Financial & Travel Musings

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When people think of moving to France their first thought as to how to generate an income is to buy a gite complex and rent it out to people from back home.

It sounds like an idyllic lifestyle, doesn’t it? You work one day a week and the rest of the week you can be sunbathing by the pool.

The snag is that you need to wash all the sheets and towels and carry out maintenance work during the week. OK, so two days work and five at the pool? In theory, you might get away with that though, of course, the guests will be using the pool too and, usually, expect you to do things for them like organise tours or the area, tell them all the best places to go and so on.

What’s frequently forgotten about in all this is the financials that go along with this lifestyle. From a typical six or seven person gite you can probably get around 700€ a week in the peak season. That size of gite equates to a small three bedroom house in size and, of course, amount of work to look after. In reality most people aim for a gite complex of around four or five gites. On the whole, you’ll eventually reach an occupancy of around ten weeks per year for the gites which translates into around 35,000€ a year of an income.

However, there’s the matter of expenses to consider. Bearing in mind that you only have four or five hours to reset the gite between guests you’ll end up hiring a cleaner to help you which eats into the income somewhat and you may need someone to look after the pool. There’s also the business of maintenance: unlike a normal house rental you’re getting a new set of tennants virtually every week and that tends to be quite hard on the furnishings so you’ll need to renew at least some items pretty much every year.

Oh, and don’t forget the taxes!

I’ll look at the normal alternative to this next time ie buying a B&B.

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You might think that because there are thousands of companies running affiliate schemes around the world that there’s a lot of money to be made in it. There is, but not necessarily for you.

The problem with many of these schemes is that there are minimum payment amounts so in many ways it pays the companies running the schemes to have a thousand affiliates each bringing them one sale rather than one affiliate bringing them a thousand sales. In the first case the only cost to running the scheme is the administration as there’s often no sales commission to be paid whilst in the second case they’d end up paying out the commission at the highest band.

In general terms, that problem usually applies to companies running their own schemes therefore it’s usually better to sign up by way of one of the affiliate marketing companies such as TradeDoubler or CommissionJunction. They obviously take a slice of the commission that would otherwise go directly to you but at least you avoid the problem of having a series of small payments due yet none of them above the minimum for a payout.

Clearly there are some affiliates who go all-out in their marketing of the products and they do very well as you’d expect but it’s far from the easy job that many people seem to think. For example, even though I run a series of travel accommodation websites and religiously place affiliate links for car rental on pretty much every appropriate spot, in reality I get under $100/year from the affiliate links from those sites.

In fact, car rental doesn’t pay a massive amount (usually around $10/rental) but there are other affiliate links that pay quite substantial chunks of cash. Of those, probably among the most lucrative are house sales and online casinos.

The link on this page probably isn’t a fair test of the affiliate schemes but, on first sight, you’d think that at least some people would click on it and buy something. Frankly, I’d be very surprised if anyone did, but if they do, I’ll update this post. Go on… ruin my day and sign up for an Amex card (free to you, few dollars to me).

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We’ve a special interest in reading to our kids as we’re in France and we want them to grow up knowing English as native speakers and readers.

Of course, it’s not just the business of reading that matters in our case, it’s the topics of the books too. In their nursery school it’s the French nursery rhymes and fables that they’re coming across so at home we make a point of working our way through the various stories that we came across in our own childhood.

Up to now, we’ve been concentrating on the Ladybird range which is for babies up to around five or thereabouts although that’ll depend on your childrens’ interests and notionally their range runs up to around seven. However, just by chance we came across the Usborne range of books which seems to pretty much take over where Ladybird finish although with quite a bit of overlap.

As with all these publishers aiming at the child market, they’ve loads of different ranges of books but the one we chanced on was their Young Readers Series 3. It’s actually aimed at older children than our nearly 4 and nearly 6 year olds but they just love the books so we’re planning on plugging away with those over the next six months or so although with the remainder of the Ladybird ones and some from the Usborne Series 2 mixed in amongst them.

Since we’re in France, we also get a library book from the school each week and read that to the boys in English which is much harder to do than you’d think. After all, if you’ve learnt French as a teenager or adult you’ll have missed out on all the words for things like witches and goblins which make up a surprising amount of the reading material that ends up getting brought home. So far though we’ve only been defeated entirely by one book.

Our next challenge will be to teach James to read and write in English.

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