Rain stops play, and money problems hit home!

Yesterday it started to rain. Now, to be fair, it's the first "proper" rain we've had since we've been here so we shouldn't complain. We've had a couple of showers before but one day, in fact only half of one day, of rain in almost a month isn't really enough to complain about!

The up side of the weather is that we now have most of the rooms in the house that are habitable unpacked and usable. Okay, over the next few months (or years) there's still a lot of development to do in them, but they are usable. Upstairs is still pretty much like your average loft!

The downside of the weather, if you can call it that, is that as the temperature hasn't dropped at all, everything is growing like mad, including the grass! I can't get on the garden to dig as it's just a bit too wet (but not waterlogged by any means!) and the fencing has come to a halt, along with the grass cutting and gardening.

So what did we do today? We went shopping of course. This led us to a rather concerning investigation. When hubby tried to pay at the till for 88 Euros worth of shopping the card was declined. Now we knew that there was about 3000 Euros in the account so hubby was none too happy to have to pay with a UK bank card! Now, it's not the first time our card has been declined for no reason that we could work out. So when we got home I got out all the bank paperwork for our account to discover that our account is currently limited to withdrawing 450euros in a seven day period and paying out 1500 Euros in any 30day period. We had ordered and paid for heating oil, cost 496 Euros, only a few days ago which of course means no spending on the card for another 3 days due to the 450 limit. We had been under the impression that the 450euros withdrawal limit was per day not per week!

Be careful when you open a French bank account that you understand fully what the bank account limits are. Here in France, it doesn't necessarily follow that just because your account has money in it, you can actually have access to the money! 

On Wednesday we have an appointment with our account manager to discuss increasing these limits. Mostly because, once our UK house sale is completed and the money transferred here, we will be commencing on the French house renovations which is going to necessitate payments over our limits on a regular basis, so we need to rectify this before it causes us even more problems!

 Signed Frustrated from the Vendee!