Moving to France Doable For People, Say People Who Moved to France
This family moved to France and is renting an amazing farmhouse in the French countryside for $1,500 /month, while this family moved to France and rented a two-bedroom apartment in Paris for $2,500/month. Their breakdowns of cost make moving to another country (France, at least) seem like a thing that we can all do, well, if we have jobs that can sustain us and we can prove we have fat bank accounts and on and on.
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Previously on The Billfold
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The second link is blocked at my work because: Games.
I can also advise that dating a French person makes moving to France much easier. Conversely, not speaking French makes it infinitely harder, unless your job does not require any form of talking or communication (thankfully, France has a thriving mime industry.)
I guess if you have a job you can do from France, sure! But make sure you know how to handle the tax issues – like, if your work is IN another country you’re almost certainly gonna lose more of your income to taxes.
@deepomega Unfortunately, it seems like finding the job and getting the visa for the job is the hard part. The people I know who moved abroad either were dating someone who covered their expenses (they didn’t work and left the country every time when their tourist visas were going to expire – essentially being an illegal immigrant) or taught English and had a parent support them. For the latter, I’m not sure how they handled taxes – with one person, I’m pretty sure she didn’t pay them.
@CubeRootOfPi I taught English in France and didn’t make enough to have to pay taxes in America or France.
You don’t pay US taxes on money you make abroad if you make less than something like $90,000, unless that has changed, but I don’t think it has. This is only applicable to money you make in country, so if you are, say, a freelancer for the Village Voice, you’re paying taxes, but if you work for Le Monde it will all be US tax free. So you really are only paying that country’s taxes and not the US taxes. It’s some sort of tax exemption called the “Foreign Earned Income Exclusion” and it was amazing because 1/2 of the taxes I paid to the Japanese government when I worked in Japan were also returned to me by the Japanese gov’t because they knew I would not be taking advantage of things like social security, so the time I worked abroad was more or less tax free.
@genkiliz Yes! I live in Japan and I pay a few paltry U.S. taxes for the freelancing gigs I do that are U.S. based, but other than that I pay Japan taxes. They are not so cheap, but manageable and come with health care.
Here are the tax treaties between the US and France: http://ambafrance-us.org/spip.php?article704
Love that there is a whole article for “Artistes and Sportsmen”
The two women mentioned are really well known bloggers who are making thousands of dollars a month from advertising. Find people who want to move to another country to do a real job and not live off page clicks. Like the article about the man who moved to South Africa and how hard it is to legally work there. That’s more like it.