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.

CURRENCY TRANSFERS AND PNC BANK: #7

 

 

PNC BANK

I’ve had no problem with PNC Bank for nearly forty years. Free checking. Online banking. Overdraft protection. Hardly a hiccup. But today, if I found myself back in the USofA (besides wondering why the heck I wasted my time, money, and health by returning), one of the first things that I would do would be to get my money out of PNC Bank and into a bank that was dedicated to customer service in the 21st Century and sufficiently competent to provide it.

Although Social Security direct deposits our retirement benefits to our French bank account, the companies handling our IRA investments are based in the US and my retirement package from work can deposit only in an American bank account. And so, we retained our PNC account as our focus moved abroad. There’s one problem, though. One MAJOR problem. We live in France and PNC is reluctant to give us our money when we want it. 

You see, we've bought a new house and we're selling our current one. If we had sold the old one first, we would have our equity in hand and could finance the new with it. And the money would all be in France, in euros. Easy peasy. Unfortunately, if we sold before buying, where would we live? How long would we need to rent? Would we really want to move twice in a short period of time? No. The easy way to do it would be to buy first, sell as soon after as we could, and move at our leisure. And that's what we're doing. But it means that the funds financing the deal had to be in dollars, in our savings/investments in the USofA, and converted into euros as is was electronically transferred across the Pond. Should have been easy peasy too. It wasn't.

A video on PNC’s website explains that PNC is concerned that the tech companies that provide the digital platforms to pull funds out of our PNC account and deposit those funds into our French account are privy to too much of our information and cannot be trusted to handle that information in as secure a manner that PNC approves. PNC says that it is working hard to resolve this matter. But as a result, the major currency transfer companies have to provide people like me with burdensome workarounds, if they can provide their services at all given PNC's security protocols. PNC is apparently notorious in these circles as one of the major banks in the USofA that hasn't climbed on board the electronic banking train.

And given that PNC’s video explanation of their security concerns and their expression of determination to address those concerns is two years old, PNC is either incapable of addressing the concerns that do not prevent other major US banks from granting their clients access to their funds or is simply not interested in doing so. Either way, incapable or uninterested, PNC management’s attempt to convince me that they care about me fails to convince me that they actually do. 

Perhaps they do care about me, but they are simply incompetent. Incompetent. Not a word that you want to be associated with your bank.

In the end, I used the one of four currency exchange companies that I investigated that could actually move our money without requiring that we jump through 15 hoops and mortgage our cat. I will discuss their relative costs, speed, and convenience in a subsequent post.

BUYING AND SELLING A HOUSE IN FRANCE: QUICK TAKES #6

 

Little things can trip you up. 

Just about everyone of a certain age has purchased a house at one time in their lives. I realize that the current common wisdom is that the old aspiration of owning your own home instead of renting may be passé, but I still cast my vote for the benefits and satisfaction of ownership. We have lived that philosophy. Cathey and I have bought four houses in our several decades of marriage and we’ve sold two. A third is on the market. (I’m open to offers.) Let’s talk about some of the oddities of the process in France.

 GETTING YOUR MONEY BACK

You never do, do you? Below is a picture of how the kitchen looks today and, under that, a picture of the kitchen the day that we bought the house. You just can't put a value on that kind of work. 

THE MAYOR

The latest hurdle to clear if you are selling a property in France is getting the signature of your mayor. Why? To ensure that the village does not have plans for the property. Playground? Parking lot? Whatever. The mayor needs to sign off.

Gilbert’s a good guy. He’s the only mayor I’ve known since we moved here and he’s recently been elected to another six-year term. The one time that I needed his signature, on a document concerning something other than a property sale, he was most obliging. Signed on a weekend. But as you learn the longer that you live in France, every additional signature on a document can add weeks to its completion. That’s why I am reluctant to complain about the occasional noisy party down the street or the crap oven by the sidewalk in front of the house next door. I don’t want to be the needy, pushy foreigner.

So I let stuff slide that my French neighbors might find unacceptable. There may come a time that I will want Gilbert to be my friend in City Hall. Like when we sell our house.

MANSPLAINING 

When we were signing our agreement to buy the house that will suit us better in the coming years, I was surprised at the level of animosity exhibited by Madame Villa, the owner. I don't know whether Monsieur Villa is her second husband or if, for tax/inheritance purposes, they decided to put the house in her name alone, but clearly the Madame was in charge. And the Madame was not happy.

It seems that the agent through whom we are purchasing the house had fallen out of favor. When he would call the Villa household to ask questions or provide information, he would talk to Monsieur. Monsieur would then relay the gist of the discussion to Madame. And Madame did not appreciate all of the mansplaining concerning a deal that she was coming to believe might not be in her best interests. You see, the day that we signed the papers, the house was advertised by a brand new agency for a higher price than we were paying.

My advice to you, free of charge and worth every penny from a man on the cusp of his Golden Anniversary? Don't mansplain stuff to a fiery old lady who holds the reins of power. If the decision is hers, stay out of the way. On second thought, don't just stay out of the way. Run, do not walk, to your safe space while the deal goes down.

THE PRICE OF PROCRASTINATION

Ya know that smudge on the wall that I left when I bumped up against it when my forearm was smeared with burn salve because I'd reached into our car's hot motor to grab an errant fluid cap? How about the unpainted plaster around the skylight? The roofing around it has been sealed for over two years. Speaking of plaster, how about repairing the bit at the bottom of the stairs that got kicked out a while back? And the shutters on either side of the newly painted front door are different colors, one set wears the new color and the other, the old.

I know that stuff like that looks funny to prospective buyers. They are simple jobs. I should have done the work in a timely fashion, But I procrastinated. I'm old. It's France. So what? Well, I'm trying to sell the house. Every little undone piece of work is a black mark. So I paint and I plaster and slowly, the house is getting into ship shape. Maybe I should bump the price.

THANKSGIVING IN FRANCE: A PREVIEW #5

I'd like to say that our cousins all sat with us on our living room on Thanksgiving Day, drawing colorful turkeys while our dads watched over us, having loosened their ties just a bit, smoking their pipes. The moms, of course, were in the kitchen, chatting away happily among themselves while they prepared the feast. I'd like to paint that picture, but I don't remember Thanksgiving happening like that. I just don't remember Thanksgiving being a thing at all until Cathey made it a thing some years after we were married and ensconced comfortably in our house in Bath, Pennsylvania. That's when we instituted Second Thanksgiving, a full Thanksgiving gathering on the Saturday after traditional Thanksgiving Day.

You see, we worked on Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving kicked off a big holiday season for us, the money was too good to pass up, and we were young and foolish. But good came out of it. After family and friends had their celebrations with various in-laws and out-laws on Thursday, we had them over on Saturday after all of the holiday craziness had been purged from their systems.

Why am I writing about Thanksgiving several weeks early? Well, I always seem to remember to post about our French Thanksgiving well after the event. By then, stuffed with stuffing, I'm done. Put a fork in me. On to Christmas. So I thought that I'd short-circuit the process and post now instead of later. Here's how Thanksgiving works for us in France.

 Of course, the French don't celebrate Thanksgiving. They know about it, calling it the Fête Americaine. But it’s not on their calendar. And that means that whole turkeys may be difficult to find in November. The French prepare whole turkeys for Christmas, so if you want one a month prior, you have to special order unless you're willing to take your chances. Our local butcher is happy to oblige. In mid October, we order a seven-kilo bird for the day before the holiday so that we have time to brine it. That’s the right size for the eight people who can fit around our little table. Unfortunately, birds of that size are not always available. They are coming through heavier and heavier these days. Twelve kilos and more. Why? According to our butcher, because Americans in posh communities like big birds.

We order our bird, buy the bird, brine it, and roast it according to a process taken from one of Cathey's favorite cooking authorities. And it works. The birds are uniformly moist and tasty. Each time. Every time. If you are interested, leave a Comment and I'll pull up the recipe for you.

Fresh cranberries are not regularly available in France. Buy them when you see them and freeze them. Polenta had to replace corn meal for the stuffing for many years, but con meal is now becoming more readily available. Canned pumpkin isn't available at all for pie making but we have learned that you can buy a frozen pumpkin mousse in Picard, a chain of stores that exclusively sells frozen food. Speaking of pies, pecans are expensive and just don't taste the same as Texas pecans. And molasses and Karo syrup have to be imported in the suitcases of family.

Speaking of family, we have created something of an intentional one. We've introduced several folks to an American Thanksgiving - Brits and Irish and Swedes and, of course, French. We hear through the grapevine that who we include and who we exclude is a subject for discussion among our neighbors. Sorry, but our kitchen and dining are too small to invite a horde.

I'm not going to go into the details of Cathey's Thanksgiving dinner menu. Any discussion of that artful presentation requires pictures to fully appreciate it. It's the full monty. Soup to nuts. Literally. And as many as three different pies. Wine, of course. And maybe an aperitif and a digestif.

Leftovers and sandwiches and, in the dead of winter, gumbo made from turkey bone stock.

How do you slow things down enough during such a Thanksgiving dinner to take pictures? You can't take pictures when you are licking your fingers. Maybe next year...

LIVING IN PARADISE: FRANCE IN OCTOBER #4

 

 It's the end of October.  

The sky is blue with puffy white clouds floating by. The temperature approaches 70F during the day, hovers in the high 40s at night. The vines, having just been harvested, are turning color prior to dropping their leaves. Many of those leaves turn yellow before going brown but some blaze bright red. Same with the deciduous trees, mostly yellow but with some autumn colors more familiar to this Northeastern boy.

Yes, it's unusually warm and pleasant. If this is a result of climate change, I'm down with it. I just hope that next summer isn't a killer.

Even given this inviting weather, tourists seeking to prolong summer heat find warmer climates by heading farther south, into Spain. Perhaps taking a ferry or a short hop to northern Africa. Zanzibar is within reach. And many Europeans have spent considerable time in Southeast Asia. 

We remain here in our little rural village in the southwest of France. Quiet descends. Traffic eases. Scarves, sweaters, light jackets, and socks and shoes replace polos, shorts, and sandals. In fact, the easiest way to distinguish the French from the Brits in the region is the insistence of the Brits to continue wearing shorts well after the French have started to protect themselves from the coming gray, wet, cold winter that is inevitably on the way. When the French break out their scarves to 'warm their necks', it's a good idea to follow their example and break out your winter gear.

That's not to say that you need the kind of winter clothing that is required in our former stomping ground of eastern Pennsylvania. My good winter coats have yet to be worn here as I go into my 8th winter. They hang in a closet, not forgotten but not necessary, either. Jackets that are labeled good for three seasons in the USofA are good for four here. So I wear my good fleece. 

Last winter, we had one hard freeze. Simply not worth it to take the down jacket off the hanger for that one day just for the sake of nostalgia.

We miss the pop-up restaurants on the beaches. Do you know about them? They are stored in containers over the winter - full-service kitchens, tables and chairs, decking, and more. They are assembled in the spring right on the beaches up and down the coast. They serve just about anything that you could ask of a simple, unpretentious French restaurant, which is quite a lot. They are busy, busy, busy all summer. Then, suddenly, as if they were migrating birds, some signal unheard by mere mortals is heard and the restaurants disappear for another year.

Year-round restaurants shorten their hours. Folks who didn't take vacations with their kids in the summer close their businesses for a couple of weeks in preparation for the winter holiday push. All Saints and All Souls Day preparation begins. But the winter holidays are a subject for further discussion. 

It's the end of October and we are living in Paradise.

RANDOM THOUGHTS, SOME FRENCH SOME NOT: VENDANGE, BREXIT, GERMANY, AND MORE #3

 VENDANGES 

The rural south of France is crisscrossed with two-lane blacktops, narrow and with curves that skirt old property lines several times per kilometer. Unlike the USofA, where roads take precedence over property, the French are unlikely to consider condemning a portion of a vineyard just to straighten out the road a bit. Since I like driving on twisty roads, I like driving in France. But not during vendanges, the grape harvest.

Grapes are harvested at any hour of the day or night, depending on the personal preferences of the vigneron, the winemaker. Some go by the phase of the moon or other astrological and/or mythological signs and portents. Some are of the opinion that pure chemistry rules. Whatever the case, for several weeks and at unexpected times of day, you may find yourself on a curvy patch of blacktop behind a slow-moving tractor who has insufficient verge to let you pass…and probably would just as soon let you fend for yourself anyway.

It’s a miracle that the byways of the south of France aren’t littered with the burnt corpses of the cars of impatient French drivers who gambled on the absence of oncoming traffic once too often.

GERMAN ELECTIONS 

The European multiparty system has definite disadvantages. One problem was immediately manifest the night that we sat with German friends to watch election night coverage on German television. All the votes might be counted, but we still don’t know who the winners will be. Although the center-left party received a few more votes than the center-right party of Angela Merkel, both of those major parties come in close to 25%. Since it takes 50% + 1 to govern, it will be necessary for one of the parties to build a coalition.

Let the horse trading begin. 

If it can be said that there was one true winner, I suppose that it would be the Greens. They came in a solid third place, meaning that the party that they choose to align with will probably be able to form a government and name a prime minister to replace Merkel. It should be noted that the Greens in Germany are not just a fringe party. They may have only commanded 15% or so of the vote nationally, but they are the party that will be running Berlin. 

The negotiations could take weeks, months. And so, after all the votes have been counted, the question of who won the election is still an open one.

UPDATE: As we go to press, the three parties of the left have announced a tentative agreement to form a coalition. That was the expected result, certainly. But the devil is in the details. Stay tuned.

BREXIT

On second thought, no. I will not discuss Brexit today. What’s going on in England right now is simply too unnerving to try to tickle apart in a few sentences. It’s as if the USofA had elected someone like Donald Trump as President. Unimaginable with consequences too convoluted to untie contemporaneously. We just have to hope that the next generation of historians can come up with a coherent rationale for WHAT IN GOD’S NAME WERE PEOPLE THINKING!

 

 THANKSGIVING

This week, I will go to our local butcher and order a turkey for our Thanksgiving dinner. It’s necessary to order a month or more in advance because French shops don’t normally keep whole turkeys on hand except for Christmas. Wings? Breasts? Thighs? Yes. Whole turkeys? No.

Why? This is where the Gallic shrug comes in, that Franco-European gesture that signifies that a question has no discernible answer and that the ‘shrugger’ has no interest in pursuing the matter.

We order a turkey for pickup the day before Thanksgiving to give us time to brine it. We ask that the turkey weigh seven kilos - about 15 pounds for the metrically challenged among you. The bird is always delivered on time and is of uniformly excellent quality, but we have received turkeys ranging from five to twelve kilos. That 25 pound bird barely fit in our little European oven. 

Whatever their size as they are being prepared for the Thanksgiving table, our turkeys all suffer the same fate. Leftovers. Sandwiches. Freezer - if there's any meat left. Stock.

FINDING A HOUSE IN FRANCE: FIRST STEPS #2

 

First, be advised. I am not an expert in anything except my own experiences. And my experiences are confined to a particular time and place. If you have issues, I welcome them in Comments.

We've been house hunting in Herault on several occasions since 2003. (Herault is a French department, somewhere between an American county and a state.) We twice visited to find a holiday home from which to learn about and explore the region. After deciding that this region of France was where we wanted to settle in our retirement, another search led to our current home of seven and a half years. And recently, we searched for a home with broader, gentler stairs given the state of our old bones. So I do speak from experience. As always, my advice is free of charge and worth every penny.

There's no multiple listing service in France. Each agent has their own website and, while some agencies do cooperate with partner agencies, it can easily be the case that there is a house for sale next door to the one that you are viewing that fits your requirements, but there's no sign out front (There are seldom street signs in our region.) and your agent doesn't have a clue. That's one reason to employ a more scattershot strategy than you might in the USofA.

The internet is your friend and there are multiple ways to take advantage of what the internet has to offer.

Once you have picked a region, do a simple Google search. And yes, even though you will be searching in France, such search terms as 'real estate Languedoc' or 'real estate Herault' work just fine. You can even take it down to an individual town . You'll get a bunch of hits - pages and pages. Take the time to poke through several of them and you will be rewarded. Fortunately for those without working French, most of the sites do translate into English. Eventually, if you expend time and effort, you will learn which sites seem to handle the type of properties most suited to your requirements. You may notice that some agencies update their websites frequently, some not so much. Decide for yourself what that might indicate.

In addition to the sites of real estate agencies, there are FSBO sites - For Sale By Owner. leboncoin.fr is the French equivalent of Craigslist, everything that can be sold privately (and legally) appears, sortable by type, price, region, and more. Agencies also post on leboncoin, so it's not exclusively private sales. You'll need at least beginner French to get through it properly. Here's how our ad looks. The site for Green Acres is similar, with both FSBO and agency ads. View the ads carefully. A private sale that doesn't include an agency fee may have more wiggle room in the price.

And then there's Facebook. Lots of pages and groups cater to anything and everything for sale as well as sites that are specific to real estate, to French real estate, to French houses in a specific region, to French houses under 50,000, and so on. My brief and recent experience tells me that Facebook is becoming very popular for both sellers and buyers. Whether you like or hate Zuck, his Frankenstein monster is hard to ignore. 

Never undersetimate word of mouth. Bakeries, butchers, supermarkets, and other high traffic venues often allow the posting of community announcements. Tabacs, the only stores allowed by law to sell cigarettes and other tobacco products in France, can be important community gathering places. The folks in the mairie, the city hall, usually have a pretty good handle on what's going on in their town. And in the village squares and in cafes, there are likely to be men and women who will be happy to engage with a stranger, even one with fumbling French, as long as the effort is sincere.

In sum, if you are looking to buy a house in France, there are multiple avenues available to assist you. Make a list of your requirements - important questions from buyers in our region include the nature of the outside space, is there a garage or available parking nearby, distance to local services, and such. Let your contact know how important those requirements are. Stick to your guns. And get to it. 

A journey of a thousand miles begins with having enough RAM.