[House Finding services]

The problem is that agents fees are about 8% of the sale price, so much higher than in the UK for a house sale.

[Any advice/help buying a property in France]

We have bought 2 houses in France and sold one.  If you offer the full price on a house then that is legally binding.  If however you offer less than the asking price you can be outbid quite legally. 

[Pompe a chaleur]

Hi Gluestick, we have a woodburner fitted (almost) for next winter....I agree on the woodburner but it seems a shame to pull out a gas boiler that is already working.  Just use it to heat hot water rather than put in a new tank (expensive).  Unless of course the original tank has an immersion with night time heating already installed.  In SW France were we live I believe that air to water heat pumps are the way to go rather than water to water heat pumps as they require a bore hole or a large coil in the garden to extract heat from the ground and that is expensive.  I did consider it but couldn't justify the expense and extra work ( i have a digger and a large plot so I could have done it)  We did pull up all the floors in the house and fit underfloor heating and that was well worth the effort,  prior to that we used an air to air heat pump which works well but leaves the feet cold and that is very uncomfortable.

[Pompe a chaleur]

Thinking some more if you already have a gas boiler then I would say keep that and install a heat pump as well.  The reason being in very cold weather the heat pump is very inefficient so use the gas boiler then.  When the air temperature is above 7C air to water heat pumps become much more efficient so use the heat pump then.  Also heat pumps are not good at heating water to more than 55C.  For very hot water a  gas boiler is more efficient.  If you only need water for a shower (38C) then a heat pump is fine.

[Pompe a chaleur]

We have a 12kW heat pump that heats our underfloor piping and hot water.  It is sold in the Uk by Trianco and costs £2000ish with a further £200 for transport to SW France.  I fitted the system which is just a plumbing/wiring job.  The heat pump is a grey box about the size of a washing machine.  So far it seems to work well.  Just be aware that heat pumps give out a variable output in proportion to the air temperature.  So a 12kW HP actually only gives 6kW at 0C and 12kW at 20C.  Realistically expect betwenn 6 and 9kW in winter.  Don't contemplate a heat pump without good insulation.

[Guernsey Banks Warning!!!]

One of the reasons expats bank offshore is that it is very difficult to get a UK bank account once you are abroad......See this triggered by the collapse of the banks in the UK and IOM.

Report into the Banking Crisis

(printed 31 March 2009)

(http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmtreasy/402/402.pdf).

 

In the above report under

conclusions and recommendations point 13 of the report

states:

 

13.

We accept that there

is no specific regulation or law preventing the provision of

bank

accounts to expatriate

British citizens, but in practice the supply appears to have

been

extremely limited. As

such, many expatriates have been forced to deposit

their

money offshore,

outside the protection of the Financial Services Authority, and

the

Financial Services

Compensation Scheme, as a direct result of the way in

which

Financial Services

Authority regulations were interpreted in the UK. We

therefore

recommend that the

Financial Services Authority liaise with both the

Building

Societies Association

and the British Bankers’ Association, to identify why

provision

is so poor, and report

back to us on steps to be taken to ensure better provision in

the

future, whether by new

products, or greater access to existing products.

(Paragraph

101)

It would appear that the UK is the only country of 96

countries surveyed where it is common for their citizens to be refused an

onshore bank account in favour of an offshore one.  Considering what happened to

the Derbyshire building society customers when their parent company went into

liquidation in the Isle of Man and 100,000 UK citizens lost all their savings it is a wonder that Banks still actively try to force customers offshore once they leave the UK.  In our case HBOS tried to force us offshore recently when we wanted to open a new account to get a better interest rate.  We cpmplained to HBOS and that did no good.  We sent letters to the FSA and to the Treasury Select Committee(TSC) and after a lot of wrangling we finaly got HBOS to let us open a new account but not until we moved half of our savings to HSBC.  I have to say I was very impressed with HSBC and totally shocked at how HBOS treated us.  We have banked with Halifax and Bank of Scotland for many years.