Looking for ressources on good plans in France

Coffee
1

Hello!

I am Swiss and I will soon be moving to Paris for a year with my wife and my son of a few months. I have greatly benefited from MP’s good plans for my Swiss insurance and telephone subscriptions.

I was wondering if there was a blog of the same kind but for France. I’m looking for good French plans for all things related to insurance/phone and internet/banking/…

Thanks for your help :blush:

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I have left France 5 years ago, but the following should still hold:

Banking :

[Boursorama Banque] (https://www.boursorama-banque.com/?origine=2403) is among the cheapest french banks. It is totally online and for a normal usage it should be absolutely free to use. (Check their conditions if you have fancy requirements)

Internet/Phone:

Free.fr is by far the cheapest: depending on your needs you can have:

  • a mobile abo starting from 2 EUR per month, the max you will pay is 19.99 EUR per month
  • for internet they have many different box as well depending on your need, going from 9.99 EUR to 45 EUR per month. Yes, discovering swiss phone/internet prices is a shock when you come from France

Insurance:

Health insurance is directly taken out of your salary, so you won’t have any choice. I don’t expect you to need a car in Paris, so you will only need a mandatory insurance for your apartment (which usually is as well a liability insurance). You can use an insurance comparator like https://www.lelynx.fr/ to compare them but usually this is really not a big expense.

As you can see, all these topics are a tiny fraction of your income.
Except for the health insurance: although it is not a “direct” expense, you will still have 8% taken out of your brutto salary for your health coverage. There will be as well 15% of your brutto salary taken for the social contributions (i.e “CSG/CRDS”), which don’t provide any coverage, but are a mandatory contribution to reimburse the french social security debt.

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Awesome, thank you for this information! It is very helpful.

For future readers, I have also discovered that you every French resident must pay the “taxe d’habitation” and the “taxe d’enlèvement des ordures ménagères” as well as the standard taxes. If you own a television you will also have to pay the “redevance audiovisuelle”.

Moreover I’m interested in any tricks to help me find an apartment. I will work as an intern so I won’t make much money but we have enough savings to live comfortably in Paris for one year (we will come back to Switzerland after that). So what approach is the most effective to convince landlords/real estate agencies to choose us as tenants?

  • bank deposit (as proposed by the Société Générale bank;
  • public French location agency as Visale;
  • private company like Cautioneo or garantMe;
  • a private garant that I know;
  • other solution I never heard of?

Some of these solutions are free, some aren’t. But which one is the most effective?

Thank you and best regards!