House move

[bazfaz]

We are selling Chateau Faz and buying Faz Cottage. These events are scheduled for the same day in September. The agent for the house we are selling says that our notaire simply transfers the money we have received from our buyer to the notaire of the new house on that morning - easy, hooray for the internet. Yesterday the agent for the house we are buying telephoned to say this was not possible; and that we would have to send the money a week before we buy the new house, in other words a week before we have the money.

No wonder moving house is rated the third most stressful event in your life (after death of a spouse and divorce).

[bjd]

Why are you surprised? Surely that would have been too easy.

But I would find out why you have to send money for a house a week before you sign the papers. Smells fishy to me. Maybe the notary wants to make a quick investment?

[bazfaz]

bjd, we are of course not going to take out a loan for a week. The whole business is nonsense and something the 2 estate agents and 2 notaires can sort out. I agree with you that it just seems as if someone wants to have our money to get a week's interest. It would be much but multiply it by the number of house buyers in a year and it is significant.

[lagatta]

kerouac had some comments about this, and certain agreed-upon legal fictions in France involving real estate; perhaps he'll have ideas. Does this mean you are downsizing to a smaller place? Will moving house also mean selling furniture and other items?

[bazfaz]

Yes we are downsizing. There are several reasons for this but the big reason for selling our house and moving out of the region is the unacceptable behavious of certain bureaucrats towards us.

The new abode is a house in a village. It has the same number of bedrooms and bathrooms as our current house. We intend to knock down a wall to increase the size of the sitting room. There is a good sized dining room-kitchen. There is a swimming pool and a garden that is both flat (our current one is difficult and terraced though very beautiful) and smaller. We will certainly make the garden more beautiful.

I don't know if we'll have to get rid of any furniture. We are going to measure up in 10 days and then we'll know.

[bazfaz]

The estate agent selling our house has telephoned to say the estate agent we are buying from is talking crap. Our notaire will have the money from our house sale the morning the final contract is signed. She will transfer it in seconds to the notaire of the house we are buying. End of problem.

So when we come to sell the new house in a few years we shall avoid using that agent. They seem clueless.

[Deleted]

Yes, of course he was talking crap. You can make estate agents jump through hoops in these troubled times.

[spindrift]

So when we come to sell the new house in a few years

Baz - what do you mean? where will you go next?

[Deleted]

I take it that Baz is still planning on leading an exciting life full of adventure rather than settling down for the last time and wasting away.

[bazfaz]

Mrs Faz's experience of French bureaucracy means that she does not want to have one of us dying here. So she is planning a move in about five years to a hovel in Britain.

[spindrift]

I'm stunned!

[bazfaz]

Every country has its own way of going about things. But France is very highly regulated in many aspects of life and the bureaucrats who enforce the rules can be little Hitlers. Our current experience with who should pay for making a cliff on our land safe is a case in point: the bureaucrats held a meeting to which we were not invited and where they tried to persuade our neighbour to take us to court, saying they would back him up. As I said, this was done in our absence. And these people are civil servants who are supposed to serve all people not just who they favour. Our mayor was present at that meeting but he didn't protest on our behalf that it was not correct behaviour. Am I being unreasonable to suspect that the bureaucrats adopted this attitude because we were foreigners?

Currently we are selling our house. We cannot (as in England) go to a lawyer and say: here is the name of the buyer's lawyer, go ahead and do the sale. A notaire (state official) handles the sale for both parties; we are sent questions about about whether the pool (built 7 years ago) had insurance for the building works; we are asked to produce evidence that we have paid income tax; etcetera. The notaire informs our mayor. Our mayor sends off documents to the prefecture; since this is the holiday season the competent bureaucrats are on holiday and nobody covers for their work; because we are selling land above a certain size it has to be offered to local farmers and this takes 2 months from the time the prefecture returns the papers; but if you pay what is in effect a bribe they will get off their bums and do the necessary work in only one month. Nobody keeps us informed about what stage our sale is along the line of notaire-mayor-prefecture-land office. We have a date of 22 September for the sale of this house (the purchaser is eager to get in while the weather is still good) and also for the purchase of our new house. We have no guarantee the bureaucrats will have done their work in the two months that have been available to them.

Mrs Faz is right not to want to go through the bureaucratic hoops on my death (I am older so likely to die first). You cannot leave your property to whom you like in France; there are rules. The surviving spouse gets half the estate with the other half divided between the children. Mrs Faz has 3 from a previous marriage; I have one. We also brought different sums of money to our marriage. We cannot stipulate in a will how this is to divided, we must follow the law. The house we are living in is part of the estate so in theory Mrs Faz would only get half the house on my death and if she was on bad terms with one of the 4 children she could in theory lose the house she is living in. (No wonder I am so accommodating with their myriad food fads) In fact it seldom comes to that. And a law was passed fairly recently where the surviving spouse can have the continuing use of the estate in her/his lifetime. We have been to a notaire and signed the necessary form. But I think it is wildly improbable that everything would proceed smoothly if the case of my death. I think that hurdles we cannot even imagine now would suddenly appear. I think that it would be horrendous to have to deal with it when you are still in the shock of bereavement.

This has turned into a bit of a rant. Sorry.

[BigIain]

But surely things will never be so bad as to lead to a return to the UK? Maybe a move to Spain or Portugal would be better? I think you should have Mrs Faz investigate the business of estates/inheritance across Europe and then start taking the appropriate language lesons for your next move in five years.

[spindrift]

Life is, indeed, suffering

[bazfaz]

Mrs Faz needs to be within easy driving distance of a Ryanair airport so she can make frequent visits to her family. That is her main criterion for where we live. Moving to the UK makes visiting her cildren even easier.

[Deleted]

You paint a bleak but mostly accurate picture of French bureaucracy, Baz. I have found that I grudgingly support it most of the time for the inheritance restrictions, because I have seen too many unfair situations elsewhere. At the same time, I completely agree that it should be possible to cut unworthy heirs out of an inheritance, which is not officially possible in France.

For people just joining the show, the basic rule is (let's say there is just one parent left) that if you have 1 child, you can leave 50% to the child and 50% as you wish. If you have two children, you leave each child 33% and you have 33% to leave to anyone else. If you have three children, each will get 25% automatically and you can do what you want with the remaining 25%... and so on. Of course most people don't bother with the "extra" share and 2 children get 50/50, 3 children get 33/33/33 and so on. They cannot receive LESS.

And that brings us to the situation of having a horrible child who does not deserve anything and a wonderful perfect child who should receive everything. Leaving aside the concept that the parent's perception may be skewed, there are all sorts of ways of distributing the wealth ahead of time, before it gets down to inheritance. Some of it is sneaky and some of it is totally official. But it always involves annoying bureaucracy no matter what in France. I sort of doubt that you can avoid this in most other countries.

My own take on it is that the heirs should have everything decided and settled before anybody starts dying. This is done through 'donations' ahead of time, although there are ceiling limits on what you can give at any one time. You can even give away the house you are living in while keeping the right of the last surviving spouse to live in it until death.

Basically, just about all of us feel immortal until it is too late.

[bazfaz]

This inheritance law had unexpected consequences. It was meant to promote fairness and avoid disastrous quarrels. But in the countryside it simply meant that farms were divided up and the plots of land became smaller until it was hard for peasant farmers to scratch a living.

So, instead of scrapping the law they have tried to address its worst effects by letting farmers have first call on land being sold so that they could increase the size of their farms that the laws of inheritance had made small in the first case.

This is yet another law made in Paris. Nobody wants to farm round here. The land is poor and really is only suited to vines and maybe olive trees. But it is terraced and so difficult to manage. So farmers (even in the years we have been here) have retired and their children have long gone to the cities. Nobody will want to farm our plot which is not only terraced but has a parking area, paths, steps, swimming pool - let alone the house and terrace. But we are selling something above the magic figure of 2,500 sq metres so we have to go through this charade.

Care to guess the size of our plot?

2505 sq metres.

Crazy or what?

[BigIain]

If I had had the cash, I would have bought the Fazerie in an instant!! Its a great catch for someone. We should have had a whip-round on here to buy it... even with the rockfalling cliffs.

[spindrift]

Well, actually I did have the idea to whip round and start a fund to pay the cost of the rock damage but Baz wasn't enthusiastic. Dear Baz, he is a Stoic.

[bazfaz]

Bless you, it was a lovely thought. But we no longer felt any joie de vivre here.

[Deleted]

I totally understand Baz's decision, as it just takes one incident to poison the atmosphere of a village. However, I still don't think it had anything to do with being a foreigner but just an "outsider."

[happytraveller]

Oh dear... sounds messy ! Good luck with the house move and I hope you'll feel at home in your new place Baz.

[Deleted]

In a village, you can never be anything other than an outsider if you come from elsewhere. At best, you can be a "nice outsider, almost like us".

[Deleted]

Aug 17, 2009 20:00:05 GMT kerouac2 said:

In a village, you can never be anything other than an outsider if you come from elsewhere. At best, you can be a "nice outsider, almost like us".

This is so true. I've been gone from the village where I grew up for 3o years or more and when I visit I am still considered a native and people I know who have moved there and lived there during those 30 years are still considered outsiders. I'll run into people and they'll say "ah,you're home".

[bixaorellana]

I went half of my freshman year and all of my sophomore year of high school in my mother's home town. Some of her teachers were still teaching and routinely called me by her name, and I got used to answering to it.

We moved to Savannah in my junior year. There was a girl with my mother's name in some of my classes and most of the time when the name was called at roll, I would automatically answer.

I still think I'm partly to blame for the girl not getting caught for absenteeism and getting pregnant and having to leave school before graduating.

[bazfaz]

We have now met the difficult notaire for the house we are buying. She will not accept that the notaire down here can transfer money on the internet on the day we are completing the the purchase. She will not even accept it if the notaire here sends her an email that the money is being transferred to her account. She will only accept a cheque. So I must drive one hour in the wrong direction on the day of the 2 house sales to our notaire and when the purchaser of our house has signed our notaire will write out a cheque to cover our house purchase in the Lot. I must then drive for 5 hours to give it to the notaire of the house we are buying. Then she will accept we have bought the house.
Curiously she will allow that the sale is going through if our notaire here sends her an email saying I am on the way with the cheque.
She is too stupid to see there is no difference between my driving with a cheque and a notaire-to-notaire bank transfer - she will not have the money in either event but will still accept that my carring the cheque is OK.
And if I have an accident and the cheque goes up in flames?

[Deleted]

She probably has insurance for that.

Next month, I will be doing notaire festivities myself when I finally official purchase my upstairs space that I have occupied illegally for more than 10 years. This particular notaire does not seem all that dynamic, because last month I received a letter that said something along the lines of "I am now in possession of all the documents but we had better wait until after the summer holidays to do anything else." Did not bother to ask if we were available or anything. Before I got stuck in the same place, I would rush off on a long holiday the moment the summer holidays were finished -- what would he have done then?

[Deleted]

How are you feeling about this move, Baz? Is it a new adventure in an interesting new place to you, or are you feeling bitter about being forced out of the other place by irate villages with torches?

(In my last move, I was happy to be evicted after my court rent battle, because I needed the impetus to move on.)

[bazfaz]

We feel happy about our new house. We just want the next 5 weeks to be over so we can move and start afresh.
We have asked one company to quote for move our goods and there was an answerphone message when we returned this evening saying it was too big a job for him. ? We don't have pianos or ping-pong tables. Someone else is coming tomorrow to give a quote.

[bjd]

Sounds like you should use a different notary, Bazfaz. This woman sounds as though she is still using an abacus.

I'm not quite sure how one chooses a notary in France. We have had good experiences, as well as bad, but we rarely seem to have chosen the person ourselves. It usually ended up being the one of the person we were dealing with. But nobody says you have to use that one, if I'm correct.

We bought an apartment a few years ago, and it was the agency who gave us the name of a notary he usually dealt with. The guy was perfect, competent and the sale was hassle-free. But while we were waiting with the seller, he told us that for the place he was buying later that day, it had been totally screwed up by another notary and that he had had to put his furniture into storage and move in with his in-laws for a month.

Good luck with the move.