ExpactMama83

Hi

I'm 32, married but I'm thinking of ending it. I have a 2 yr old and always regret not experiencing life abroad! Lots of travel but no extended time. I feel the time maybe right, I'm sick of the UK rat race, child care expense, mortgage ,weather, there is really nothing here for me anymore I feel. And my work contract ends in August. I have been learning French for a few years at B1 lower intermediate level, I have French speaking pen pals and still studying! I love the language. I'm undecided on the area to relocate to but I'd love to have warm weather, cheap rent, decent school, and a very multicultural area. I thought of Lyon or the south where weather is fine.

My questions are
What advice would you give a single mum in her 30s with a toddler about relocating to France?
Where is cheap to rent generally but in particular the south?
I'm a qualified teacher is it easy to secure work? But I'm happy to leave teaching and work at the supermarket or hotel cleaner!
Is it better to secure work before or upon arrival? What area is good fir work?
Any advice on CV and cover letter prep?

Where the bloody hell do I start once I decide to relocate bearing in mind my 2 year old?

Tips on finding a nursery my boy be 3 by the time we leave?
I think that's all for now, I'm deadly serious about this i have thought about it many times my home life situations and unenthusiastic husband stopped me, my baby is young confident and I'm sure once i improve my French we be fine i have no expectations of France apart from a new start, nice weather and a future for me and my son.

Look forward to hearing from you

Pulaski

Without permission from your child's father, or a court order, you won't be allowed to remove your child from the UK. If the child's father objects it is unlikely that you will be able to get a court order.

Unless/until you are reasonably certain that you will be allowed to remove your child from the UK, all other planning is likely to be a waste of time.

mikelincs

Welcome to BE.

You need to look very very carefully at what you would NOT be getting that you get now, no free healthcare for one, so you need to look at the costs of private health insurance at least at the start, and most of your UK benefits would stop.

You would need written permission from the father to take the child to another country, and, unless you are fluent in French, you will face a very difficult task getting a job. The jobs you mention are very low paid, and you need to factor in the cost of acommodation, rentals in some places are reasonably chea, but that's because there are few jobs in those areas.

ExpactMama83

Removing my son from the UK will not be a problem. For more than 1 reason.

ExpactMama83

I don't actually claim any UK benefits! Not entitled due to salary so that's ok.

Gosh the responses are not very positive or encouraging difficulty finding jobs, loss of benefits etc.

Anyone else with anything to add that is a tad more useful or relevant to the actual questions I asked.... Thank you. Any other mothers out there with something to add

Pulaski

Unless you have obtained that advice from a solicitor experienced in family law I am sceptical of your confidence. The only reason that springs to mind as a likely reason to get a court order would be if contact between the child and its father would be potentially harmful/ detrimental. Otherwise a father even with minimal contact with his child is likely to be put up effective arguments to persuade the court not to grant an order allowing the child to be removed.

ExpactMama83

Well keep being skeptical it's your energy not mine. I did not join to justify myself to anyone my questions are clear and I really only wish to discuss those areas. Thank you

Pollyana

Presumably you are entitled to NHS care for yourself and your child though? Iappreciate you may have already looked into French health care, but if not, ts something an area all of us expats have had to investigate carefully. Nowhere is quite like the NHS

ExpactMama83

Thank you 😊 noted,on the list to look into. Do you have children? Did you relocate with a family?

Pollyana

No, relocated to get married, now moved on
Most of my knowledge about relocating within Europe has been acquired over the years from moderating ad reading threads on here, so while its not first hand experience, I've picked up the main areas in which problems are likely to arise.

Pulaski has already flagged the parental rights issue -you appear to have it under control, but his reason for pointing it out is that a huge number of people appear on the forum having not even considered that it will be an issue, and so its best to flag it upfront before too many pans are made.
Similarly with the benefits and healthcare - living outside the UK removes your right to use the NHS, hence my suggesting you investigate the French system, and I know some of our France-based posters will help you out there. And on the benefits front, its not that people think you want to live off them or anything like that, but some people are in receipt of various benefits, and assume that they are all transportable when they move - thats not always the case, so again its something that gets flagged for people looking to move.

Anyway, we have some great posters who are based in France, so hang around and they'll be able to help with the more precise questions that require more local input

dmu

Hi, and welcome to the Forum!
Have to agree with the others that, if you're married and not yet divorced, you can't take your child out of the UK without his father's permission.
Even if he pays alimony for his child, you are going to have a hard time making ends meet on the low salary that you can expect to earn as a TEFL teacher, in a supermarket or as a cleaner. I stand to be corrected, but teachers in French State Schools have to be French.
You'd have problems renting, as landlords require payslips justifying that your salary is 3-4 times the rent. A low rent anywhere usually means somewhere quite unsuitable for a child (for example, shared washing and toilet facilities in the corridor...)
Insee - Revenus-Salaires - Revenu disponible correspondant au seuil de pauvreté selon le type de ménage en 2013
gives the official poverty level for a single parent and one child, to survive. You would need a regular salary higher than 1200€ in order to bring your child up decently.
I live in the Languedoc and the weather has been grotty since before Christmas. Mild, but rainy, grey and damp at best, and it's getting cold again. Better weather in the south is a myth....
The (only) good news is that your child would be able to start Maternelle at 3, but be aware that, once enrolled, he must attend all the time. Maternelle has the same educational structure as Primaire. For working parents, there are always organised after-school activities and the local Mairies organise activities on Wednesday afternoons. The school holidays are very long and I'm not sure that such a young child would be accepted in a "Centre Aéré" for the duration. You would therefore have to organise child-care, presuming you find work.
And I haven't started on Healthcare coverage yet. Without a "legal" job, you'd have to take out private healthcare insurance.
Sorry to sound like a wet-blanket, but I'm being realistic. If you were single, I'd say go for it, but with a young child in tow, it would be unreasonable to go into the unknown with him, just to suit yourself.
Take a look in all the threads included in Chatterstatic's FAQs above. They give info on all aspects of living in France.

babyposer

Hi and welcome !

Well, the thing is, cashier or hotel cleaner is a real job in France. It's not like in England where you can turn up and get the job straight away with no experience. As a teacher, companies won't take you seriously. Why? Because they'll think 'oh this teacher needs a temp job, as soon as she will find a teaching job she will leave, what's the point of training her and wasting our time?'.

My advice would be: move close to Switzerland (about half an hour from the border) and you will be more likely to find a teaching job there. Of course try to find the job before you actually move.

You can either work in the French part of Switzerland or the German part and live either in Alsace, Franche-Comté or Rhône Alpes.

Good luck!

Tweedpipe

Welcome to the forum.
To the best of my ability I've tried to address some of your queries below.
Hopefully others here can fill in the blanks.
Genuinely, I've been trying to think of what words of positive encouragement I can offer to you and your toddler. None come immediately to mind, with the exception of 'Good luck'.

EuroTrash

Hi, welcome to the forum.

I think the central question is and the answer, if you need the income to live on, is: before. No two ways about it. Because the biggest reason why people's French dreams go horribly wrong is because they run out of money faster than they think and end up not being able to pay their bills. Living in France isn't cheap, and things that you take for granted as an established UK resident, you can't take for granted as a new arrival in France. The main one, as has been mentioned, is 'free' NHS healthcare. In France you will have no entitlement to state healthcare until you've started paying into the French social security system and established yourself; and as a mum with a toddler you can't take risks, you need healthcare.

Hence you need a job, so it makes sense to get the job first and then find somewhere to live near the job. Unemployment is high in most parts of France, over 10 per cent on average I believe, so it's no good picking your spot and then hoping there will be a job waiting for you in a 10km radius.

Obviously most jobs are in towns, and in towns the rent is higher, but even if you get a job at minimum wage it will pay the rent and you may in due course get state help if your income is low - reduced taxe d'habitation, cheap electricity etc. Don't make the mistake of choosing a cheap place to rent in the middle of nowhere because you think that if the rent is cheap enough you'll be able to live on next to nothing and not having a job won't matter. No job, no healthcare, it keeps coming back to that.

As Babyposer has said, the mindset as regards work is different here. Occupations that are regarded as 'dead end' jobs in the UK and up for grabs for anybody to apply for, are respected in their own right here (part of the socialist tradition I guess - everybody has their place in society and does their bit). You're not 'just' a cleaner or 'just' a shop worker. You have chosen that as your occupation and you train for those jobs, for instance, cleaners learn about chemicals, cleaning products, fabrics, H&S. As an ex-teacher, getting a job as a cleaner with no qualifications and no experience isn't going to be simple; there will be 'real' cleaners applying and they'll get preference.

So I think you need to put your mind to what kind of jobs you can apply for, then find some way of coming out for a month or as long as you need/as long as you can, without burning your bridges in the UK.

You can do searches online, for instance at Emploi | un clic. tous les emplois. Indeed - I suggest you spend some time before you come out searching for different types of jobs in different areas, to get some idea of where your prospects look best. Then you say your job contract ends in August so you could maybe rent a gite out of season for a month or so, and apply for as many jobs as you can. October might be good - it's no good applying for jobs over the summer because everybody's on holiday, but the daily slog starts again in September. If you find work, you're over by far the biggest hurdle and all of your first block of questions will have been resolved. If you don't, well you'll have had a nice holiday and the questions about staying on will be redundant because without a job, burning your bridges would IMHO be too big a risk. France has no responsibility towards EU citizens who move here and run out of money.

I hope you find work. In reality, salaries don't stretch further in France than they do in the UK - you work all week to pay the rent, pay your mutuelle, heat the house and put food on the table, much as you do in the UK. But living in another country is a great experience, if only to discover that most countries have their own version of the rat race - they used to call it metro-boulot-dodo here. Life in France is different from life in the UK, better in some ways and worse in others, and even if you do decide to go back to the UK after a few year, you'll go back with a new outlook on life. Bonne chance.

bobbi2

We would never be able to live in France if we didn't come with the opportunity with work. To be honest I think on retirement we will move back to the UK as the cost of living here is so high. 10 years ago we were visiting France for cheap shopping, now it is the other way round, the UK is cheaper on so many levels. We are in the Rhone Alpes and property is amongst the dearest in France. We are 45 mins from Geneva which sounds great and is, but if you want to find work here maybe in a ski resort great too - but the property will cost you. Also if you do get affiliated in the french health system it isn't "free" like the NHS and would need top up assurance to aid with the costs. Even then there will be things that aren't totally covered on the health system unlike walking into a hospital in the UK. Yes, you are more likely to find seasonal work in the Rhone Alpes (ski work) but we know people that do this year in, year out and it is living on the edge a little, especially of you have a family. Most work around ski resorts is also anti social. Not putting a damper on things just being realistic.