Happy 4th of July

Hello everyone, welcome to our 24th post of the Baby Boomer Move to France blog. This Friday was the 4th of July. The rain held off so there were some pretty cool fireworks around our North Port location.

If this is your first visit to our blog, I hope that we keep the ongoing story of our move to France interesting enough to bring you back each week. We publish each Sunday. Long story short, we are a couple of “Baby Boomers” on an adventure to move to France permanently. It sounds easy enough.

As we shared our plans with friends and family, we were asked questions about who, what, why, when and where, I figured that there is enough interest to share the experience. So, we started this blog. Our plan is to publish every Sunday even after we get to France. After all, that is when the real fun starts.

As usual, I made a list of some of the important stuff that needs done this week in order to have everything ready for the move. Hopefully, we can report completion of all of the following tasks. We are now down to less than a month until we board our flight to France.

• Follow up with My Baggage. Confirm labels and customs paperwork.
• Open and clear prohibited items from our shipment then reseal the boxes.
• Zoom meeting with the French financial advisor.
• Meet with our US financial advisor.
• Follow up with French Connections HCB regarding a car purchase in France
• Ask French Connections about setting up our French driver’s license.

My Baggage

I got a good start on filling out the customs paperwork that is required by My Baggage. I’m not quite finished yet. I have to finish that paperwork before they will send the official shipping labels. We got to looking at our list of stuff and decided that we don’t need to take all those clothes, so we did ANOTHER purge. We reduce the number of boxes to 6 from 7. I will need to update all of the information at My Baggage and revise the customs list. This should save a little money. We managed to clear out the few prohibited items and will wait to seal it all up.

Zoom Meeting with French Financial Adviser

I had a good meeting with Mike. He will introduce us to a French lawyer so that we can have our French will drawn up. It is important to have this done so there is no question about beneficiaries and so on. French law regarding inheritance is somewhat different than the laws in the US. Mike’s recommendation is to take it slow. I need to do some research on an international broker, and I need to take my time doing it.

I will send him some details on our financials, and we will take it from there.

Meet with Sean, our US adviser

We had a good meeting with Sean at his office in Lakewood Ranch and made some new plans to protect our nest egg. We will follow up next week to be sure everything is in order. I feel pretty confident that we have a good plan. One thing we will do is set up zoom calls quarterly with Sean until all the dust from the move settles and we are certain we can set the autopilot on and will only need minor course corrections as we go. Part of it will be impacted by the housing market in France and the US dollar exchange rate. I see the dollar inched up by a small fraction Friday. Maybe it will start an upward trend and get back to where it was in December. (Not holding my breath).

Driver’s License and Car Purchase

We will be busy the first month getting our drivers licenses paperwork in process. We have heard that the process takes several months, even though Florida has a reciprocal license exchange agreement with France. Needless to say, we will ask French Connections HCB for help on this. Elizabeth did confirm that we can get our Florida driving records online if needed for this process. But, it will need to be translated into French by a certified translation professional.

I have asked French Connections to look into arranging for the purchase of a good, reliable used car. We have set aside what we think is a reasonable budget for a low milage 2-year-old 4 door vehicle with good gas milage and decent performance. We will be happy with a hybrid and the transmission can be manual or automatic. Car purchases can be tricky, especially for folks that don’t speak French all that well. There will be French language documents to be explained. French Connections will be super helpful for this.

I contacted the car rental agent about extending our rental and did not like the answers. The car purchase needs to get done by the end of August.

Telephone Service

Another thing that needs to get done this month is to lock down phone service. We definitely do not want to deal with international roaming charges once we get to France. You might remember that we had some phone troubles when we were in France in March and April this year. For our situation where we will be in France for a long term, we need to have a carrier that services Europe.

We still need our US number for all of those “Authentication” calls. We will keep our US bank account and will need our US phone number for those pesky authentication calls from the bank.

One option is to go old school and have 2 phones. One with your US number and one with your French number. I guess that was the way things were done before the advancement of E-Sim cards.

Another option is to have a phone that allow you to change your Sim card depending on your needs. So, while in the US you install the card for US and when in France you take out the US card and install the French card. You will have a little storage case for your various Sim cards, and you will have to have some way of identifying each card. Totally confusing and not efficient.

You might have heard of an electronic Sim card (eSim). Elizabeth had seen an advertisement for an eSim so we tried to load it on my old phone while we were in France. No joy. We got pretty frustrated with our phones so when we got home, we looked into new phones.

If you are fortunate enough to have an Apple iPhone 16 or similar cell phone, you have a really cool option. These phones have the capability to have 2 eSim cards installed. Thus, you have the ability to have 2 phone numbers simultaneously in your phone. These are electronic Sim cards, so you never have to handle a physical card. No worry about losing or damaging a physical card. With this arrangement you get an eSim from your US carrier (BEFORE you leave the US) and another eSim from your French carrier. I’m no expert on the matter, but I’m learning, and I managed to get a new eSim installed on my phone. I did the whole thing online. Once again, Elizabeth had seen a posting by a lady living in France describing a low-cost cell phone service that you sign up for and install their eSim online. Since we don’t need much for our US service we will opt for this low-cost service and terminate our contract with Xfinity. We will be using Tello and I opted for a $14/month plan (taxes included). Unlimited talk and text. We will probably drop down to an even lower cost plan, but I wanted to be sure we would be okay first. This upcoming week I will get my old number ported onto my new carrier and then get EB set up and then we can close out Xfinity.

Exploring, House Hunting, Getting Use to French Life

Elizabeth is doing a lot of online property searching and finding lots of options within our self-imposed tight budget. These housing options are spread all over France so we will need to narrow our search by visiting some of the potential towns and regions. She has seen that some regions have more properties in our price range than other regions. I know, we thought we had the region nailed down. As we continue our research, we find our first thoughts might not be our final thoughts yet. That said, I’m still convinced south of the Loire Valley is where we will end up. If you know France, you are probably laughing as south of the Loire is a huge area. Don’t get me wrong, the Loire is super beautiful and was our first inspiration for moving to France. It is a great place to visit and I’m sure we will visit again.

Anyway, we need to plan some more exploring trips once we land in France. Since we will be in Duras the first 3 months, I started trying to put some rough plans for exploring using Duras as the hub from which we will spread our search. I figure we can start with a driving radius of about an hour. That gets us as far as Bordeaux to the east, as far as Agen to the south, as far as Périgueux north and Sarlat la Caneda to the east. Of course, we will spend the first week or two settling in and getting to know Duras and getting our feet wet in our new French life. Who knows….we might even like Duras and want to locate there permanently!

We will visit the castle of Duras and learn some history. This castle was built in the 12th century so has survived multiple wars, multiple religious leadership and in fact multiple national alliances, having been owned by French and then English and back to French monarchs. We will find our favorite restaurant, boulangerie, cafe and pub and try to get to know a few people.

There is a huge 4D sound and light show during August that we will enjoy at least once. Then there is an art show featuring paintings and sculpture of amateur artist to see. There is also an Escape Game at the chateau. We haven’t done all that well at escape games, but they are fun.

We are looking forward to the traditional market on Monday mornings and the local night markets too. It will be fun to take pictures and share these experiences with you.

We will jump in the car and visit potential houses as EB finds potentials so those rough plans that I mentioned are just that. Ahh, we are retired who needs a plan?? LOL

Until next week

Thanks for visiting our blog, Next week we will have new updates of our plans and how we are progressing on the many tasks needed to make our move complete. Until next week take care and stay safe. If you have any questions, comments or suggestions please feel free to share in the comment section below.

Many of you will be taking vacations in the coming months. We look forward to hearing about your adventures. If you don’t mind, we will add a note to our blog about your trip.

Until next week, Au revoir.

Mark and Elizabeth Beiley

BabyboomersmovetoFrance.com