France was to be a clean start. With no salary, credit cards, overdrafts or loans

Fidelma Cook passed away this summer. We are running a selection of her columns as a tribute. This one is from April 2013. We hope you enjoy it.

FACED with figures, paperwork and any financial speak, I take the only option available to me. I metaphorically, sometimes literally, pull the covers over my head and mutter: go away, go away.

I do the same with all medical matters, damp concerns, crumbling render, strange piles of insect dust under the beams, paint falling off the walls, a tail disappearing under the central heating boiler and odd, almost certainly alien, lights in the night sky.

Relatively competent in many other matters, which unfortunately I cannot quite think of at the moment to do a similar list, I am rendered almost catatonic by all of the above.

But, with the optimism that only a woman of limited logic can command, I feel sure that by morning the overnight fairy will have sprinkled her magic dust, waved her wand, and all will have – puff – disappeared.

God love me.

There was one brief period, however, when I rose above my inadequacies and actually project-managed a tick list of vital and important things to do.

Before moving to France with my little pot of cashed in early pensions, flat sale, and redundancy payment, I managed to pay off several credit cards and overdraft; cancelled car and house insurance, the newsagent; organised removal and storage of contents and transferred all other matters to my saintly accountant.

I even had box and letter files into which I put “things” pertaining to those matters. Often I opened them for the thrill of having “files”, shuffled them around a bit and put them back, glowing with the enormous, solid satisfaction of being a real person at last.

By the time I bought in France six months later, I had no files, only semi-meaningless notations on the backs of envelopes or ripped up newspapers, or corners of notebooks, and was doing my old trick of rounding figures down to make them look better.

I put stars on certain figures to remind myself which ones were lies to myself but of course forgot what the original sums were. I still don’t know. And, in high dudgeon, I had taken to ignoring one credit card company I had paid off in full who, because of the date I’d paid, claimed I still owed them something like £4.56 interest. (That has now grown to something close to £400, is in the hands of debt collectors, has destroyed my credit rating should I ever return to the UK, and I’m still under the duvet because I’m still in high bloody-minded dudgeon.)

Anyway, France was to be the clean start. With no salary, hell, there was no option. No more credit cards, no overdrafts, no AmEx or M&S loans to pay the latter to start again, to up the overdraft etc.

France is scary when you write cheques with no money. Public humiliation, bank card ripped up, no further banking and probably a visit from the mayor or the gendarmes.

I have no credit cards, no overdraft, no loans, no outstanding debts … barring that putain of the UK one. Oh, and no savings either. However, however. Hanging always over my head has been the teenytiny, unresolved problem of tax. An important one, I give you, and right from the start the UK revenue gatherers were officially told I had moved to France. Was now resident in France, had no other home, no other address.

God knows I tried to see where I would fit into the French system. As a freelance working for UK newspapers I ticked no known boxes. Even my union, French branch, couldn’t tell me what I should register as but warned that I could end up being doubly charged as employer and employee. I downloaded every possible document in French until even my teeth hurt with the complexity of it all. Eventually, I retired under the duvet and continued to pay my taxes in the UK.

Britain knew I was here. My forms came here and to my accountant. Once, when I was behind in payments, I got a letter warning me I had 14 days to pay or, basically, they would hand me over to the French authorities to collect.

I consoled myself that, unlike many expats, I was at least paying tax within the EU. I also knew it was no defence as I was fiscally resident here, unlike those expats who cleverly keep children’s addresses as theirs. But, like a big, black cloud, my tax situation has always hovered over me.

When I read that UK residency laws regarding tax were to be tightened up and investigated this month, I knew I had to act, and act fast if I didn’t want to drown under a wave of penalties.

I found a UK/French company in Paris – English speaking – who immediately recognised they were speaking to a mathematically challenged four-yearold and tailored their language appropriately.

So, I am now an AutoEntrepreneur, thanks to a simplified

system brought in by former president Sarkozy.

And the irony is, despite the heavy social charges I will soon pay, I will probably be better off in tax terms.

At last, I am legally blonde in France.