When the French dream goes sour

[woolybanana]

Brits in trouble again, usual story. Very, very sad.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2751110/France-s-migrant-problem-Penniless-hungry-BRITONS-Their-dreams-La-Belle-Vie-turned-dust-Then-socialist-EU-neighbours-far-tougher-won-t-pay-benefits.html

If they wanna go back, why cant they just turn up in Dover and demand aid from the State? Or is that only for non-British people?

[Rabbie]

I am sure they would not be allowed to starve if they turned up at Dover. Of course it may be that the DM has exaggerated their plight but who am I to query the honesty and accuracy of the DM [6]

[Hereford]

We are benevoles with Restos de Coeur and every year we have at least one British family, last year and the year before it was two families.  Desperately sad but each year our "responsable" has said to us "why did they come" - there is little work locally (in Normandy) and they appear to speak little French anyway.

When people ask us about coming over we always say don't even think about it until you are retired and have a pension unless you have work lined up. Even then think hard about exchange rates, although at least for now basic health care is not a problem once retired

[idun]

 My first thought is the cost of getting as far as Dover, not as if petrol or diesel is still 35P a litre. AND if their passports have expired and they have families it could literally cost hundreds and hundreds of £'s to renew, which apparently they haven't got.

If they got 'home' then they would not starve, move in with their families or B&B accommodation from the council, but my friend's daughter and her family ended up in the latter after returning from Spain, and they soon got on their feet again.

This is what I was going to post on the phone phobia post yesterday, not quite word for word, but after saying that I always rebelled in my own little way and avoided as best I could what others were doing and still do, ie smart phones etc are not for me. I was going to say that our move to France was yet another of example of me not doing what others do, it was very rare when we did it. IF we hadn't moved when we did and I had seen programs encouraging such migration, I would have steered clear, never ever done it. For those that do, if not retired, then surely for anyone with a family,  a proper job and proper income has to be in place.

I don't have much sympathy really. IF you knew what was going on in my life at the moment, when instead of using common sense, an intelligent adult is acting like a dimwit and the hole they have already dug themselves into has turned into a cesspit, which they appear to prefer to wallow in, rather than try and climb out[:@]  Fools and their plights......... give me strength!

[YCCMB]

I think the producers of A Place in the Sun should be forced to set up a contingency fund to help all the people they've hoodwinked over the years....

Mind you, some people do make their own mess.

[mint]

[quote user="You can call me Betty"]I think the producers of A Place in the Sun should be forced to set up a contingency fund to help all the people they've hoodwinked over the years....

Mind you, some people do make their own mess.

[/quote]

Yes, these types of programmes should come with a health warning.

OTOH, I don't know why people in their 40s or even 30s should expect to sell their house in the UK, move to France and expect to live off the difference in price of properties forever or at least till retirement age and the receipt of a pension?

Of course, once the UK raised the retirement age and France at the same time refused to pay for health care costs of non-actifs, the fall-out was always going to be predictable.

As for the children they bring with them, who do they expect to pay for those until they are of earning age?[8-)]

[PaulT]

I have absolutely no compassion for the first case - sheer stupidity

[nectarine]

The first case in the article left me speechless ..... never been to France, couldn't speak the language and bought a house online sight unseen. That's got to be pretty silly in any language!

However, a chap who worked for an international removals company would tell me alarming stories of people going to Spain who were, in his opinion, generally unprepared. In his words, they'd go on holiday to Benidorm, then return to UK and sell up and come to Spain thinking that they could buy a pub and sit in the sun and drink all day. He said that about three years after moving them out, when they were full of bluster and boasting, he'd be moving them back to the UK again with a fraction of their possessions and they'd be moaning about their misfortune.

Fools and their money etc.........

[Rabbie]

What has happened to people's sense of personal responsibility? Why do people expect to be bailed out when they do something stupid?  I was always brought up not spend more money than I had and if possible to have some put aside for a rainy day. I do feel some sympathy for the couple who ran their farm for seven years and then were hit by bad luck but they do seem to be trying their best to support themselves and not expecting to be bailed out as a right.

To me it seems reasonable that if you have not contributed to a system you should not expect anything from it. People need to learn to read the small print.

[Chancer]

Seems that in many cases the poor retired parents are the ones that are expected to shoulder the Financial responsability, I have seen several cases like that around here and as someone who even before leaving school had started to repay the moral and social debt to my parents and who continued to do so throughout their lives and retirement, these families that sell up in their 40's with school age children and then want their parents to finance their lifestyle choice sicken me to the core, totally selfish and the parents and offspring are the victims.

I was seduced by APITS and was happy to follow my instinct and come to France without doing any homework but I am and always will be a survivor, my choice has not impacted on or affected anyone but myself.

After finally cracking and getting UK TV I am being brainwashed once again, this time to become a pilot and go and fly for Susi air in Indonesia and crash into a mountain in Papua [:D] On the last program they showed a divorced guy of my age that had done just that excepting the crash. But like Idun I dont like to run with the crowd, my coming here was an individual thing even if I did find on arrival that there were English ghetto villages dotted around.

People around me cannot comprehend that I will in the near future sell up and do something else, they cannot comprend that I did many different things before, whether they are 25 or 55 they all see no possible alternative future other than what they are currently doing and have always done.

There is always a place for dreamers, they should not be discouraged except when they are going to impact on others, if not then everywhere would be like France.

[NormanH]

I haven't looked in detail at these cases, but I cannot understand how any one can have £350,000 to start with and spend it.

Buy somewhere for 100,000 (4 times the price of anything I have ever bought in France), and spend 50,000 doing it up (10 times the amount I have spent on travaux)   keeping 200,000 which you do not touch.

There is no excuse for frittering away large sums of money then asking for help which was designed for people who have never had anything.

[mint]

[quote user="NormanH"]I haven't looked in detail at these cases, but I cannot understand how any one can have £350,000 to start with and spend it.

Buy somewhere for 100,000 (4 times the price of anything I have ever bought in France), and spend 50,000 doing it up (10 times the amount I have spent on travaux)   keeping 200,000 which you do not touch.

There is no excuse for frittering away large sums of money then asking for help which was designed for people who have never had anything.

[/quote]

Norman, they can't not touch that money because they have no job and no pension?

[dave21478]

As the saying goes - idiots and their money are soon parted.

I have no sympathy at all - they made stupid decisions and now have to face the consequences.

Aside from the farmers who appear to have made a go of it and had bad luck, but the article is missing too much detail about their situation for me to get really judgemental!

I know a couple here, British, who have sunk every penny into an uninhabitable shit-hole that I wouldnt keep a dog in. It has potential, but needs 100k+ of work to get it up to scratch, which is out of the question for them since they have to get their food from resto du coeur. No jobs, minimal benefits, a little kid at school.....I dont think their vision of The Good Life here included being ankle-deep in mud for most of the year and living in a two-room bothy with no water or electricity.

[Pommier]

It's not the fault of Place in the Sun if idiots do zero research, move over and then fritter every penny they have (why not give up 'the dream' when they could still afford the ferry back to the UK?).

The poor children whose lives are now ruined since they have no qualifications get my sympathy as do the poor ageing parents whose last few years are being spent in poverty and misery.

[NormanH]

Norman, they can't not touch that money because they have no job and no pension?

Sorry I didn't explain myself clearly.

You survive by working, running a business, or having bought somewhere that you can let part of.

If you get to the point that you need to touch the 200k (or some other fixed amount you have previously decided)  you immediately  call it a day...

What you don't do is continue to fritter, or pour money into a black hole.

In other words you keep a reserve and when you have no more than that you use it to go back home.

[dave21478]

But that involves common sense and responsibility, both of which seem to be in ever-diminishing supply.

[NormanH]

I wonder if they have been eroded by the prices people were getting (possibly still are) for UK property without necessarily ever having done much to earn it.

A couple whose parents have both left them average price houses might easily have inherited 400/500 K without ever lifting a finger.

To them it is isn't real money.

My latest flat cost 25,000 € of which I borrowed 20,000 at about 350 a month over 5 years.

These are sums that I can envisage and hope to manage to pay.

If I had 250,000 I could buy 8/9 of these live in one and let the others....

Greed also plays its part and what the French call 'Folie de Grandeur'

[dave21478]

Absolutely.

Not that long ago, selling your mediocre 3 bed semi in Wolverhampton netted you enough money to splurge on a charming French rural property in an idyllic village and oh what a life of fine wines and fresh eggs and popping to the shops to buy a baguette and waving hello to the cheery locals. Oh and since property prices were also on the up in France, it was a solid investment to be re-sold later and make even more free money.

Except the charming rural property leaks like a colander, is uninsulated and fitted with an antique heating system that costs a fortune to run, has rotten roof beams and a clogged fosse. The fine wines turn out to be rather expensive and the cheery locals hate them.

And then the property bubble bursts and people no longer make significant fractions of a million pounds by just sitting on their bums doing nothing.....

Lots of people did well out of it, making hay while the sun shone, but many people were too complacent and made stunningly bad decisions based on assumptions and guesswork.

[YCCMB]

And now, you can sell your mediocre 3 bed semi in Wolverhampton fro probably even more, buy a French property (quite possibly done up by somebody who has already fled for the hills and is losing a packet on the resale) and start your rural dream life.

And, as the people in the article have found, once you've spent all your savings (far faster than you ever dreamed possible), you will still have the French house like a millstone round your neck, and have no hope whatsoever of getting a foot back on the UK property ladder.

But of course, things could change yet again!

[Chancer]

[quote user="NormanH"]Norman, they can't not touch that money because they have no job and no pension?

Sorry I didn't explain myself clearly.

You survive by working, running a business, or having bought somewhere that you can let part of.
If you get to the point that you need to touch the 200k (or some other fixed amount you have previously decided)  you immediately  call it a day...

What you don't do is continue to fritter, or pour money into a black hole.

In other words you keep a reserve and when you have no more than that you use it to go back home.

[/quote]

I think the fixed amount would be a lot less than 200K be it £'s or €'s but I guess it all dépends on what you started with but what you say is absolutely true, these people cannot have just found themselves broke with thousands of €"s of bills to pay without burying their heads in wine bottles for a very long time.

My place cost me a tenth or a twentieth of what they paid, I was sure that I had enough savings to live and do the place up but I was wrong, the costs of  living over 10 years has eaten away at the capital, in 2007 I really Drew in my reins and reduced my total expenditure to €7.5K per year, by 2010, the year I stopped doing the depressive accounting I was down to €4.1K per year and had also hit the bottom "comfort limit" of my capital nearly one tenth of what you mentioned, since then I have only spent when I have had the money, I no longer dip into my savings, I dont spend what I dont have and have saved close to £4K since then which has moved me away from the sinking feeling limit.

Things are on the turn since a year now, I relet my UK property for 40% more than before, the £ has strengthened against the €, I started doing some paid teaching for the lycée and I completed my first 2 rental units in May. This summer however I had not one client as the factory was practically deserted until this week so I stopped work completely on the remaining flats and used materials that I already had to finish and redecorate my own flat.

In the last week I have got rentals for both flats up to the end of the year and probably beyond so I can once again buy materials and work can recommence, I have forgotten the phrase but something about cutting your cloth.

[Debra]

There is more to at least one of the stories than is admitted in the article but reading it makes me glad we couldn't sell our UK house when we moved over.  If we had, we'd have more than likely spent all the equity in it on some too big property and be in a worse position now.  (The amounts they paid for what they got seem far too high though so I don't think we'd have done as bad a job as they did but I can easily see that we may have ended up with something that was too much to handle).  As it is, it's annoying wanting to move (somewhere more convenient for my  kids' lycees) and being unable to because the housing market here seems to have died.  Still can't sell the UK property either but at least if I really had to I could still go back there.

[EuroTrash]

I'm sure there is a lot more to it, but what comes across from the article is that these people seem naive and feckless beyond belief. Buying a house unseen on the internet is mad in itself but did they even bother to read the paperwork to find out exactly what they were investing all their savings in or did they just look at the pretty pictures. They must have been sent the diagnostic report which must have mentioned the fact that there was no insulation and the place would cost a fortune to heat, the seller had to pay for the report and that's exactly what it's for, but no, they rock up and shock horror look there is no insulation, how were we to know, nobody told us. No matter what laws and systems you put in place to protect people from being ripped off you can't protect them from their own stupidity.

[Patf]

What puts me off about the article is that it's written by Samantha Brick - the DM reporter in France.

[NormanH]

Thickasa?

[idun]

Well, perhaps NH!

She said that it was 'hell' being so beautiful. She isn't even what I would call mignon, never mind tres belle. So would I trust her writing, nope, I wouldn't[Www]

But saying that, there are enough fools out there who get separated from their money and IF it is not quite 'right' about these folk, then sadly, I'm sure that there are others in the caca bouda.