Where to live, where to buy?
This question must be one of the most often asked and yet one of the least thoroughly researched. How many times have we heard people say – ‘We only visited the property for ten minutes and fell in love with it at first sight.’ Sadly a year down the road they follow with, – ‘The house is lovely but we cannot find anything around to meet our needs!’
It seems inconceivable that people would rush into buying a property and often spend all of their money, without first ensuring that it at least ticks most of the boxes that they need. Amazingly though we hear this scenario regularly.
These pages are here to try to give you some of the answers, to help you share other peoples experiences and read first hand what it is REALLY like living in France. How can you make informed decisions when you perhaps only research with tourist books and information. Living in France is a very different story to the fortnight away on holiday or the snatched weekend house hunting.
The many people who chase the dream of buying an affordable property in the French Countryside with land are very often totally disillusioned on arrival. They have not realised that living in this beautiful country is actually so different to what they are used to. Each Department is very unique to itself and terrain, weather and local traditional life can influence greatly how your dream life evolves. Having the responsibility of horses, pets and children becomes a heavy burden when you don’t even know how to get the phone working let alone the Internet!
Just ask yourself, if you are interested in Dressage would you purposefully move to a department where the only horses anywhere pull ploughs and the locals think you are a ‘crazy person’ because you actually just ride a horse. If you don’t farm or breed it for meat you are misunderstood. To top it all, to watch anything remotely like a dressage class you have to drive a five hour round trip. The answer would possibly be a NO. If you enjoy fishing, why move where fishing lakes do not exist. If you are very anti hunting then could you tolerate the very traditional French life during the hunting season if it were literally on your door step? So why do many ex-pats buy properties inappropriately and then dislike it?
This is not the minority it is surprisingly the majority. Hopefully by discussing, real life living, with people in different areas we can bring knowledge and understanding and you the reader can make better educated decisions about where to buy and settle down. Most people that return ‘back home’ do so because they just do not research properly and rush in to buy.
We want to hear from you, contact us and we can help explain the differences and facilities and way of life in all the different departments. You can then match your requirements with what the departments have to offer.
What is the legal procedure for buying in France? Read Part 2
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