Milestones Reached

Another couple of milestones have been reached in our relocation journey to France.

The Financial Hub

The first was setting up a financial hub for our European money transactions, things like purchasing everyday items, connecting to the French banking system, or paying rent. For that, we have a Charles Schwab brokerage account which is connected to WISE and to a US bank.

WISE is well known and widely used by expatriates for everyday money matters. It is where you can “park” your dollars and convert them, in our case, into Euros. I am also getting my Social Security deposited into the brokerage. Setting this up takes a little time; it took about two months for the first SS deposit to appear in the brokerage account.

Right now, everything seems to work just fine. We can convert dollars into Euros in a few seconds for a small fee. You can also track the dollar against the Euro and convert when you think you are getting a good value. Wise provides a digital card, and you can order a physical one, too. The actual card is a debit VISA. We are going to use WISE to fund our French bank account.

The Apartment Search

The next major milestone was reached when we signed up with IBANISTA to help with our apartment search in France. It costs 750 Euros at sign-up and another 750 after they find us an apartment and we actually sign the rental contract.

They are very transparent about what they do and how they do it. They are super professional and, at the same time, very personable. It feels like talking with your best friend. They are creating a dossier for us which will be presented to the agency or landlord. Tenants have many rights in France, so landlords want to make sure we can pay the rent and that we are the right people. Heck, they even asked us why we are moving to France and why we picked Toulouse!

Since we do not have a French address and are doing this search from the US, we had to be backed by a guarantor. Now, this is really big. Without this, it is almost 100% impossible to rent from the US. I can be wrong, but I think there is a 99% rejection rate without a guarantor. We worked with Smart Garant, and they qualified us. Easy process, very responsive and we are highly recommend them.

The Next Steps

Now for the fun part: every Tuesday and Friday, our agent will send us possible apartments aligned with our search criteria. We can reject or say yes to any, and the ones we like will be set up for a video viewing. This is definitely the fun part!