How To Move To France: A Guide-Blog

Once you know where exactly you're going to be living, you can start the house-hunting offensive. This is a very daunting task, especially if this is your Year Abroad, in which case you're probably very young and have never had to do anything like this before. I was so overwhelmed that I put this off until about three weeks before I left (don't do that). If you want, you can start with the most obvious idea of doing a general search for ' location  [town/neighbourhood name]' or ' immobilier [region]'. This allows you to get a general idea of rent prices. At this point, you're going to start seeing a lot of confusing French housing- and rent-related vocab and abbreviations, and you might take one look and want to run away, which is pretty much what I did at first. The best thing to do is look what these mean up once and make a mini glossary, as this will save you a lot of time. Here are some that come up frequently: TTC = toutes taxes comprises (...

So, you know you're going to be moving to France. Step one, then, is choosing where you're going to be living. Before you even start researching available housing, you need to ask yourself a few questions. How much choice do you have over where you're moving to? Is the country your oyster and you're going to find a job in whichever place takes your fancy? Or have you been posted in a town, like I was? If your answer to the former was 'yes', then that's a bit easier for you, as you're likely to be moving to a bigger town or city where you'll have fewer challenges regarding (poor) choice of housing and public transport, amongst other things. If you're choosing to move to a smaller place, then more of the information here will be relevant to you. If you are being posted somewhere, and that somewhere is quite a small-looking place (make sure you do a lot of searching on Youtube and Google Maps to get a feel for this as soon as you know where yo...