Our Blog - Retiring in France

I've had several questions recently from people on Facebook related to us retiring in France, and so I thought I would try to put together a blog entry to answer all of the questions in a single place. I'll try to include why we chose to retire in France, what did *NOT* come into the decision, as well as things like apartment vs house.

First, I'll dispel a couple myths:

Myth: we moved to France to get away from Trump. No, in fact, we didn't. While we retired and moved a few months after the inauguration, the retirement and move had been in-the-works for several years.
Myth: we moved to France because it was cheaper. No, for us, it is more expensive for us to live in France than remaining in the US. This is due to a few things which I'll cover below.
Myth: we moved to France for better weather. While weather in Toulouse is good, in general, it is about the same. It is maybe a bit warmer in the winter, a bit less humid ... but it is more-or-less the same weather

Why did we pick France? We lived in Paris for a few years for work, and we really liked it. It is a different lifestyle, more relaxed. We really like history and ancient architecture and there are so many sights to see in Europe, and all of these sights are closer here than in the US. Travel is so much easier here ... by car, by train, by plane, by bus ... and in many cases, cheaper. Well ... cheaper other than gas prices! People ask us "what about Italy? what about Spain?" Well, perhaps it is as simple as, we didn't live there before. We have nothing against those countries, but we also really didn't know much about them.

Why did we pick Toulouse? We had a list of things that we wanted: cultural events, public transportation, lots of restaurants, open markets, and of course, a golf course. We wanted a "city" but something that is small enough to mainly walk everywhere. We have a car but we use it only for leaving the city, either for road-trips or to play golf. We wanted good weather so that we could play golf throughout the year. We looked at the larger cities ... Paris was too large, too expensive, and too far North. Lyon and Bordeaux were options. We picked Toulouse to start and, if after a year we didn't like it here, we would pack up and move somewhere else. It is a dynamic University town with a large international community, mostly due to being the headquarters of Airbus. There are tons of things to do here, great public transportation, an airport and train station.

Apartment vs house. This one is actually quite easy. We wanted to live in the center of town, so that we could walk the majority of the time. We want to be able to take public transportation when we want or need to, but we didn't want it to be the main mode of transportation. Once we narrowed down that we wanted to live in the center of town, a house was pretty much off the table as there are very few, if any, stand-alone houses. There are some, but you never know when (if ever) they would be available for sale. We did want a balcony for outdoor space, but Tom was happy to not have to mow the grass every week.

Rent vs buy. For us, buying was the right way to go. We know people who just rent forever and in some situations, that is actually the right choice. For example, if you don't have the cash to buy a house (and as retirees, getting a loan is a bit difficult), but you have a monthly pension or retirement income, then renting makes a lot of sense. Yes, you could attempt to get a loan based on the fact that you have a monthly pension coming in as well. If you may want to move around to different cities every few years to get the experience of living in different areas, then renting makes sense. If you don't want to have a large investment in a foreign country, then renting makes sense. We felt that we were ready to set down real roots here, and we wanted to be able to make our apartment more like "our" home, rather than someone else's property that we were using.

The immigration process is something that we investigated for several years. Unlike people with EU citizenship, Americans can not freely come to France to live and/or work. You may be able to get a job with a company in France but they would have to sponsor you for a work permit. It becomes easier if you are married to a French citizen, but we decided it wasn't worth trying to get divorced, find 2 French people, get married to them, and move to France. But even then, we wouldn't really be together then. So each year, we have to request permission from the French government to live here for another year, and we can not work (we sign a document stating that we have no intention to work in France). After a certain number of years, we can request a longer-term "resident card", as well as French citizenship. Each year, we have to show that we have enough money to support ourselves (without working of course) since they don't want people to come to France and then become dependent on state assistance. Here is where the "more expensive" comes in ... each year, we have to pay to renew our "visa" (after the first year it is called a Carte de Séjour), which wouldn't be required if we lived in the US somewhere.

Now that we started on the financial aspect, there are things that we find more expensive here, and things that are cheaper.

Gas is more expensive, running about $6.50 per gallon (converted from euros per liter to dollars per gallon).
Housing costs are hard to really compare ... if you live in a small village, the house prices are cheaper than in Raleigh, but perhaps more expensive than living in a small town in Mississippi.
Taxes are higher, starting with sales tax (the equivalent to the French VAT tax). VAT (Value Added Tax), is added to both goods AND services (unlike sales tax which is only for goods purchased). It helps pay for shared services and infrastructure. Since there aren't state and local taxes (like in most states and some cities in the US), you could think of VAT as a combination of state/local income taxes and sales tax in the US.
Meat and seafood are more expensive in France than in the US. I find fruits and vegetables cheaper. Soft drinks are more expensive (and don't really ever have free refills), but wine is cheaper.
Food in restaurants ... I think that in general, the price of meals in restaurants are somewhat similar once you factor in the taxes and tips in the US. In France, the price on the menu is what you pay whereas in the US, what you see in the menu is not what you pay since you have to add on sales tax and the tip for the servers.
Medical care is cheaper in France and, based on my personal experience, the same quality. Even without talking about insurance, a visit to your general practice doctor in France costs you 25 euros (for what they call Conventionnée Sector 1). The "Sector" is somewhat similar to what in the US would be an "in-network" doctor, where the doctor agrees to a certain fee. In the US, they could have a different agreed-to fee for different insurance companies and if you don't have insurance or are not in-network, the price could be quite high (over $100 for a primary care physician). So far, prescriptions are cheaper here than in the US. They are just starting to have the concept of over-the-counter medicines here (where you literally pick them out yourselves), but there are quite a few things that are available without a prescription if you go and speak to the pharmacist. For example, you can pick up a package of Advil at the pharmacy but you have to ask the pharmacist for it (no prescription required). But nothing medical can be bought at your local supermarket or department store ... only at a pharmacy.
If you absolutely *MUST* use a certain brand of shampoo, makeup, laundry detergent ... well ... you may not want to move. For example, Tide laundry detergent liquid 50 ounce 2-pk through amazon.com (in the US) will run you $25.99 (or $0.52/fl oz). On amazon.fr, a single 50 oz bottle will run you $23.63 (converted from euros), so not quite twice as expensive. It gets worse if you want Tide Pods ... 81 pods run $20 in the US, but 72 Tide pods will set you back OVER $100 in France. As well, you basically can only find Tide on Amazon and not in any supermarket. You may be able to get it at Costco but I don't actually know as there is only 1 in all of France and that is outside of Paris. However, you can get pods of non-US brands that run you about 35 cents. While that is higher than the 25 cents or so of the Tide pods, it is still within the same ballpark at least.

Mind you, our lives are quite different now than when we were living in the US due to us not working.

Our golf membership is 5/7, which means we can play as much golf as we want during the week (M-F, which is the 5 days out of 7 in the week) as long as that day is not a holiday (which is treated like a weekend). We will play our first round of golf on a weekend in 2 years this coming weekend, as we were invited to play with a French friend of ours and in general, he plays mostly on weekends (he still is working). It will be interesting to see how busy the course is on a weekend.

We spend a lot more time shopping. In the US, we would do our grocery shopping once per week and would, in general, buy everything in a single trip. Here, we shop normally twice a week and buy from up to 10 different places or vendors. We pick up our meat at a butcher shop, but he doesn't have fish so if we want fish, we have to go somewhere else. Then we try to get all of our fruits and veggies from the vendors at an open market near us. We get different things from different vendors. There is one that we buy tomatoes from, but normally only tomatoes. We have several vendors that we frequent most of the time, based on what we need to buy. Then there is a small Russian store that carries good Greek yogurt. Asian items we have to pick up at one of the asian supermarkets, and anything Mexican or Indian comes from yet another specialty store. Cereal, flour, sugar, milk, and butter come from the supermarket along with paper products (paper towels, napkins, trash bags, etc). If we need honey, there is a store that specializes in various honeys. Dry spices we can either get at a supermarket, or we can buy it "by the gram" from a spice vendor at a different market. There are stores that sell really good extra-virgin olive oils and speciality vinegars. But you can start getting the idea that shopping sometimes takes a bit of time and effort. Mind you, we could buy almost everything at the supermarket, especially if we got in the car and drove to one of the HUGE supermarkets out in the suburbs. But the open markets and small stores is one of the reasons we moved to France.

We also spend lots of time just sitting, having coffee, drinking a glass of wine, chatting with our friends. In the US, we were working all of the time and so we really didn't have the time to just walk down to a cafe and drink a glass of wine in the afternoon because, well, we just want to.

We try to travel a bit, especially on weekends for short 1 or 2-day trips near Toulouse. There are lots of towns and villages, some of them dating back to Roman and/or medieval times. Some still have the ancient city walls visible, while others, you can sometimes only see a few remnants of them here and there. There are tons of chateaus, churches, and abbeys dotted around the countryside and the Tourism Offices do a really good job of providing information on even the smallest little town if there is something to see.

Included in traveling are going to festivals. Many small towns across France have a festival of some sort, mostly around food items, every year. So far, we have attended festivals for green olives, pink garlic, purple garlic, and strawberries. There is a citrus festival near Nice that I'd like to try to get on the calendar for next year. Up in the Brittany area, there are festivals for all different types of fish and shellfish. It takes a bit of research, but I am compiling quite a list of festivals around France that we will try to get to over the course of our time here.

And of course, there is learning French. We do a bit of self-study with the TV (we have both French and English channels), reading French-language books (mostly police thrillers but Tom also throws in a few history books here and there), and going to a French Conversation class. We also get lots of on-the-job-training, so to speak, since we try to speak French with almost everyone other than those in our English-speaking groups. We take cooking classes in French and have taken enough that the chef knows us and greets us with the French "bises" (the little kisses on both cheeks when you meet up with friends).

So, a bunch of random stuff really ... but hopefully that answers a few questions.