Skip to main content

STUFF TO KNOW ABOUT FRENCH MORTGAGES: #8

 

Every interaction with a French institution teaches valuable lessons. Usually, those lessons involve learning patience. The French bureaucrat/fonctionnaire has a list and loves to check the boxes. Here are a few boxes that you need to be checking.


 

You have a banker, not a bank. I don't know how it is for folks with abundant resources, but we are just average folks with an income close to the French national average. That means that there's one person at the bank that handles our account, our banker. Frederick. It's a small branch with just a few employees, so there's no hand off. Frederick works on our dossier and, if he's not around, the dossier sits. (More about that later.) Get to know your banker.

Bring every piece of paper that you own when meeting with your banker to discuss your request for a mortgage. If you have been living in France, five years worth of tax returns. French tax returns. (If you live in France, you have to file whether you have to pay French taxes or not.) Proof of residence, such as a utility bill that's less than three months old. Proof of income - required even though we've been running our income through the same bank for almost eight years. If joint request with spouse, proof that you are married. In other words, bring every piece of paper that you own.

French bankers don't negotiate like American bankers. We didn't need much of a mortgage. We initially asked for a mortgage that would cover about 40% of the purchase price of our new house. (Our 'new' house, by the way, is 1,000 years old.) Between the equity in our current house and our savings just for this purpose that I'd put aside, we could easily cover the rest and didn't want to borrow more than we needed to borrow. After much typing and chin scratching and more typing, Frederick told me that we couldn't have a mortgage. He carefully went over the reasons - our age, our income, the phase of the moon. 

After several minutes of Frederick explaining why we couldn't have the mortgage that we wanted, and seeing how genuinely sorry he appeared to be that he couldn't help us, I asked a simple question. Suppose we only asked for 30% of the purchase price instead of 40%? More typing and chin scratching and typing. Yes! That would work. An American banker would have suggested adding money to the pot at least five minutes sooner.. I only brought it up because it seemed obvious that Frederick was not going to. Don't assume that French bankers are like American bankers. They're not.

You don't actually apply for a mortgage until you've been approved. That's right. We signed nothing until our third or fourth meeting with Frederick, after we'd supplied him with every piece of paper that we owned and completed an online medical questionnaire. After about five weeks of meetings and emails, Frederick informed us that our loan had been approved and that we needed to come in and sign the papers. We were surprised to learn that the papers that we had to sign were not our acceptance of the mortgage. We were to sign the mortgage application. Why waste time signing things if you are not going to be approved? But once the management of the branch approved, it's OK to sign the application.

You are not approved until the regional office signs off. Yippee! We're approved. Well, not really. It turns out that the approval of the branch isn't the final word. The dossier has to be sent to the regional office for the final checking of the boxes. A formality, Frederick assures us. Fingers crossed because, although Frederick says that we are approved, we are not really out of the woods quite yet.

There's a waiting period. French law takes cooling off periods seriously. What is a cooling off period? When buying a property, the buyer has a ten-day window after signing the purchase agreement to back out of the deal without major penalty. In the case of a loan, you cannot except the money until the eleventh day after approval - in our case, until Montpellier approves. We didn't know that until after we signed, not that it would have made any difference. But it would have been good to know. Maybe it was in the fine print. Be that as it may, whatever the schedule that you had in mind, add the cooling off period.

Frederick got COVID! I mentioned that Frederick didn't have a buddy at the bank to keep up with his customers when Frederick was sick or went on vacation. As it turned out, the day after we provided the last document that the bank required, Frederick tested positive. (He's fine, now. Thanks for asking.) Frederick was out of the office for three weeks. While we thought that our dossier was in the mail to Montpellier, in truth it was languishing on Frederick's desk. We are now waiting for the next update from Frederick, who is back at work after his bout with COVID.

It's been about ten weeks now. There's more. Stay tuned.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

RESTAURANT TEN, UZES: RESTAURANT REVIEW

Ten sits just off the market square in Uzes, one of the prettiest villages in southern France. The newly renovated space is airy and comfortable with tables of sufficient size and sufficiently spaced to provide for a pleasant dining experience. Service was cheerful, fully bilingual, and attentive without being overbearing. The food presented well to both eye and tongue. And the rate of approximately 30 € per person for a party of five included starters, mains, a dessert or two, two bottles of local wine, and coffees at the finish. Reasonable if not cheap eats.  So why am I hesitant to give an unqualified thumbs up?  It took me a while to figure it out. Uzes is a quintessentially French village in a quintessentially French region of southern France. There are those who will say that the Languedoc is just as beautiful but less crowded and less expensive than its eastern neighbors. I know. I'm one of those people. But the fact remains that for many people, villages like Uzes are t

CONGRATULATIONS, DUNCAN AND FIONA: JUNE 1, 2019

We've known Duncan since he was about 5 and were honored to be invited to all of the festivities surrounding his wedding to Fiona. The wedding was held in a magazine converted to a military museum in Gosport. Duncan's dream...a wedding in a place where they used to blow things up. I've never been around so many uniforms. Live Long and Prosper! A kiss was the price to continue... That's Duncan's sister Clair arriving on the right. Grandparents...headed for 100 and sharp as tacks. Reception in an old magazine/museum. Mom baked the cake and made the ducks to order. Not from the wedding but seemed appropriate.

Kreuz Market vs. Smitty’s Market: Texas Barbecue in Lockhart

I was born and raised in New Jersey. I didn’t taste Texas barbecue until I was twenty-two years old. What the hell do I know about barbecue? And what could I add to the millions of words that have been written on the subject? Well, I know a bit about food. I’ve managed to check out a few of the finer joints in Texas – Sonny Bryan’s Smokehouse in Dallas, Joe Cotton’s in Robstown before the fire, the dear departed Williams Smokehouse in Houston, and the incomparable New Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Huntsville . So I can speak from a reasonably wide experience. This will not be a comprehensive discussion of the relative merits of Texas barbecue as opposed to the fare available in places like Memphis or the Carolinas. It’s simply a take on our recent visits to Lockhart and the relative merits of Smitty’s versus Kreuz from our point of view. I’ll get all over academic in a later post. On our way out to the ranch in Crystal City, we stopped at Smitty’s. You have to look