French Utilities--

What you need to know

Photo by Jon Moore on Unsplash

Readers, it’s happening. We’re leaving for the summer soon and getting our utilities set up.

The utilities: Electric (which covers the stove and the water heater, among other things), water, internet/tv/phone.

A few things you need to know. 1. Usually the realtor who sold you the house helps you with this (and they offered to do so in the walk through) but of late ours has not been returning our emails. Never fail! Renestance to the rescue, as always. Since they are on the ground, so to speak, and are, of course fluent, the lovely Gaia at Renestance has been handling all this for us, with John (whose Francais is plus mieux que le mien) pitching in as needed. I still plan to do a whole post about Renestance at some point, but for the amount I shout them out, you should be getting the impression they are the linchpin to this whole endeavor. Once more for those in the back, I don’t know if we could be pulling this off without their services, which are always top drawer, kind and never exhorbitantly expensive.

2. You need a French phone number to set up utilities. We didn’t know that and are in the process of getting one right now (yes, we can do it from here) but it’s going to take a bit over a week, so Renestance is letting us use their # to communicate during the set up.

3. As with our home insurance, you also need a French bank account to pay for the utility fees, you can’t just pay with your American debit card. So we transferred funds to Lumen, the exchange organization, and they sent it to our account, which Renestance used to set everything up.

That’s it for this week. Two important bits of info. Next week Asuna has her final vet visit so John will be reporting on that.

In the meantime, PAT ROBERSON has won this week’s book. Pat, I probably have your address somewhere but I also wouldn’t mind if you messaged it to me.

Till next week,

Stephanie