ESSENTIAL TIPS FOR MOVING TO FRANCE: 4 MUST-DO THINGS WHEN YOU ARRIVE!

As a new Expat in France, some things may be overwhelming. There’s a lot you need to do to get settled, beyond just unpacking your boxes. The first thing everyone needs to do is let France know you’ve arrived by validating your Visa.

If you’re a senior, collecting US Social Security benefits, you may want to transfer the payments and have them made in Euros directly into your new France bank account,

If you’re moving from a state in the US that has reciprocal agreement with France, you may want to swap your driver’s license for a new France driver’s license and skip the classes, and tests

And last, but certainly not least, you’re going to want to request an absentee ballot so you can continue to vote in the upcoming US elections.

We’ll review how WE took care of all of those things in this video.

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If you’re looking for the contact information for the translator we used, here it is:
Carmen – bctraductions11@gmail.com

Hi! I’m An Scott. I’m a happily retired 70 year old woman with my “golden years” on the horizon, living the “good life”, whatever that is on any given day, with my fun husband Jeff, and our “bossy” little Yorkie, Bella. We have recently moved from the USA to the beautiful south of France and made our new home in Nice France.

Moving from the USA to a foreign country is no small “project”. Through my videos, we’ve been taking you through the process, sharing the steps, talking about what we’ve learned and the ups and the downs.

And now, we continue to share our life, our new life, here in Nice, getting settled, adjusting to the “French” way of doing things, dealing with the French “red tape” and all the while, making every wonderful day in Nice, the best day ever…

SUBSCRIBE, FOR FREE, to my channel and come with us!

MUSIC CREDITS:
ES_ Peace At Last by Atlas Kind
ES_ Morning Laughter by Water Mirrors

Most of my videos are shot with my Samsung Galaxy S20 Note Ultra Smartphone and a circular ring light, as needed.

[Music] I watch you as you drive do you know I’m looking and I can’t help but smile do you know how much I love you you put my favorite song on I put my feet up and we just sing along and I can’t help but feeling just loving this moment can we stay here forever I’m loving this moment can we stay here together if I could stop the time don’t you know that I would cuz I’m just Ling this moment hello everyone and welcome back to our Channel my name is an this is postcards for my golden years I’m so happy to see you so today I thought that what we would do is share some information on how we took care of the most important things we needed to do I guess you’d say administratively once we got here to France and we’re able to take a breath and say ah okay so the first one I’m going to share with you is how to validate your long stay Visa so now this the procedure is probably going to be the same for everybody the only difference may be the fee I think students May pay a €50 fee uh Jeff and I paid $200 each um so this is part of what it costs to have a long stay visa and I’ll go through it step by step so let’s not waste any more time let’s get on with it first thing let’s talk about how to validate your long stay Visa once you get get to [Music] [Music] France so when you to receive your Visa clipped to one of the pages of your passport uh across from the actual Visa that is uh glued I guess to the page in your Visa um you’re going to find this little piece of paper this little piece of paper you need to hang on to like for dear life leave it clipped in your passports so that little code right there you that will bring you to your file and you do this by cell phone it’s very easy uh I just pulled that little paper off scanned it with my QR code it brought me to the website where I have to validate my Visa okay if you are lucky enough to have WiFi and your laptop when you first arrive in France you don’t have to to validate your visa on your cell phone like we did we unfortunately it took us a few weeks to get some Wi-Fi so we did it on our cell phones but you can go directly to the website and here is the web address now when you first get to this web page it’s going to all be in French so the first thing you’re going to do is come up here and switch it to English so you understand everything easy to read now right right okay so the first thing you’re going to click on is this box that says validate your VLS DTS longstay Visa that’s what you want and there you see the little box it says Visa number this is the number that is on your Visa you’re going to insert that number right there and then you’ll click on confirm your Visa number and it will pull up another screen and I’m not going to put put my Visa number in here because I’ve already done all of this and I don’t want to mess with what I’ve already done um so in the next screens I will show you or I’ll tell you rather what other information they’re going to be asking for once you click on confirm your Visa number so let’s go [Music] [Music] [Music] and so it was easy to validate our long stay Visa at the time all we could do was use our cell phones and with our cell phones we logged in we filled out the information and boom there we were validated long stay Visa people living in France imagine us oh my gosh I don’t think we expected it to be as easy as it was so you just have to make sure that you’ve got a credit card handy to pay the tax and if you don’t go to a tobacco store typically they’re called tobac and you can buy what’s called a a t which is uh the stamp for the fee for the tax so okay next thing we’re going to talk about is how to move your Social Security monthly benefit from the US to France and when I say this what I mean is um for example right now we’re getting our us Social Security money and it’s directly deposited into a US bank account that we still have what we have made application to do is to have that money go directly to the American Embassy in Paris that’s where it’s located here in France and then they issue our monthly social security benefit actually it’s the US Treasury Department issues our social security monthly benefit but they will issue it to us and directly deposit it into our new French bank account and they will directly deposit it as euros and there is an advantage to this if not the fact that you don’t have to deal with the American Bank anymore and you know transfer your money from the American Bank to something over here whether it’s a bank account or your wise card or revolute or whatever it is you’re using you’re saving the fees because what happens to us when we have the money in our US bank account we move it over to our wise card so there is a fee to Move It from the US Bank to our wise card then once it’s in our wise card it’s in dollars and we need to then convert it to Euros so there’s another fee if you have the US Treasury Department automatically directly deposit your social security benefit into your French bank account they will deposit it as euros and from all reports everything I’ve read you get the best possible exchange rate because it’s really the US Treasury Department making the conversion before it even goes to you so there are no hidden fees uh typic Al Banks here in France will not charge you to have your monthly social security benefit dropped into your bank account and if they do you want to go back to them and make sure they know that this is your pension your Social Security um in most cases that I have heard there is no cost to do this there is no it’s not like wiring money to you it’s just an automatic deposit into your bank account so that’s the greatest Advantage you’re going to get more money than you would get if you if you had it to posited into your US bank account and then start moving the money on your own and paying all the fees to do all of that process you don’t want to do that save yourself some money but keep in mind I am not a tax expert I’m not an expert on finances or Social Security maybe there’s some advantage to you keeping your money in the us and having the the benefit drop into your US bank account contact your Financial Consultant contact a tax consultant contact any expert on things like that I’m not the expert I’m just telling you that when Jeff and I had to make the decision we didn’t consult anybody we consulted each other and we decided yes this is what we wanted to do so let me show you how it’s done [Music] so how do you do that first thing you do is you go to this website right here and then you are going to scroll down you’re going to be looking for an SSA 1199 and that is the direct deposit sign up form for France so you will click on that and then there’s your form now you can download the form if you don’t want to do anything with it right away or for us we just simply printed out the forms because we are ready to do this now uh take a look at the form most of this is going to be pretty easy if it appears that if you have a joint bank account with someone that you’re going to be depositing the money into that person has to sign off allowing you to have your Social Security dropped into this bank account and so when you do this form you’re going to be stating this is a joint account if it’s your own account just click on my own account and here and and right here this is where your bank here in France and they’re going to need to complete their information right there and note right here it’s going to require the signature of a bank official [Music] so coincidentally we were moving from one French bank account to another French bank account and we had just changed our bank account so we had been dealing with BNP parabus and one of the things that we didn’t like with BMP parabus was that they wanted us to keep €10,000 EUR in a savings account in order for us to get a debit card with them so it was really disappointing I it took us months to open that account we opened it for the most part we did all of the paperwork and every all of the the majority of everything while we were still in the US and then when we got here we had to meet with the bank before they finally approved the account and that’s when they told us that we were going to need to keep €10,000 in a savings account and not touch it forever um for in order for us to get a debit card and the reason being with their debit card you could take their debit card to any ATM machine withdraw money and even if there is no money in your account the ATM machine will spit out money it doesn’t make sense to me but they wanted you to keep the €10,000 EUR in your account so that if you had an overdraft as a result of taking more money or spending more money than you had they could pull it from that 10,000 well we didn’t like that so we decided to move to credit agricol credit gold does not have that requirement uh yes you have to pay for a debit card but it’s minimal um in the scheme of things I mean we already knew when we moved to the to France from the US that debit cards were going to cost us and there was a monthly charge for the bank account it is what it is that’s that’s simply life here so anyway when we went to credit agricult to finalize opening our account we brought this form with us and just as I showed you on the form there’s that whole bottom section we had the bank person that we were working with we had her complete the bottom of the form and she even gave us an envelope to mail it so that part was taken care of and now we’re off to the post office well it sounds like a silly thing to show you but this is our very first visit to a post office here in N so we are going in to buy a stamp to mail a letter fortunately the letter is still in is being mailed to Paris so it’s not leaving the country it’s a beautiful building isn’t it I’m going to walk across the street here I go so after you complete your form this is the address you’re going to put on the envelope doesn’t have to be an envelope that big but that’s what we got and then you mail it to the US [Music] Embassy okay next we all know how important this next general election is back in the United United States who’s going to be the next president you want your vote to count don’t you even if you’re not in the United States still in American citizen you still get a right to vote don’t forget about that so we decided we’re going to obviously we’re going to get absentee ballots so we had to make a request online and for me it was very easy I just typed on Google uh find or I’m sorry um request and absentee ballot from outside the US and there were a few websites that popped up this particular one is the one that I show so let me show you how I did that first thing you’re going to do is go to this website and then you’re going to click on register to vote request absentee ballot okay and there you go and then you’re going to select overseas citizen voters voter registration and absentee ballot and there you complete all of the information pretty simple complete all of the information [Music] and then after you click submit you’ll get a message like this that says it’s on its way to your election office so the upcoming election is one of the most important elections in history your grandchildren are going to ask you what did you do in the 2024 elections every person needs to vote so make sure you fill out your form online and send it in do it early so that your Board of Elections will know where you are and then when your mailin ballot comes make sure you fill it out and send it back as soon as possible it’s an important election this sh this time around [Music] okay next the last thing that I’m going to talk about is we’re getting ready to exchange our US driver’s licenses our Florida driver’s license for a France driver’s license now we have up to a year to do it and if we don’t do it within the year we lose the right to do that and then in order to get a driver’s license here in France you have to uh spend a little money you may have to take classes and and you have to take a driving test and I believe there is a test it’s an online test a written test um we didn’t want to mess with that fortunately we’re coming from Florida where there is a reciprocal agreement with France as long as you make the exchange before the first year is up no problem [Music] so we aren’t ready to actually send everything in and I had already done a video on this months before this is the video look for this video in my library of past videos where I go through step by step by step how to do this in fact I had to watch my own video just a week or so ago to get us started so I could remember the steps so the first thing that we needed to do is request our driving records from the state of Florida and it’s very easy to do I simply went online and typed in request driving history from Florida motor vehicles and it brought up a link and you click on it and I was able to get all of this in a matter of minutes online using a credit card um you can do this for pretty much any state in the country if you need it now also you need to make a copy of both sides of your driver’s license good clear color copy of both sides of your driver’s license I played around with my printer a little bit and I managed to put copy of the front and the back on one piece of paper the next thing I had to do was find a translator you need to have your documents translated by a certified France translator so where did I look I went on one of the forums on Facebook and they were talking about other people were talking about who they used so I found this one website sort of a government website of translators and I sent a request to that website somebody responded to me with a price quote they wanted $180 to translate both my husband’s and my driver’s license from English into French and I thought wow that is really expensive so I went back to the Forum saw what other people were doing and one of them had posted a link for a translator and I’m going to include that person’s information down below this video look in the the information under the video I’m going to put the link to that person because that person charged me uh it was less than 50% of that cost to translate both Jeff’s and my American Florida driver’s license so that part was taken care of and this person was so fast I highly recommend her she was so fast she did it within a few days so if you’re looking for a good deal please tell her that I sent you okay I don’t get anything for it but I’m sure she’ll appre appreciate the additional business okay so I got the driver’s license translated I still have to get our driving history translated I haven’t done that um I just realized I needed that translated so I’ll go back to her and you attach it to an email you say here’s what I need she’ll give you a a price quote and then after the whole translation is done she sends you a link to her bank account information um so that you can send the money to her now here in France we use what’s called an iban number which is sort of a number that identifies you with the bank and the bank has an rib number so these are things you need to wait until you’re in France to do it because when the translator sent me her payment information she sent me her iban number and her rib number and then I just went on my wise card uh and if you don’t have a wise card it’s really great to get a wise card but I went on my wise card and then I added her as a vendor and then I put in her bank information and then I sent her the money she asked for in euros and it was in her hands I think it was like 70 seconds so it was that fast so but it’s something you’ve got to wait to do until you get here in France unless you find some other alternative means of getting a translation where you can just walk up and hand the money I for me it was easy to just do it from home [Music] so the next thing we needed to do is get photographs taken this is easy you just go to one of those photo machines that you see in the Metro sometimes well actually you see them in the metro in Paris I don’t think I’ve ever seen them in any of the tram stops here here in N we’ve only seen these photo machines at the mono PRI the grocery store so wherever you are in France look around I will show you what the photo machine looks like they pretty much all look alike and I’ll show you how Jeff went through the process so let’s watch so you look for one of these machines at your nearest grocery store the photo m [Music] then you come in here and first thing you do is change the language to English okay you’re going to pick this side cuz you’re going to want a driver’s license okay over here now to the driver’s license side and this side youed okay continue you prefer and then you have to sit up straight no smiling look straight ahead [Music] okay Jeff has googly eyes on that one I would take another one he gives you an opportunity to choose another photo okay next time when Jeff looks he shouldn’t have googly eyes you should just look straight and relax okay okay much better oh it says it might not be compliant with passport standards might have to take another one Jeff do that same face but maybe you were out of bounds see this says may not be compliant don’t mess around here okay keep your head in the circle you have one try left you’re out of the circle come in no you’re okay now look straight ahead relax your eyes [Music] you weren’t all in that Circle so that one might not be good either so he likes the picture clicks okay okay now this is important you have to sign so that your signature is visible press hard no no [Music] no no oh oh almost no [Music] [Music] and then click okay okay okay then you pay for for the photos Okay then we get a [Music] receipt and if you watch on the side of the machine oh there’s his car all right he’s all [Music] set you need a picture to send in with your signature and what you do is you do with your hand on a little touchcreen now the first time I did it I like did my signature but I didn’t see anything I thought oh the machine will just print it out wrong wrong wrong I had to go back and do it a second time make sure you see the image on the P touchpad in the photo booth and then make sure it prints out because that has to have a signature and your photo to send in [Music] [Music] [Music] So speaking of driver’s license there’s one other thing that I wanted to share with you because it was really for me it was drama that I didn’t need um we are having our mail from our Us address forwarded to here to our address here in France and and we did set up a physical address in the State of Florida because we didn’t think that they would do business with us if we were living outside of the US so um the rest of our mail anything that that isn’t anything where we have not physically changed our address the US Post Office is forwarding to us here in nce so I received a letter from Florida Motor Vehicles and it’ been moving around I guess it took us about 15 days before it reached me so by the time it reached me it was already a nightmare so the the letter said that my driver’s license had been suspended you know that’s how I felt and it said it was suspended because we took the automobile insurance off of one of the cars that we had we had a little Miata that actually before we left we sold it back to carvana we had purchased it from carvana and when we left we sold it back to carvana and carvana had all the paperwork they apparently they didn’t retitle it in the State of Florida I don’t know where they retitled it but as a result the State of Florida thought that we were driving around in Florida without insurance on our car and according to the State of Florida we still had a loan on that car so they had given me I think 10 days or something from when the insurance was cancelled to Ren notify them of new insurance and I didn’t do it so they suspended my driver’s license so I didn’t know what to do and I went online to motor vehicle gives you all this information in a letter and it says the only option to get license back used to pay $150 and show up at Motor Vehicles locally and because your license had already been suspended you have to go in person and here I am in France and I can’t go in in person so um the other problem is that I had kept my us telephone number for a while because I had hoped that keeping my us telephone number would allow Banks and uh other entities to send me four-digit security codes when I’m logging into things and so far since I got here I have not received one code when I needed it so that entire situation using keeping my old Us number failed and anytime that I tried to make an outgoing call using the SIM card from my Us number it would say I don’t have any service here in Fr France so then I would go on to my France SIM card and make the phone call from here and I didn’t have coverage I had unlimited text messages to the US so I can text all I want to the US and receive SMS codes but I can’t make a phone call to the US without being charged like a zillion dollars a minute so anytime I have had to make a phone call to the US immediately when I’m finished I get a text message from my France telephone carrier saying I have a bill of $244 or3 35 and in order for me to continue using my France phone service I need to pay it right away so one time when I got this none of the credit cards I had in my wallet worked and so I physically had to leave home and run out to the free it’s it’s we used free mobile it’s the name of the company I had to run out to the free mobile store which fortunately is only about a 7 minute walk away but I had to run there and get on one of the machines in their location to pay that bill so the last thing I wanted to do when I had this problem with my driver’s license being suspended is like oh my God you feel so powerless you can’t do anything I couldn’t make calls to the US without costing a fortune I there was nothing I can do they wanted me to go go in person so I took a deep breath I went out for a little while that day and the next morning I woke up with a new outlook on this I went back to Florida Motor Vehicle website and on there it said click here if you’re the insurance company and you think that the suspension was an error so I clicked on that link and it took me to another place where I could upload information saying the car had been sold the date of the sale a copy of the bill of sale um and I think that was it oh and I had to do this attestation statement that they had there stating that I swear I sold the car blah blah blah so I did that and submitted it and the next day I got a letter from someone at Motor Vehicles fastest faster than I ever expected and she said well let’s not worry about it yet so she sent me this other form where I had to copy the information from the bill of sale it was basically a a Florida State bill of sale for the vehicle the buyer did not have to sign the form all I had to do was swear on that that form that I sold the car and that it was sold before my license had been suspended which I did and she said just email it back and then like the next day 24 hours later I got a letter back and she said I was able to fix it you’re fine your license is reinstated it’s not even going to show on your record that there was a problem we apologize for the error I’m so happy I could have helped you with this so when you sell your car this is the lesson learned when you sell your car take that license plate back to motor vehicles and return it so they know you don’t own the car anymore Jeff thought he was doing us both a favor and he chopped up the plate and threw it in the garbage uh he didn’t realize that this is a possible end result of not notifying motor vehicles that we sold the car so sharing that little tidbit with with you so that you don’t make that mistake when you sell your car just make sure take the license plate to motor vehicles and you won’t have that [Music] problem so those are the first four things we think were the most important administrative type things I mean once you you get the electric on and you get your cable intern internet and all of that set up we’re talking about important paperwork and things you need to take care of so hopefully we’ve given you enough information so that you can get on the computer and take care of those things yourself and get on to living the life in niece exactly that’s what we’re here for right right that’s it so thanks so much for watching and we will see you next week with another exciting video from somewhere right from somewhere yes yeah yet to be determined actually no I just realized next week yes we are taking you to venilia oh venilia is supposed to be the largest outdoor Market in Italy so Jeff and I took the train just a few days ago we took the train to vilia and well you’re not going to want to miss it because if you come to ni it’s going to be something you’re going to want to do while you’re here exactly so thanks again for watching we will see you next week bye bye for now [Music] he [Music]