“You have two of everything,” my French friends recently remarked.
“Two jobs, houses, computers, phones – it’s like a double life!”
I had to admit my friends had hit the mark. What started as a pre-Brexit adventure to establish residence in France has become a way of life where everything is in duplicate.
It is possible to live in both France and another country at the same time, although nothing about it is easy.
For me, it all started with an online job. I left employment in 2019 and started teaching business English remotely. Within six months I had rented a flat in Avignon and started commuting between there and Oxford – until the pandemic struck.
Once travel resumed I was commuting monthly by train, and still do.
Renting a flat was not straightforward without employment in France, but that was just the start of the battle.
You can only be resident and therefore pay taxes in one country, and that is what makes a ‘double life’ so tricky. You have to choose. If self-employed, make a tax declaration in each country and get some good advice. Be sure to avoid double taxation – two of everything is not always good!
Without a French bank account, the ‘Wise’ website and app is a great alternative. You can hold both euros and pounds, converting currencies instantly at low fees.
The app is also a digital wallet for payments, but you can have a contactless card too. For anyone living between two countries, this is a really efficient timesaver.
Having chosen France as my ‘main’ home, I obtained my carte de séjour, and from then it took about two years for full integration into the French healthcare system.
With my permanent UK address I can still access primary healthcare in Oxford, and any unplanned treatment in the UK is covered by the French CEAM: carte européenne d’assurance maladie.
Another challenge was how to make friends in France and keep in touch with old ones in the UK.
Technology is a big help here. The ‘meetup’ app is great in both countries – video chats with friends and family mean you can always feel close.
Offline, the association Accueil des villes françaises (AVF) exists in many French towns to welcome new arrivals with a programme of events.
I now play boules with my delightful local crowd each week, feeling really French!
My final piece of advice? Get a French phone number immediately.
Use any old phone and buy a SIM card from a tabac – making sure it is an easy number to say in French. Without two phone numbers, you cannot easily live in two countries.
Brexit rules make it difficult...
Of course, I am not the only person looking to keep a foot in two cultures.
Retired scientist Brigitte and Stephen live between an apartment in Marseille, where she is from, and a house in Lancashire – Stephen’s home.
Neither has residence status in the other’s country, having retired and become a couple since Brexit.
Stephen is restricted to 90 days in a rolling 180-day window, making travel “hugely complicated”.
He explained: “It is extremely difficult to schedule family visits, medical and essential appointments (car MOT, home maintenance etc).
“Although there are calculation tools available, we have produced a spreadsheet to help us keep track and plan ahead.
“For Brigitte, the UK rules seem to be slightly more relaxed, although they are more vague. We have been taking holidays in non-Schengen countries in order to generate some flexibility!”
For healthcare, Stephen has a GHIC card – although he was unable to use it in France recently for emergency dental treatment. Brigitte has travel insurance. They realise that the situation could become more problematic as they get older.
Nevertheless, the couple still get a kick out of their cross-Channel lifestyle.
“Now we are both retired, we are able to enjoy the different cultures, landscape, climate and gastronomy of France and the UK,” said Stephen.
“We try to escape the hottest weather in France and the coldest weather in the UK – but sometimes the travel restrictions make this impossible. In short, we try to maximise the benefits of living in more than one country while minimising the problems.”
Dutch entrepreneur Gerald van den Heuvel has a similar attitude.
The 44-year-old splits his time “roughly 50/50” between Kraggenburg in the Netherlands, and rural Nièvre in Burgundy, where he owns a successful business selling trailers.
“From 2014 to 2019, I was living and working in France full-time. But then I met my partner, who has a farm in the Netherlands, and started spending longer periods back home again,” he explained.
Gerald van den Heuvel lives in Normandy and the NetherlandsGerald van den Heuvel
Gerald pays all his taxes in France, uses the French healthcare system, and has a French-registered car. All this, he said, was easy enough to organise.
However, the birth of the couple’s first child in 2022, followed by a second earlier this year, has necessarily made his lifestyle “more complicated”.
“My eldest, especially, misses me when I’m away. They stay mainly with my partner, but every third trip to France we all try to come as a family”.
The car journey takes almost nine hours, which can be exhausting, and Gerald also finds living out of a bag increasingly tiresome as he gets older.
“Then there’s the fact nowhere really feels like ‘home’. When I’m in France I’m ‘the Dutch guy,’ and in Holland I don’t fit in neatly either as I’m not around much.”
There are benefits though, he insisted. “I get the best of both worlds – the space, tranquillity and countryside of rural France, while in Holland it’s the social life I love.
"I thought about selling the business and moving back permanently, but for now things are ticking along just fine.”
