Emigration, a long waiting game
Navigating the turbulent Bureaucratic Ocean that lies between South African and French residencies...
(Read this post in French here)
You could just one day decide, that’s it, I’m going to go live in another country, hop on a plane and hey presto you’ve left and you’re now a citizen of a new land, but you’d be skipping a few vital steps.
Firstly the decision itself may not be instantaneous, but a long string of events that eventually leads to Day Zero. I’ve already talked about my reasons for deciding to leave South Africa and move to France, where I was born and lived only eight short years.
Once the decision is made you are faced with an ocean of bureaucracy on which navigates a fleet of decision-ships that will plot the course you take and determine where and when you finally reach your destination port.
The bureaucracy of it all can be divided into two sections: your port of departure and your port of arrival. You face the daunting task of closing-up shop and extricating yourself from the web of paperwork and registrations you have spent your previous life entangling yourself into, before getting started on the more exciting task of discovering the intricacies of your new country’s own web of social and civil mechanisms. Exciting that is, until you start pulling your hair out and derailing your sanity on the sometimes vicious circle of red-tape, long after it has become too late to stop the express train !
Two and a half months away from my own D-Day, here is what I have done so far, and what’s left. Go make yourself some popcorn and find a comfortable chair before you start reading…
Exiting South Africa
<: Apply for a new driver’s licence - coincidence, my current licence expires later this year and I don’t know how long it takes to convert to a french one so I have applied for a new one, and hopefully receive it before I leave because the only card-printing machine in the country was broken for months and there’s a huge backlog, compounded by the long covid inactivity…
<: Apply for a new SA passport - coincidence, my passport expires just when I plan to leave and I want to make sure I am able to return here to visit family later on. I discovered after unsuccessfully trying for two months that the online application doesn’t work if you click the “naturalised” box, when I omitted the option one day… Could this be unintentionally rigged against ex-foreign-nationals ?? Whatever it is, I’m in but I still have to go for my biometrics appointment this week. Getting there…
<: Sell my house - in progress. Finding a buyer is not the end of it though, I will still have to get a clearance certificate from the municipality for rates and services, and compliance certificates for gas, electricity and electric fence, then close those accounts and make sure deposits get refunded. Then wait for the property to be transferred and funds paid over. Hopefully completed by the time I leave !!
<: Redistribute all my possessions - started slowly giving away clothes I haven’t been wearing, selling french books, stamp collection, diving gear - my kids have taken or booked the things they want, and I’ll only really start getting it all out once the house sale comes through, so it still looks lived in, decorated and tidy here for any potential showdays…
<: Sell my car - I also need to do a last service and some preliminary light panel-beating and removal of branding stickers beforehand, which I am kind of leaving to the last minute…
<: Decide what to do with my darling dog - Fate decided that for me last week and took her over the rainbow bridge to the endless grassy plains…
<: Find a new home for my recording booth - in progress - also need to finalise the design and creation of a new travelling setup !
<: Close cellphone and internet accounts - it’s about time my grown-up kids had their cellphones in their own names anyway. I’ll still keep my SA number going though as long as possible I reckon.
<: End medical, car, household and life insurances - I’ll still keep my medical insurance for three months until I settle in, also make sure my two are organised with their own contracts.
<: Close bank accounts & deregister company - I don’t think I’ll hurry with this one, rather keep them open until I really have no need for them, it’s easy access with internet banking…
<: Complete financial emigration - I have to look more deeply into this, I think it only applies once you’ve lived overseas for some time anyway.
<: Convert my covid vaccination pass - maybe this will all be scrapped by June, but in the meantime, I’m still going to follow the rules, wouldn’t want to be stopped at the border when I’m that close !
Starting up in France
:> Open a bank account - luckily I’ve had one since the 90s when my parents opened one each for my sister and I to go on summer holidays with the cousins back then. Just had to convert it to a useable adult kind.
:> Get a phone number - thought of that last year on my holiday, but I had to get it in my sister’s name since I didn’t have FICA documents, now I can just transfer it to me.
:> Apply for a French ID - I’d never had a French ID card before, only a passport (and that is a great big advantage I am very grateful for), so I waited for the French Consulate in Joburg to re-open for business in October last year after covid closures. It only took a few weeks - done !
:> Register my micro-entreprise - epic adventure that. The voice-over activity is apparently very obscure because I was being sent around in circles, apply here, no apply there, before I asked some of the thousands of french voice-over people where to actually go and received a simple direct answer.. I now have a company registration number and can do business with french clients without further complication :)
:> Sign up to a Société de Domiciliation - this I decided to do to avoid having piles of admin mail sent to my sister: it is like a traveller’s postal service - they receive all my paper post, scan it in and email it to me, and also serve as my official domicilium citandi et executandi address for all official administrative purposes, since I will not have a fixed abode in the foreseeable future. For a fee of course, but totally worth it.
:> Sign up for Securité Sociale - that was a bit complicated, as I needed a social security number in order to register my company but not being on-site to visit an office, I had to work out what my number should be before it was officially confirmed after my company was registered… A bit of a contortion act…
:> Convert my driver’s licence - this took my sister three years to complete so I have started the process (now you see why I need a new five-year SA licence) - applied for an official confirmation letter from the licencing department in Pretoria, which I will need to have officially translated before I can complete the application. Luckily the whole process is now online so I don’t have to send anything by snail-mail, and they have streamlined it considerably due to all the Brits living in France who are no longer Europeans and now have to convert their licences en-masse…
:> Register as a tax-payer - looks like this happened automatically when I registered my company but I’m going to have to speak to someone when I arrive as to when I actually have to officially start paying tax there and not here - conundrum !
:> Choose a car insurance - a bit of research and I found a friendly small company in the same town as my domiciliation company that specialises in camper-vans and the particularities of full-time nomads. I just need to have my current insurance certificates officially translated so they can gauge my risk factor. I will make sure I have everything in hand before I land so I am ready to hop into my future driving-seat !
:> Purchase a vehicle to call home - I am currently addicted to camper-van classified ads, but I’ll only go look at actual vehicles once I am on location, I won’t buy online and it wouldn’t be much use anyway… At least I know what I’m looking for now !
Have I missed anything ? Do let me know in the comments please !
I started investigating and actioning all this in September nine months before the Big Move, and all of them have been long processes involving lots of waiting and seeing… and some of them will continue even after I arrive… So keep all this in mind before you decide to emigrate, because there’s really a lot to think about and get through !
And yes, still much more if you’re not lucky enough to already have a passport for the country you’re going to…
Yes, and ?? there’s still so much to do and only two and half months left, it looks like I’ve barely scratched the surface ?? Well yes… I have started on a lot of them already, it’s a work in progress, and also, the definitive sale of my house will be the catalyst for getting cracking on completing a lot of these processes, last-minute rush of activity - just when my work-load is picking up for the year aaah !!
Gotta hit the ground running, come on then !
Do you want to hear more of my emigration adventures and what happens when I finally get there ? Hit the button below and you’ll get an update straight into your inbox whenever I write a post. I promise I won’t spam you, I don’t post all that often, just enough for you to start wondering what I’m up to !
Feel free to share my publication with your acquaintances, you never know ho could do with some extra info for emigrating from South Africa to France, I’m always open to answer questions too :)
Sounding very together Gaelle! All terribly exciting ... wishing you a wonderful new chapter!
Woah, my head is spinning. I thought we had a lot to do to move from an apartment into a camper. I can't imagine doing all that AND process all the things that go along with leaving another country and moving to a different one. But as Anne Williams says, you do sound very organized! I'm so sorry to hear about your dog passing, by the way. That is very sad news to process amidst all the change to come. You can do this!!!