Dear Sweet 17. Siddalls are an extremely reputable company in our experience with French and UK registered and qualified advisors. We found the advice they gave excellent and it covered all the issues you are currently facing. We understand that they are legaly responsible for the advice they give and that they offer totaly Independent advice. We received all their recomendations in the form of written advice and the chap that we dealt with organised the notaire for us. We also took advice from a UK IFA and subsequently found out that what had been suggested to us was entirely inappropriate for our life in france as UK investments whilst appearing to offer higher rates of return offered no protection from french succession rules or taxation (something our UK IFA Knew nothing about whatsoever). In our case had we taken our UK IFA's advice and had one of us died we would have seen a third of our money and a third of our house being passed to our kids/step kids. Furthermore if I had tried to leave any capital for my step daughter she would have had to pay 60% in tax !!! All of this has now thankfully been resolved by using tax free French Investments My advice is to take qualified advice from a company registered in France such as Siddalls. It is true that much of there work is geared to investments but as this seems to be part of your problem this this could work out fine. As a matter of interest, the guy we used gave us advice well before we ever talked about investments for free and whilst I cant vouch for Siddalls as a whole, the local guy was excellent and very Knowlegable. The notion that you are trusting non qualified pundits with your capital on the internet is bordering on the riduclous and as a minimum at least speak with an IFA of somekind before taking advice from non insured, non regulated and possibly non qualified individual who will not be around to face the music should things go wrong for even the best intended advice given. Kind regards.
