10 YEARS OF EXPAT LIFE: COST OF LIVING PART 1

 I retired on April 1, 2014. Cathey and I boarded a plane at JFK on April 15th with four suitcases and two cats, determined to become lifetime residents of France. In the intervening 10 years, we have been back to the Colonies a total of five times - twice for me, three times for Cathey. Only for REALLY important stuff. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm American and I say so with relative ease and pride. But we've chosen to live in France. Chosen. Macron is my President.

SPOILER: Not a single regret. Not. One.

COST OF LIVING

From buying groceries to eating out, from going to concerts to partying with friends, what does it cost to live a satisfying retirement life in a small village in the rural southwest of France? You may be surprised to learn that an income equivalent to two average Social Security Retirement checks monthly is sufficient. (The average SSR check, which can be direct deposited to your French bank account, is currently just over $1,900 per person monthly.) 

Remember that legal residents in France get 70% of most of their healthcare costs either provided freely or reimbursed. (The French consider healthcare a human right. What a concept.) There might be what are called social charges to pay, a percentage of income to pay for the healthcare and other socialized services. But those charges at their very most would be a small percentage of your taxable income above a generous floor, can be offset by US taxes (which are credited against any French charges), and your Social Security Retirement income is not considered taxable income in France. 

The point of all of this is that, assuming you have a home and a car free and clear or loans that consume only a small percentage of your monthlies, and assuming the two SSR incomes, retirement life here can be rewarding. More income is better. Of course. Less is possible, but not an easy road.

Your experience may differ. Different folks live different lives.

HOUSING 

If you take the cost of healthcare off the table and if the tax burden is minimal, what's left is housing, transportation, food and entertainment. 

First, there's the problem of a bank account. There are people that I know who work entirely through their plastic from Wise (formerly TransferWise). But a bank account makes things so much easier. It's France, though. You can't get a bank account without a house and you can't get a house without a bank account. As digital as France has become (I have fiber and 5G.), it's still France. Patience and, depending on your circumstances, professional help may be required to establish a working relationship with French bureaucratic culture. But what can be done will get done eventually given unfailingly polite but insistent determination. 

If you are reading this, you have some personal interest in moving to France. My suggestion is to carefully research the region of France that most seems to suit your requirements. Must you be near snow skiing or ocean sailing? Can you stand Mediterranean summer heat in order to be free of winter frost? France spans from the Med to the Atlantic, from the Pyrenees to the Alps. It's northern tip lines up with Brussels. So finding the France that's right for you demands serious investigation. 

What to do if you are certain that you've found just the right place? A number of the websites/blogs will tell you to rent first, for some months at least, and that's not a bad idea. You may have picked a region that really doesn't suit you after all. You may have pegged region correctly but picked the wrong town. At the very least, you'll have a base from which to broaden the scope of your search.

You might also consider a foothold, a relatively inexpensive village house with just enough space to cram your stuff into until you get set and settled, looking for a more suitable landing pad. All of this assumes that you have sold your house in the States that is going to be your nut. Or that you have been prudent in the markets and come to France with a bit of cash in hand. Either way, a foothold gives you more than a base. In some small hamlets, you may be welcomed almost as a celebrity. Or shunned. In some tourist towns, you may become part of a thriving expat community. Or become part of what your neighbors see as a growing problem. Either way, home ownership, particularly in a small village, makes you a part of a community in a way that being a renter does not.

A small foothold with 100 square meters of living space or more that doesn't require extensive remodeling, with a reasonably-sized terrace or courtyard, and with two or three bedrooms and functionally modern plumbing and electrics can cost you 125,000USD, less in the deep sticks far from shopping and services. Count on 175,000USD more or less in our neck of the semi-rural woods when all of the fees are paid and if you want a garage and serious outdoor space. In the most popular places like Aix-en-Provence or Paris, mortgage your firstborn child. (Actually, compared to similarly popular American locations, even Aix is relatively inexpensive. But if you look at what's available within a couple of hour's drive, it's off the charts.) If you choose to jump directly into the fire, a larger house that has a mature garden, a good-sized garage/workshop, a small pool, and is otherwise good to go will sell for 300,000USD if you are lucky and go up quickly from there. In our neck of the woods. At least. Today.

The seller pays the real estate agent, the buyer pays the notaire - the French equivalent in France of a property lawyer and notary. Add anywhere from 5% to 10% depending.

We were fortunate in our house hunting. We found a house that was a bit more than a foothold that met all of our requirements except one that we didn't anticipate - the ravages of old age. Well, maybe that's a bit harsh. The house served us very well for eight years. But the stairways were narrow, steep and winding. Very common in a small, village house in France. What had been a snap for us when we moved in became a burden on our older, less well-lubricated knees later on.

Because we had eight years in the village and had made a surprising number of close, endearing friends, it took a while to find the right place to buy in our small, rural village of under 2,000 souls that would be in our price range and had the proper interior and exterior spaces. Oddly enough, we found just such a house 75 yards from our old place, downhill to make wheelbarrow moving possible...with professional muscle moving the really heavy stuff for us at the end. 

You never know what's beyond the facade of a village house. Often courtyards and terraces are not visible from the street and can be extensive. Look for a side gate wide enough to accommodate a tractor and there's no telling the size of the yard and outbuildings that might be behind that gate.

I have left out our trials finding a bridge loan/mortgage/home loan. Story for another day. Banking is another post entirely.

Your experience may differ. Different folks live different lives.

TRANSPORTATION

France mimics the rest of Europe in that public transportation at almost all levels is safe, reliable and affordable. Ride sharing is popular even over long distances. Check out BlaBla Car. Ride sharing on steroids. Busses and trains go pretty much everywhere and, within about an hour of our house, there are four stations that connect to about all of the country's routes. Short-hop airlines compete with the trains in pricing and time. Yes, you can buy cheap train tickets, There are sales and promotions. But if you are not flexible and need to go from here to there on a schedule, train tickets can be surprisingly expensive. Small airports like the one closest to us are under siege with the government subsidy running to 1,500USD per passenger. But two internationally connected airports are about an hour away and major international hubs are within about three hours.

And yes, the French hitchhike.

But mostly, when we go anywhere, we go by car. And that is getting interesting. More and more cities are banning smelly old diesels. I drive a smelly old diesel. Yes, Ginger is reliable and economical. (I name my cars. Ginger is a bright red station wagon.) But yes, Ginger is old and Ginger is smelly. The way that things are going, in a few years we will have to go gas, hybrid  or electric. Today, 5,000USD to start for a decent older used car. 10,000USD for something newer and more reliable. Some folks lease. New car prices are new car prices. Whatever, you have to factor that cost into your budget. 

I love my old diesel. Ginger is comfortable, reliable, and gets the equivalent of 42 MPG. Given the price of fuel in France, diesel costing the equivalent of 5.67USD or so, you need that level of fuel efficiency.

Your experience may differ. Different folks live different lives.

FOOD, BANKING AND MORE

That's PART 2. Internet. Grocery stores. Restaurants. Concerts. Wine! Lots to talk about.

GRAZIE TRATTORIA - MEZE RESTAURANT REVIEW

We're not water people, not swimmers in pools or in the Mediterranean. But some of our favorite restaurants are near the Med or on the Canal du Midi. Particularly when spring comes, before July and August when the French decamp to the shore en masse, we like to head for the coast for lunch on a sunny day, stop for a sip and a nibble, and watch the world pass by. On a recent Saturday, breezy but with clouds making way for a bright sun, we stopped at Grazie in Meze for lunch.

Grazie is a smallish space with a glassed-in verandah and a few tables inside across from the bar. Calls itself a trattoria. Due to the cool, breezy weather, the outside tables and chairs that could be set up across the pedestrian walkway next to the boats moored in the marina were stacked and unused.

The veranda filled quickly, about ten tables of from two to six diners including a couple of noisy children. No, I'm not a grumpy old man who can't stand children in a restaurant. But combined with a packed, happily gabbing crowd in a relatively small space, it became difficult to converse with my soft-spoken table mates. 

The servers were pleasant and attentive without being intrusive, explaining both a printed off-menu special and a chalkboard special. The main menu was a bit thin. Limited choices. Cathey chose the poulpe, Eveline the fish special - mullet, and I had a pizza. All arrived in reasonable time taking into account that it's France and we're retired so don't check our watches. And every dish was well presented, well portioned, and properly prepared. Cathey worked her way through more food than she usually does, a definite indication of a quality meal. Likewise, Eveline finished her plate. My anchovy pizza had a decent crust, not the typical French toppings-on-a-cracker, and was covered with caper berries.

The desserts mirrored the quality of the mains. Tiramisu for Eveline (Grandma's recipe, so the menu said.) and a medley of citrus tastes including limoncello for me, both fine finishes. 

With a bottle of wine, no coffees, about 35€ apiece. 

I have clearly picked a nit or two. I did enjoy the meal. But I'm compelled to say that Grazie probably won't join our regular rotation. Not enough choices. Not enough elbow room. But give it a try. You might very well feel differently.

JOE WALSH, RONSTADT, MEEZERS AND MORE - #19

MEMORABLE CONCERTS - PART 1

I first saw Linda Ronstadt in concert in about 1973 in a little venue in Atlanta called the Great Southeast Music Emporium. I have since seen on various websites that the capacity of the venue was about 540 people. It seemed smaller, a converted shopping center movie house that sold beer by the bucket. Literally. Little metal buckets. Search the name and read about the place. By the time that Cathey and I went to concerts there, some of the acts that they were booking went on to the big time. One such was Linda Ronstadt.

Imagine seeing Linda up close and personal in such a small venue, blue jeans and bare feet and with a band that would become the Eagles backing her. Imagine that it's the early show and she's just hit town and she's kinda tired so it's mostly ballads. That voice just a few feet away. Singing love and loss right at you. And imagine, when the show is over, that management comes out and says that, since the second show wasn't sold out, you could stay if you wanted. Yes, there was a time that Linda couldn't sell 1,000 tickets over two shows. And we were there.

I'll talk about other shows at that venue in subsequent posts. But right now I want to talk about pre-Eagles Joe Walsh and another venue worth mentioning.

St. John Terrell's Lambertville Music Circus was a one-off when it opened, a bowl in the Greek style serving up theater-in-the-round under a circus tent. Novel idea. Fifteen minutes from my house. The history of the Music Circus is littered with famous names of the 50s and 60s. The list of jazz artists who performed there reads like a Hall of Fame lineup - Basie and Brubeck, Ellington and Fountain. I saw Rita Moreno in West Side Story there. And I saw my first true guitar hero there - Joe Walsh.

It's difficult to describe a concert like the one that I attended at the Music Circus 60 years ago. Saying that the  James Gang was a power trio doesn't do the term justice. Maybe the James Gang actually defines the term. (Picture of Power Trio in the OED = The James Gang) Joe started the show alone, offstage, making sounds that I had never heard come from a guitar live before. The show hit me right between the eyes. It became my music then. It's my music now. I just can't help it.

    

MEEZERS

There's something about Siamese cats. I can't explain it. If you're not a cat person, you won't get it. Even if you are a cat person, the allure of Meezers may not get to you in the same way that it gets to those of us who have been captivated by the breed. Siamese...Meezers...are talkative to a fault. They are bossy and demanding. They are too curious for their own good, smart enough to open any cupboard door and find the tasty treat or chicken bone hidden therein. But at the same time, Meezers are beautiful to look at, regal in bearing, and loyal to their chosen human. One of the great mysteries of life...

MACRON IS MY PRESIDENT

We moved to France permanently in 2014. We have returned to the USofA on the average of once every five years. Our rural, quiet French village of Quarante sits in the middle of a relatively active tourist region but is not significantly picturesque or sufficiently close to a popular tourist destination to be on anyone's radar. The road to Quarante leads to Quarante and nowhere else.

It's true that Quarante is on one of the routes of the Santiago de Compostelle, the long road purportedly followed by Saint John as he brought Christianity to Iberia from Rome. And occasionally, pilgrims carrying a heavy backpack with an identifying seashell attached to the back will find their way to our village bar for a rest and a drink of water or something more bracing as they follow that ancient route. But they are few and far between. No, this is France Profund, Deep France as Cathey likes to say, a generation behind the rest of the country, the rest of the world.

And so we watch the goings on in the USofA with a certain amount of detachment. We are concerned for the future as it might affect family and friends, as it might affect the rest of the world. But deep down inside, if we are being honest, we've left the USofA behind. Thoughts and prayers...

Macron is my President.

IT'S ME AGAIN - SOCIAL MEDIA AND THE CORRUPTION OF DISCOURSE

Drafted months ago. I think I'm going to start writing again.

 

 

 

What happened? On the evening news fifty years ago, like clockwork, millions of folks would watch Walter Cronkite describe daring flights in space while raptly watching grainy video that we would only see once. No VCRs. No YouTube. Perhaps more importantly than his space exploration commentary, Walter's grainy video described the moral complexities of the war in Vietnam. Whether or not we considered either or both of those endeavors noble, we trusted Walter's presentation. He showed us pictures and commented on them truthfully, so we believed. There were other guys sitting in the chairs in the other two networks. They seemed like nice guys. But Walter was the standard, at least in our house.

There were the three national networks with just one or two independent stations serious enough to consider in the major media markets back in those days. More locally produced radio and more local, often daily newspapers. Every major city accommodated at least two and sometimes more daily papers, with some even publishing morning and afternoon editions. (Their demise is a constant regret.) Either way, even in a major metropolitan area of several million people, an avid consumer of publicly available, current news and information had limited choices. A smart consumer could detect slants in the reporting. But even having seen those biases, folks generally believed that the words that they were hearing bore some relation to reality and truth, as tenuous as that relationship might be. 

 Fast forward...

Search "The Earth is Flat" on YouTube. See what happens. Whether agreeing or debunking, video after video after video has garnered millions of views. Millions. On a topic that is settled science and observed reality. Settled, damn it. How can it not be?

The roundness of Earth is not a settled matter in some circles for two reasons. First, social media provides an opportunity for those who believe otherwise to communicate with each other, join together, and recruit others to their delusion. Why they insist on their belief that Earth is flat is irrelevant. They have a megaphone and they use it. 

More importantly, there's money in clicks.

Capitalism has created a world full of consumers. Folks just love to buy stuff, often more stuff than they can afford. They are enticed through advertising. Manipulative, button-pushing advertising. And one principle of advertising is that the more often a consumer is exposed to an ad, especially if that exposure is accomplished across multiple platforms, the more likely the consumer is to recognize, desire, and buy the product. And so, advertisers have embraced omnipresent and oft-visited social media. And so, given that advertisers are willing and eager to throw money at content creators who attract eyes to their ads, content creators are happy to become platforms for advertising, The more eyes on the ads, the more money the content creator makes.

Does the content matter? Not at all. Followers matter. Clicks matter.

I have cancelled my Twitter account. I haven't posted on Pinterest or LinkedIn in years. I post occasionally on Instagram, mostly pictures of my walks for exercize in rural France. I know that it's a cliche, but I like cat videos on Facebook. I have several email accounts because it's convenient to keep things properly separated. And that's about it. No Reddit. No TikTok. And when I just looked up the top fifty social media sites in the world, I couldn't believe how many I had never heard of, much less never considered joining.

I will probably not live to see the practical results of this social experiment, this post-truth, capitalized clicks, living life virtually society. That is, although things move fast in the digital world, time in the real world continues apace. Just think of me as an old man, telling Google to get off my lawn.

IT'S TIME TO GET REAL - ISRAEL AND JK AND LIFE AND MORE

DEEP THOUGHTS

I have not been writing blog posts for several months. I have been too timid to put pen to paper - fingers to keyboard - because Israel and Trump and gender issues are so strongly held. Those of you that I call friends may know how each of us feels about these issues, but when we disagree, we don't talk about them much. We are not the kind of voters who insist that we are undecided two weeks before an election. We've thought about things and we've decided. I hesitated to post because I knew that I have friends and family who have come to different conclusions than I have. But it's late and I'm getting old and bullshit is getting harder to tolerate. And so...

ISRAEL

Full disclosure, I'm Jewish. One of a group of us who are secure in calling ourselves Jews but who haven't been to synagogue for awhile...a long while.

Israel is where the Abraham of the Abrahamic Religions came from. Judaism started with Abraham. In Israel. Christianity started with a Jew called Jesus who lived as a Jew and died as a Jew. In Israel. According to the Quran, God gave Israel to the Jews. No, I'm not claiming that Jews owning the deed to Israel relies on certain holy books. I am claiming that until 1948, everybody knew that Israel was where Judaism began and where Jews lived. Sometimes, they were chased out, but whether they were thick on the ground or scattered to the winds. for centuries the world at large agreed that when Jews first were forced to scatter, they scattered from Israel.

Israel doesn't have a right to exist. Israel exists. Whether you like it or not. Period. More in a follow-on post.

TRUMP

Beyond understanding. I'll try. Later.

JK ROWLING

Words do not make reality. Words shape perception. You can argue that Earth is flat because you perceive it to be flat. But in reality, it ain't flat. JK says that there is reality in chromosomes. Others say that words alone can alter the reality that chromosomes represent. JK doesn't believe that. I don't believe that. I don't think JK is transphobic and I don't think that I am transphobic. 

And by the way, phobias are fears. So being transphobic means fear of trans people. Which means that a whole bunch of people called transphobic are not transphobic at all. They demonstrate that by not being afraid to say what they think about trans issues. 

Words matter, but they don't matter to the point that they can alter observed fact.

GETTING OLDER

If a man is not a socialist by the time he is 20, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 40, he has no brain.

That quote is most often attributed to Churchill. He may have said it, but he probably didn't originate it. Whatever the case, it does describe the political evolution of some people. For the record, I'm not one of them. Yes, I considered myself a liberal in my younger years, probably not a socialist. But even then, I noticed in conversations with friends that political lines were easily, and often unwittingly, crossed. 

For example, I had a very progressive friend back in the days when being a feminist was not simply progressive. It was radical. And she was a radical feminist. I'll call her Annie. We shared a common female acquaintance. That friend decided to do something that Annie thought that she shouldn't do. "Stop her," Annie said to me. "Tell her not to do it." In that one exchange, I learned that principles can easily give way to personal preferences. I understood why our friend had made her choice, I knew that she had considered the choice carefully, and I respected her. So I wasn't about stop her from pursuing her choice.

And that's where I'm going with this. I don't think that our choices are the result of embracing one end of the political spectrum over the other. I think that we choose what we choose either emotionally or logically based on preferences that are ingrained and can defy understanding. Shit happens. And we react as we do, if we are thoughtful people, reasonably and consistently.

So as I got older, I didn't get more conservative. I have gotten more confident in my beliefs. Israel exists. Deal with it. Trump was an existential threat to American democracy in 2016 and in 2020 and he is an existential threat to American democracy today. Deal with it. Sex isn't assigned at birth, it is observed at birth. Deal with it. 

THE UNIVERSE IS FINE TUNED FOR LIFE

Is it? I watch YouTube videos of serious people having long, detailed discussions to convince themselves and others that the universe seems to be fine tuned for human life. Change one little bit of our universe and its properties and it all goes away. The strength of gravity. The Cosmological Constant. Any one of dozens of numbers like those are right where they need to be.

I have never understood why no one ever argues the opposite - that human life is fine tuned to the universe. It seems obvious to me. There's one universe that we know of. The numbers are what they are. Panelists talk about what would happen if the numbers changed, but who's to say that the numbers can be changed? We evolved in the comfortable niches that those numbers provide, billions of years after our version of the universe was born, hundreds of millions of years after our Earth was formed. 

It took a hell of a long time for us to get to where we are. If there had been a designer, why did She wait billions of years to create chocolate-peanut butter ice cream. I would have whipped that up first.                   

 

IRA'S STUPID STUFF AND ARETHA - MID SEPTEMBER 2016

1. Researchers looking in places with high incidences of traffic congestion have found magnetite in peoples' brains, not the natural type but the stuff that comes out of car exhausts. The natural type is found in the plaques in the brain that often accompany Alzheimer's Disease. So car exhausts may cause...

Shit!

2. My Granny could run the 100 yard dash in 9 seconds flat. Uber is a ride-sharing service. Which of these statements is true? Did you answer NOTA (None Of The Above)? Good for you. Because Nana might have been quick, but she wasn't fast. And every Uber driver travels from the mall to the grocery store to the burbs and back again and back again and back again every day and is just looking to share the cost...

3. Continuing on a car theme...Headline: Paris Police Thwart Car Bombing
A car parked in a No Parking Zone near Notre Dame Cathedral, hazard flashers flashing, without license plates, sat for two hours before the police investigated. They found that the car had seven gas canisters inside, one empty. There was no detonation device. If they'd only let the car alone for another day or two, maybe a meteorite would have hit the car and exploded the canisters.

4. Profs teaching a course entitled "Medical Humanities in the Digital Age" said that they were not going to debate the causes of global warming and that those who wished to do so should not take the course. Internet breaks. It's getting hotter. It's hotter this year than last and hotter last year than the year before. If you don't believe that the 'pause' in warming is a hoax, you don't believe math. The trend line is undeniable.

The course in question is about the effect of that undeniable heating and not its cause. Would it make sense for profs in a paleo-archeology class to suggest that persons who believe that Earth was created 6,000 years ago might not benefit from the course? You betcha! Every point of contention is not debatable in every context.

5. Apple paid an effective tax rate of 0.005% on its European profits. So, after a three-year investigation by the EU, Apple got hit with a 13,000,000,000 euro back tax bill. CEO Cook calls the ruling 'political crap'. IMHO, the definition of crap is the deal that Apple made with the Irish government. I couldn't make that deal. You couldn't make that deal. Nobody that we know could make that deal. Put on your Man Pants, Apple. Get taxed like the rest of us.

6. Geneticists have determined that human hands probably evolved from the tail fins of fish. Maybe not stupid, but interesting. Don't you think?

Carole King was honored at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She was blown away when Aretha sat at the piano to play and sing RESPECT. So were Barack and Michelle and everybody in the audience and everybody who has seen the video. Neat stuff.