help

[Dave&Olive]

please bare with me for a moment. can i open a french bank account without a french address. reason the exchange rate is good at the moment 151 to the . I want to take say a 60000 loan out on my house transfer the money into the french bank account to buy our place in france. then sell our house to pay off the loan .this will give us a cash advantage in case it takes us months to find a house and i can stay in employment over here untill both happens does this sound O.K.

[Mike_87300]

surely any advantage you gain on the exchange rate is going to be outweighed by the interest payments on the loan?

[Kevinmc]

Regarding a bank account, yes no problem at all. Use Britline and you don't even have to visit France. Apply for an application pack via their website, it will be with you in a couple of days.
Although, some people don't like or have had bad experiences in daya to day dealings with Britline, as a quick, easy way of opening an account, it's ideal.

[Camille]

I would open a bank account near where you're going to be purchasing a property. Britline can only help so far and eventually you're dealing in French anyway so you may as well be more local and have people who actually know you, and you know them, and when you need to check your balance they don't look at you like you're from Mars even though it's the same company.

As for your plan, do you really want to take out a loan in sterling, and convert all at once to euros to purchase a property (at this all-time high or nearly all-time high of the euro --- which means horrible exchange from sterling to euro). Would it not be better to pay as you go, and wait to transfer the funds later? Send only what you need now, and it will likely be either the same rate or better months from now.

Camille

www.maisonquercy.com

[A_Redman]

Why not just open a Euro deposit account with your UK bank which you can do in less than half an hour.

[Dave&Olive]

fist thank you for all your replys.will have a look at on line banks mentioned,i have been talking to a few "bar room" advisors who seem to think the euro now with turkey and the ex eastern bloc countries now joining will put preasure on the euro and it could level at 1.60-1.75 to the any experts or views out there would be welcome because this could alter my plans i have been thinking along the lines of 1.35 to the ????

[Carolski]

No one seems to have discovered Caisse D'Epargne, totally French and to date we have not found any of the staff spoke English. However, we managed to open an account when we visited last September (with limited French and many hand gestures!!). There were no documents required apart from passports and UK address. We explained that we were planning to move over summer 2004 and 'et voila'! we had ourselves a bank account. We came over a few weeks ago having now got a place to rent for 6 months and visited said bank in our new location,explained (again with limited french and many hand gestures!)that we now wished to transfer our account from Royan where we opened it initially to new location and deposit 100 euro's in our initially empty account and that in 2 months time we should have more to deposit on the sale of our UK property. No probs, we were issued with a folder and paid 32 euro's for a Carte Blue ( usual practice). All very painless and they were so helpful.

So far so good, hope this helps.

Carole