sazzyberry

Hi, Does anyone know of an english speaking dentist in the 36 region, in and around the Buzancais area? any information would be greatly appreciated. Many thanks

Hi FairyNuff, The bill states that it is for a maison secondaire and we pay the same times as you, June and December. Seems strange that we are paying the same as you for a maison prinipale but I suppose it varies from commune to commune, we come under Buzancais. Thanks for your reply. Sarah  

Hi Pickles, Thanks for your reply. Yes the lorry does come round to our house. The bill  comes from the local tresorie. So it's not just a case that if you stopped paying they would stop collecting then? Are you saying that you are legally obliged to pay the bill? Many thanks Sarah

Hello, I wonder if anyone can help me, we have a second home in the Indre region which we have owned since 2004. Every 6 months we get a bill for dustbin collection which is in addition to our tax d'habitation and fonciere.  It works out as roughly 152 euros a year which doesn't sound a great deal but when you work out that we only use the house for about 5 weeks a year is quite a lot for 5 or 6 collections. My question is do we have to pay this bill or can we just take our rubbish to the communal bins as and when needed? I am about to be made redundant so any savings we can make would be hugely beneficial. If anyone knows the answer to this I would be most grateful.

Thank you for all your replies. CGT is another issue I am unsure about. Does anyone know whether you still have to pay this if you intend to put the profit made on the sale into another property in France? Although I suppose if you have to sell first and then rent while you search for your new property, you would have to pay the tax liability anyway but could you claim it back if you purchase another house? Again any help would be most appreciated especially if anyone else has actually been through this process.

I have searched the forum but cannot find an answer to my question which is: has anyone bought a house in France without selling their current one first. We currently have a holiday home in France and would like to make a permanent move to France in the near future. Our intention would be to live in our current holiday home whilst searching for our 'dream' home in France. We would need to sell the current house to fund the purchase of the new one but understand that the system is very different to the UK as they don't seem to have 'chains' and once you have found your new house you need to sign the promise to buy. How does this work if you still have a house to sell?? Any advice would be gratefully received as we do not really want to sell first and then rent somewhere whilst we search for our next property, well not unless we really have to. Many thanks       

Thanks Pierre, very useful. Sounds like this is the way to go.  

Yes I know what you mean, is it really a holiday when you are installing a kitchen and bathroom???!!! I don't suppose you can remember roughly how much the initial cost was can you? Does the tank have to be a certain distance from your house do you know? Yes electricity certainly seems more expensive in our opinion and like you say it's good to have a bit of both in case of power cuts which I understand are quite common in France. Thanks again for your help.  

Thanks for your reply. I take it you only use your house as a holiday home at present then? How would we find out about getting a tank installed? Do you have to pay an initial cost to rent it or anything? Was it 150 euros to fill it? Sorry so many questions!!!  

Does anyone have any information about the cheapest way to heat your french property? Our house had no form of heating when we bought it and we are gradually getting round to installing central heating. We currently have an electric fire but this seems to be very expensive as we just had a bill of 111 euros for what amounts to 5 weeks usage! We currently use the house as a holiday home but intend to move there as soon as possible. We currently use bottled gas for the radiators we have installed but are unsure if this will work out very costly if we are there all the time. I know you can get the bigger bottles which stand outside, does anyone know if these work out cheaper? We have also seen the large containers people have in their gardens but are these just for oil? We have no woods unfortunately so a wood burner is probably out of the question. Any help would be greatly appreciated.       

This is really weird, we are in Rainham in Medway. There must be something about the Medway Towns that makes people want to move to France!!! Funny that!

Spooky, we live in SE England also, in Kent. Yeah I hope we will, I have done my sums and they seem to add up if we are careful. That's right, the people renting your house in the UK pay the rates. Our plan is to live in France for 4 or 5 years to finish our renovation and then decide what we want to do. We have a lump sum of money to pay for the renovation so the rental money will just be for day to day living. 

Sounds great, I can't wait to move there. We just need to finish our extension on our house here then intend to sell it, downsize and rent out that house to give us an income. Glad to hear that the cost of living in France is less then as we have read conflicting info on this and having only been there on holiday so far it's hard to tell. We know our bills for the french house are a lot less than England!! So where are you originally from? 

Hello Linda and Richard, so how long have you been living in France and how are you finding things?.

Hello and thanks for your reply. Our house is in a small village called Le Grand Juscop, which is just outside Argy. Our nearest big town is Buzancais, not sure if you have heard of it?? Whereabouts are you?  

My husband and I are planning to move to our house in the 36 region early next year. We have had the house for 4 years and currently have a phone line but this has been disconnected. We will obviously be having this re-connected when we move there and are also interested in getting Sky so we can watch English channels and also Eurosport. We also want the internet but would prefer broadband, does anyone know if this is available in our region or how we can find this out? Any help would be appreciated and also any info regarding Sky and the cheapest way to get this as the info we have read may be out of date now. Many thanks