Working at home in France for employer in UK

[Creusedwellers]

Dear all

This is an update on the "social contributions" issue which I started a few weeks ago. Thanks to a couple of the posters, I have now reached a solution and it IS possible to work for a UK employer from one's French home, provided of course, one is prepared to take the "medium" sized cut in take home pay. In brief, it works like this:

Join a portage company (I do recommend Challenge & Co (freelanceinfrance) for their understanding and flexibility). Get your employer to pay your salary into your British bank account (the salary should be paid gross plus the employer's NI contribution - assuming one's P85 has been processed and the DSS has given permission for you to be treated as a Category X NI (non) payer). You negotiate a good Euro price on your salary with a good FX co. Every month or every second month, you tell the portage company how much to invoice your employer in Euros. YOU pay the invoice by converting your Sterling salary to Euros and paying it over to portage co. They act like your employer, deduct all the necessary cotisations and issue you with a salary slip...et voila. The alternative was to pay my employers' cotisations plus my personal cotisations without the benefit of the portage co acting as my French employer, which would have left me with about 20% of my gross package - hardly enough to live on. Through the portage co, I'm left with 55% of my gross package. These percentages would obviously vary slightly depending on one's level of earnings. As solutions go, this is better than renting a flat in the UK for 6 months of the year, both financially and in terms of quality of life.

In answer to another question I raised during the course of the discussion. One DOES pay cotisations on interest from one's savings. Depends on the level, but it comes out at around 8% (and then one may still pay tax on the balance after cotisations).

Hope this is helpful.

[Will]

That's one way of doing it. I found it better to register as self employed in France. Cotisations were 46%, and not a lot of tax. By using a good accountant who knows what costs and expenses can be offset against what, your actual taxable income - on which your contributions are based - can be kept to a minimum, which has a very significant impact on what you actually pay. Bear in mind that cotisations are based more on turnover than profit, but there are legal ways of reducing turnover. That way I found I got to keep more like 30-40% (depending on loads of different things).