It is February 2013. Still no offer on the house but we have again had quite a few viewings of the house and are keeping our fingers crossed.
I have joined a great Website called the Survive France Network, it has thousands of members and offers a wealth of information on living in France.
We’ve started thinking about our living costs when we are over there permanently and the impact they will have on our savings. We are a number of years away from retirement age and want to be confident that our savings will last.
I posted the question on the network and received over 60 replies in only a couple of days. Awesome!
Here is the question I posted followed by a link to the continually updating responses:
“Hi everyone!
Well our house is on the market in England with a view to permanently moving down to our lovely home in Limousin as soon as everything is sold.
This might seem a strange question but I was hoping to get a feel for “typical living costs” to help us budget / work out how long our savings will last and at what stage I’ll need to think about finding some small part - time job possibly (far easier said than done I know)!
Our house in France is paid for, we know how much our residential taxes are (do these change if we live there permanently as opposed to having a holiday home?).
The house has no central heating (something we will address at some stage - I stay close to the discussions regarding this on SFN), but we do have 2 wood burners.
Currently we have a low standing charge on our electricity with EDF, but I have read some horror stories of 3000 euros a year for electricity! We do have an electric water tank on a timer.
Our oven is gas (bottled).
The house is fully furnished and we will be bringing duplicate everything in terms of white goods with a view to storing them in the barn and replacing the items when the eventually fail..so I don’t envisage costs in that department for a few years.
Our home is appx 20 mins from the nearest decent town (Bourganeuf / Gueret), so we recognise we will need to plan carefully to minimise journeys thus saving on fuel.
It is our intention to live frugally and simply - a far cry from our lives currently!
Sadly, the house doesn’t have much land but I hope to rent a small piece of land locally at some stage so we can have a bash at growing veg etc but in the short to medium term we will be buying the bulk our food.
There are 2 of us plus 2 cats, and the humans are veggie..
We probably have enough books to last us a lifetime and I think the only real luxury will be access to t’interweb..and a TV.
Perhaps this a bit “finger in the air” and I’m sure there’ll be plenty of people saying that we should have done this exercise first - but hey ho that’s part of life’s excitement!!
I’m sure that there are many contributors to this site who will have done similar exercises / are living similar lifestyles and I would love to hear some experiences.
We are exceptionally excited about the next chapter in our lives and can’t wait to hand over our keys to the lucky people who buy our English home whenever that may be.
Thanks for taking the time to read this and I look forward to getting some feedback.”
An amazing array of responses from all perspectives. I am now in the process of thanking all contributors and drilling down the detail.
This has reinforced our decision and we know we are doing the right thing!
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