Robert and Linda bought a stone house near Bergerac in 2009. They had been going every summer for fifteen years, they knew the village and the purchase went smoothly with a French notaire and a bilingual agent.
Then, as Linda puts it, “we put the folder on a shelf and went on holiday for fifteen years.”
What prompted it
Robert’s brother died. He had owned a flat in Spain and the estate took nearly three years to resolve, largely because nobody could find the paperwork or work out which will covered what.
“Watching my sister-in-law go through that was the shove,” Robert said. “We got home from the funeral and I said, right, we are not doing that to the girls.”
What they found in the folder
The audit took an evening and produced four unpleasant surprises.
The acte de vente was there, which was the good news. Their French tax number was not, and neither could remember it. That single missing detail turned out to block almost everything else.
Their French bank account, which paid the utilities and the local property taxes, had been opened in Robert’s name only. If he had died first, Linda would have had no access to the account paying the bills on a house she jointly owned.
They had made a French will in 2011 and a new English will in 2018. The English one contained a standard revocation clause revoking all previous wills. Nobody had spotted that this arguably revoked the French will too, which would have thrown the property into the forced heirship rules they had specifically been trying to plan around.
And the practical layer had rotted. The plumber’s number was on a fridge magnet in France. The neighbour who held the spare key had moved away in 2019. The alarm code was in Robert’s head.
What they did about it
The tax number came back within a fortnight through the French tax portal once they had dug out an old property tax bill from the loft.
They saw a UK solicitor with cross-border experience, who redrafted both wills together so each explicitly stated the assets it covered and neither revoked the other. The new English will made an express election under the EU Succession Regulation for English law to govern the estate. That cost around £900 for the pair, which Robert described as “the best value professional fee I have ever paid, given what the alternative looked like.”
Linda was added to the French bank account. They updated the buildings insurance, which they discovered had been on the same policy since 2009 and was underinsured for the rebuild cost after seventeen years of inflation.
Then they wrote a single page for their daughters: the property, the notaire, the tax number, the bank, the insurer, the syndic, the plumber, the electrician, the woman in the village who airs the house in winter, and the alarm code.
What Linda says now
“The legal bit was the expensive part and the important part. But the thing I keep thinking about is the page with the phone numbers. If we had both gone in a car accident, our girls would have inherited a house in a country where they do not speak the language, and they would not have known who to ring about the boiler.”
The lessons, if you own abroad
Find your local tax number today. If you cannot, that is your first job, because nothing proceeds without it.
Check whether the local bank account is in both names. This one catches an enormous number of couples.
Get both wills reviewed together by someone who does cross-border work. Revocation clauses are the standard trap and a general high street will is unlikely to have considered it.
And write down the human layer. The lawyers handle the ownership. Nobody but you can write down who fixes the roof.
Where FamilySafe fits
Robert and Linda now keep the whole French file in FamilySafe, shared with both daughters: the deed, the tax number, the two wills and where the originals are, the insurance, the bank details and the page of local contacts. As Robert says, “It took an evening. It would have taken them three years.”
Names and details have been changed. Cross-border estates are complex, so take advice from a solicitor experienced in the relevant jurisdiction.
