Insurance

Insurance is not only important for your own financial protection, but various types of insurance are legal requirements. Failure to be properly ensured leaves you liable to fines and (in theory) even imprisonment. Consequently you should ensure that you have taken care of essentials:

• Automobile. If you are driving a car in France, you must be insured. This is no different than any other major country. The legal requirements are that you are insured to cover injury to people or damage to property. Whether you take out additional insurances (e.g. for damage to your car, breakdown assistance, towing back to your country of origin) is optional. In some cases you will be covered by your existing insurance (e.g. many UK insurers now automatically provide cover for short trips abroad) but it is wise to confirm your status before visiting or moving to France.

• House. If you are own a house in France, you are legally required to have insurance for injury to people that come onto your property. This is for events such as a tile falling off your roof and hitting a visitor or their car. In addition to this, you will probably want to take out normal house and contents insurance.

There are of course many good French insurance companies. However, if you are not fluent in French, you may wish to take out insurance from one of the many British insurance companies that specialize in providing insurance policies for France in English. As the following indicates, if you are not able to carefully read and understand your policy, you are at risk.

Insurance policies always have a fair number of conditions attached to them. It is not uncommon to find that you are in breach of one or more of the standard conditions, in which case if you try to claim on the insurance policy you may find that the insurance company refuses to pay or will only give partial payment. To avoid this you need to carefully read the conditions and if you do not meet all of them, have the conditions changed accordingly (this is generally not difficult). As an example, many insurance policies have as a standard condition that you must have a nearby neighbor (e.g. within 50 meters). The reason behind this is that if you do not have nearby neighbors, you are at greater risk as it is less likely that someone will be watching your property when you are away. If you do not meet this condition, simply bring this to the attention of your insurer and have him modify the policy (you may have to pay a slightly higher insurance premium as a result). If you fail to do this, then you may find you are uninsured or only partly insured. Consequently, if your French is not sufficiently fluent to be able to carefully read all the conditions, you should consider either paying a professional translator to translate (which is not cheap) or simply taking out an insurance policy in English from one of the specialist insurers.

Another standard condition to be aware of is occupancy. Many policies state a maximum period that the property can be unoccupied; if you exceed this period (which is typically the case with holiday homes) then you must ensure that your policy does not have this limitation.

If you have a swimming pool or a pond on your property, then you may require special insurance for this as well. Check with your insurer. Also, other other features which increase the risk to your property or visitors to your property.