Abertawe

The purchasers are French so maybe as you suggest sterling would not be possible. :-/

In general, the French seem to have a strong sense of autonomy which has to be admired. The post war UK/US relationship has always been biased in favour of the latter - have a read of 'Brittania Overuled' by David Reynolds. Anybody who thought that our Prime Ministers ever had just their own fingers on the nuclear button should think again - we could never have launched without the permission of the US but they could have launched without even a nod in our direction.  DeGaulle's insistance on France having their own 'Force de Frappe' made a lot of sense and released them from covert US influence.    

Thanks guys. We'll now contact the agent and see what can be done - we'd not even considered asking for the sale proceeds in Sterling either. Cheers.

Aberaeron maybe :-)  

Ditto. Excellent article and what we all knew except the French it seems.

Well we've decided not to stay. We were entitled to claim French social security, but the paperwork became a nightmare we could not handle. To be fair the UK paperwork was just as bad - but at least we could cope with the language when the inevitable problems arose. Anything other than a 'normal' claim seemed to throw a real spanner in the works. As with many others our company pension had shrunk quite a bit, booking were zero on our little Gite, and our small business just frazzled. Both a nudge above 60, we are now in receipt of pension credit here in the UK  - but this took quite some time to sort out. Anybody thinking of doing the same needs to be prepared for at leat 3 months wait if not more as the system here overheats with demand. We also had a nice 'welcome home' present from those nice tax people - 5 returns to complete. Arghhh. Hope that's cheered you all up.  

We've recently signed a sales contract on our house in France and have agreed (as we think is the norm) to complete with 3 months. In our case this was given as the 31st of May 2009. Does this mean it will all be done and dusted by then ie: all the legal stuff will be done and the cheque will be in our hands, or will it go beyond that date? Now we have signed, a friend of ours (really) has told us that 'legally' it can go 30 days beyond the date given - in which case it's going to cause us real problems with our UK puchase. Thanks guys.