When Mags Barrett-Jolly bought her French renovation project she saved money by using currency exchange specialist Smart Currency Exchange to send money to France from the UK.

 

With the current £/€ exchange rate the best it has been for 20 months, we asked her to tell us more so that others can benefit too…

How did you come across Smart Currency Exchange?

I downloaded a guide from the Overseas Guides Company on buying property in France and found all of the information that they provided very useful. They recommended Smart Currency Exchange and that’s why I decided to go with them.

Why did you choose use a currency exchange specialist?

The Overseas Guides Company have always looked after us, answered our questions and helped us out with any problems we have had so we were more than happy to take their recommendation on using a currency exchange specialist. After I discovered the Overseas Guides Company, I never had any reason to look anywhere else.

How exactly did Smart help you?

They helped us to transfer between £150,000 and £200,000 to France in order for us to buy our second home there. Each time we called, the trader who helped us was incredibly efficient.

Did anything about Smart’s service really stand out?

We can’t fault Smart in any way – they delivered exactly what they promised, transfers were fast, they secured us fantastic rates and were friendly and helpful throughout. We wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to friends and family. I can’t fault them at all.

Tell us a little bit about your property in France…

We bought a house in the Charente and have spent the last three years renovating it – we’re nearly there! We had a hankering for years to buy in France but we never thought that we would actually do it. One Thursday we decided to take a look on the internet and by Monday we had flown over to see the property and bought it! The house was pretty much falling down but it was idyllic, the garden runs right down to the banks of the Charente River and there was an old tumbling down barn. Everyone thought we were mad but they are all changing their minds now. At the moment I go over every six weeks or so for two weeks at a time, it’s wonderful.

Do you have any advice for readers thinking of buying in France?

I would warn that renovations take time and there really is nothing that you can do to speed things up so it’s best to just go with the flow. I would also advise them to choose Smart to transfer their sterling to euros – they saved us a lot of money and took any worry off our shoulders so that we could concentrate on important things like making sure the roof stayed up!

Using Smart Currency Exchange for all your currency transfers is the first step to making your pounds go further when buying a property in France or emigrating there. For a free report on how to save money when making currency transfers click here, or visit the Currency Zone.

For details of property for sale in France, see the French property listings on Rightmove Overseas.

To understand the full step-by-step process to buying a property in France, collect The Overseas Guides Company’s ‘France Property Buying Guide’