Buying overseas

John and Judy love France, and their ambition has always been to move there permanently. At present they run a restaurant – Judy’s Place– together, but now that their children have all left home they have worked out a plan that will enable them to fulfil their ambition.

The plan is to sell their restaurant (and the flat above it) to their son, George and his wife Angie, and use the capital to buy a small chateau in France where they can live and run a business. George and Angie have arranged a mortgage: quite hefty, but over 25 years, and while that’s been going on, John and Judy have found, and paid the deposit on, the ideal property: the Chateau de Chambiers, just south of Angers, in the Loire region of France.

The Chateau is perfect because apart from their own spacious accommodation, it has six rooms they can let. There’s also an outdoor swimming pool, and several outbuildings that can be converted into a small bistro, a games room, an office, and a shower/toilet block. There are 500 acres of land, including a stream and fishing lake, so there’s plenty of room for campers to pitch their tents, and they may even install some static caravans or mobile homes, when the cash flow permits.

When they paid the deposit on the chateau, John wasn’t very impressed by the efficiency or cost of the currency conversion service from their bank, so he asked Judy to search on the internet for a specialist currency provider. Judy came with FCD, and since they lived (above their restaurant) in High Wycombe they took the opportunity to visit FCD for a face-to-face discussion about their needs with one of the currency dealers in the FCD office in Amersham.

The result of the discussion, and a few subsequent phone conversations, was the creation of a master plan that set up a single time-critical completion payment for the purchase of the chateau, another single payment to transfer working capital (at the right moment, when the rates were particularly good) into the local bank in Angers, and regular monthly mortgage payments, using forward contracts to secure good rates up to six months in advance – and that strategy would be regularly reviewed and could be changed at any time.

Setting everything up in this way enables George and Angie to pay John and Judy in the UK, in instalments for a portion of the purchase price of Judy’s Place, using income from the restaurant, so they’ve been able to take out a smaller mortgage than they had anticipated.

Our help in planning your currency strategy can enable you to make the most of your business assets and cash flow.

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