALES

Our village house in Cazouls has served us well but it is not suitable as a permanent retirement home. It has no garden; the patio is too small for comfortable, open-house, sloppy partying; and two twisty flights of stairs to the top floor is just too many for a woman with two replaced knees and a husband who is just plain lazy. So we have three real estate transactions to accomplish in order to make our permanent move to France. We have to sell our houses in Cazouls and in the USofA and we have to buy the house in which we will live in France permanently. We’ve thought carefully about how to time these transactions, making our move as efficiently as possible. Here’s the plan. Time will tell how closely the plan mirrors reality. First, we’ll put the Cazouls house on the market. We’ve contacted Freddy Rueda, the agent who sold us the house, and may contact one or two others as well. We have to learn a bit more about the way real estate sales happen in France. We know that there is noth

RETIRING TO FRANCE PERMANENTLY – SETTING THE STAGE

The Southern Woman That I Married and I are both 63 years old. Neither of us was infected with the Protestant work ethic. Work for pay does not define us. We can fill our days without taking big chunks of time out of them to ‘earn’ a living. When we can afford to retire, we will. We’ll be able to afford retirement in a couple of years. As my readers are aware, we began planning for our retirement over a decade ago. What did we want to do during our retirement? Travel. Where did we want to travel? Europe. Why not live there? After investigating likely retirement locales in newsletters, on the internet, and in person, we became captivated by the Languedoc. One morning over breakfast, on our first visit to the region, we struck up a conversation with three couples at a neighboring table in what has over time proved to be our favorite hotel/restaurant, the Hotel Residence in Nissan-lez-Enserune. They were vacationing from their homes in Provence and they confirmed what we had read

TIME FLIES

A fried computer, additional responsibilities at work, my wife's knee replacement and the ensuing domestic disruption, and months have passed. This week I'll begin a new series - a step-by-step discussion of how we plan to accomplish our permanent move to the Languedoc in the south of France. I'll begin with our plans, then describe how well we anticipated next steps and problems along the way...hopefully in real time. It should be interesting - to live and to read. Let the fun begin!