How I Moved to France: finding a job, costs, timeline, and advice!

are you having an existential crisis and looking to make a change have you started Googling the best cities to move to is your favorite influencer just moved to Paris and you're wondering can I do it too lucky for you I have some experience in that department so allow me to tell you how I moved to the City of Lights Paris baby [Music] so first of all why did I want to move to France I have been studying French since high school in college I studied abroad for a couple months in Lyon with the host family and since then I always knew that I wanted to come back and live and work in France but I thought maybe it was just something that I was dreaming about that it wouldn't actually be a possibility um and so I started working in Dallas when I was working in Dallas I met Ben who was lovingly filming this for me right now he is French and he was living in Dallas at the time when I met him he moved to moyale we were doing long distance for about a year and he was planning on coming back in 2020 to Dallas he was planning on moving back around may 2020. obviously March 2020 kind of that up for us he had to move back to France because his industry wasn't hiring anymore and it was at that moment that I started thinking like hmm maybe I could actually move there that's when I started doing research into how I could actually come here so you might be asking like okay how can you come here there are basically three main ways to move abroad to another country you have the student visa the marriage visa or the working Visa why didn't I choose student visa or marriage visa or au pair I didn't choose those options because I have a very expensive student debt payment to pay every single month and I basically just need to have enough money to pay that off and be able to live and survive in addition yeah I just wasn't ready I'm not ready financially to pay for a master's degree or a PhD and the marriage thing I mean it's a huge life decision obviously that's a two-people decision Ben and I both didn't really want to do that one if we didn't have to and it's also like a lot more restrictive in terms of working if I wanted to get married to Ben to be able to move here I have to not work for six months and yeah six months of expenses is a lot and I just wasn't prepared Ben and I both were not prepared to do that so didn't choose that one I didn't choose au pair because in general you have to live with the family that you work for and it also like just is a very young student type video and I was like four years into my career at the time and I wanted to find something if possible that still was in line with my career the student visa and the au pair visa and the marriage visa you know they weren't right for me but that's not to say that those are not good options if you want to move here I think the student visa is especially interesting if you have the ability to pay for a master's degree here it's cheaper to do a master's here and if long term you want to be in France they give you like a year after you graduate to find a job and they really like want to incentivize you to stay here in France if you get your education here so that's a great option if you can do it it just wasn't the right one for me okay so how did I find a job I think the first thing you need to know is what my philosophy was when I was searching for a job essentially I was ready to take almost any type of job I was like I will do anything to move to France I knew that it needed to be able to cover my minimum student debt payment which I talked about earlier and it also needed to cover just my basic life expenses I knew that I would be cutting a lot of my expenses because I wouldn't have a car and I would be living in a smaller space and I would be splitting a smaller space with another person so all that to say like I was ready to take a pay cut coming into France okay so I would recommend knowing what salary you want to have ahead of time uh just calculate your minimum expenses and keep that in mind when you're searching for a job in addition the salary that you're going to be offered is your salary boots which just means that it doesn't have any of the uh taxes taken out of it yet so you have to think about that and France there's a lot of taxes they're known for having a lot of taxes so you're probably going to be paid like around 70 to 75 essentially even less than that of the roots salary next I just wanted to talk briefly about my advantages and my disadvantages in this area because I think that it can be helpful for you um First Advantage is that I speak French and I speak it at a pretty good level it's not required for a lot of jobs in France especially as an angle phone English is really like desired but it is a huge plus and it definitely is a reason why I think I was chosen for this job that I have now my next Advantage is that obviously I have a boyfriend who's French who can look over my resume he can practice interviews with me Etc but you can definitely ask strangers on the internet to do this for you or ask your French professors um there's lots of different resources for that my disadvantages mainly were that I don't have a master's degree in France it's quite normal that everybody has a back to site which basically means that they've done their bachelor's degree the equivalent of a bachelor's degree in three years and then they do two more years and they get a master's degree and that's like extremely common almost everybody in France goes to this level of Education or at least in the career field that I was looking in so that's quite normal and I didn't have that I just had a bachelor so that was definitely a disadvantage for me I think that having to compete against all the other Europeans and they all have master's degrees it definitely put me at a disadvantage my other disadvantage is that I was not a I am not and was not a European citizen if you are you can like live and work in different countries quite easily um I'm American and so I do not have that privilege okay so what was my process to find a job essentially I downloaded notion I use it to track all of my job applications we also use this as a database for any resumes or cover letters that I wrote um I didn't really tailor any of my uh resumes to any of the jobs but I did tailor cover letters which I know is annoying but I think it's essential to do and in addition to that I also wrote down any cold messages that I wrote to anybody or any email correspondence I would keep track of those in notion as well just so that I would have templates to use if I needed to write someone again I highly recommend cold messaging Executives or hiring managers or whatever for any job that you apply to I think that it definitely gets you noticed and that's super important because you know that nobody's reading resumes so once I started getting interviews I would practice interview questions either alone or with Ben I would practice in the mirror or I'd practice on the phone with him and I would write down any important questions that I think that they might ask me once I went through the interview immediately afterwards I would write down all the questions they asked me how I responded and how I felt about the interview you have to remember that the interview process is a two-way street if you are not getting good vibes from this company or it just doesn't seem aligned with you or it seems like maybe they're trying to lowball you or something you know listen to that gut feeling um but also be aware of what you said in the interview and be aware of their question uh they might be looking for someone who is very outgoing and maybe you said like you know oh I like to stay in on Fridays and just read a book whatever so then you will know like oh am I going to be a good fit for this role essentially if you're looking to move to France specifically I would highly recommend using Welcome to the Jungle it's for startups and in general startups have an easier way to offer visas to foreigners this is not legal advice this is just my personal experience I also use LinkedIn those are the main two websites that I used in order to find a job I did pay for LinkedIn premium so I you know was able to see when people were looking at my profile and stuff like that I'm not sure that that really helped me but it did give me some extra credits to cold message people so that could be worth it so how long did this take so I seriously started looking for jobs at the end of December 2020 and the beginning of January 2021 that's when I was like super serious about it and I applied to over 200 jobs I think it was close to 220 jobs I basically got rejected from all of them except for one and I got accepted at the end of July 2021. so seven months it could take longer it could take shorter but um that's just to tell you that you do have to spend a lot of time on this you do have to invest a significant portion of time to be able to find a job so I got the job at the end of July and I was starting in the beginning of October which meant that I had two months to get my together that included applying to the Visa getting the Visa breaking my lease and moving out of my apartment driving my car to San Diego and getting a flight and moving to France let's throw to Studio Joya to give you a cost breakdown of this to do welcome to the studio I'm your co-host Joya Studio Joya and I will be giving you a breakdown of all the costs that were related to this move starting with the visa application that cost forty dollars and in order to print my documents I didn't have a printer so I think it cost me around ten dollars to print all my documents and then 15 skip passport photos they did take my pictures at the Visa appointment but I didn't know if they were going to do that or not the Visa appointment costs 156.50 and I had to drive to Houston in order to go to this appointment so I also needed to spend the night in Houston because I took a day off of work for this so I spent one night in a hotel which cost me 185 dollars it's kind of expensive and I also had to pay for parking at this hotel which I should have looked at that before but that cost me 54 dollars so maybe you know look that up ahead of time they printed out my documents for me and they also did a picture for my Visa so technically I didn't need to print out my documents before but it's better to be prepared in my opinion because it just depends on the consulate I think the appointment took about 30 minutes so it's not at all an all-day thing but you do need to wait in line and you have to talk to the officers at the consulate so you just need to have enough time to do that I think that there's only a certain number of consulates in the United States and they're in very specific places so I was able to drive from Dallas by myself um but that might not be the case you might have to pay for a flight or you might need to find some other way to do an appointment I think that you can also have an agent come to your city uh if you request it so the biggest cost in this entire thing was definitely breaking my lease we had just resigned our lease in June and like I said before I got the job in July so my lease agreement said that we had to pay 1.5 Times rent which in my case totaled out to twenty four hundred dollars yeah it was really expensive but I had that money saved up I was prepared for that so that's just something to keep in mind if you're living at home obviously this is the cost that you won't have but if you are living not at home or living with roommates something like that you will have to think about these kinds of costs this is specific to me but I wanted to drive my car back home to San Diego so my best friend Jenny offered to fly out to Dallas to road trip with me back home and we decided to do it in three days so we drove from Dallas to Odessa then Odessa to Phoenix and then Phoenix to San Diego so we needed two nights in a hotel one in Odessa and one in uh Phoenix and this was about 180 and then plus gas split between the two of us it was about 80 a person next I needed to get a flight to France and I needed to decide how I was going to move my stuff there was I going to ship it over there or was I going to just take suitcases with me I ended up going to suitcase route so I had to pay 555 for the flight and 175 in excess bags which uh if I wanted to ship things over to France we looked at it and it was just super expensive I had this chair that I didn't want to bring to France it was this beautiful pink chair anyways I had to leave it and sell it because it would have cost like double the price of the chair to ship it over to France and we would have had to pick it up at low AV and that just would have been like extremely uh difficult finally once I got to France I had to pay for the count to sejua which is basically after my Visa expired they're supposed to give you like a residency card and that cost 225 now the costs related to the visa application and the Carthage normally should be taken on by your company but you usually just have to front it and then your company will reimburse you afterwards so in total for the Visa specific costs it cost me about 450 for the move related costs this costs about 730 dollars and for the other costs which were specific to me so breaking my lease and doing the road trip those cost about twenty eight hundred dollars and so in grand total it cost me 4000 39.10 to be able to move to France and to have a job one other note I just want to make really quickly is that this is in 2021 so you have to keep that in mind uh costs for things could have changed cost for rent cost for flights Etc I quit my job around mid-september and I started in the beginning of October so that meant that I had two weeks of expenses to pay for where I wasn't making an income and in addition I moved out of the apartment but Cora was still there for about a month or two until our lease was actually broken so I still had to pay rent uh for the us while I was in France so these are all of the expenses that I paid for when I was trying to move over to France everybody's situation is specific but I just wanted to get you thinking about what you have to save if you want to move here so throwing it back to field Joya thanks Studio Joya back to our Nightly News so there's a couple things I haven't talked about yet and one of those things is that when you are filling out paperwork in order to come to France normally they ask you for a French address and Ben was still searching for apartments at the time and so I had a French address to use and that was Ben's parents address this was huge because I could fill out all my paperwork they could see that I had an address in France that I was going to be able to go to or they could send the paperwork to you and I had someone who was living there who could relay that information to me and it also helped us in our apartment search because seeing that we already had an address in France just legitimizes kind of your dossier for your file that they use to you know verify whether or not they want to give you an apartment and that is the other thing that I also haven't talked about is finding an apartment um while I was searching for jobs that was my main focus and Ben decided that he would take it on to look for apartments in France and it just made a lot of sense because he has the ability to talk to the agencies go to visits see the apartments in person and yeah I think that that helps a lot obviously I didn't do any of that process so I'm gonna let Ben explain to you really quickly some of the tips or things that he did when he was looking for an apartment [Music] for apartments you can always use which is the Craigslist in France but you might find pretty terrible things you can use zoology or there is other website like this and usually when there is no pictures there is no point visiting because it's going to be trash probably visit around five five children Apartments you don't remember I was looking for something in a safe area because you you would just arrive so I wanted to find a place where you could go to work and come back late without any issues and also something in like cute spot with light so when you're looking for very cheap apartments very small places you might end up in somewhere without light like that's in a great spot and that's not what I wanted and also I wanted something furnished so we could move in and if we don't like it we could go somewhere else without thinking about moving all the Furnitures the least process is a bit different than in the US because you have to justify how much money you have been making you have an apartment and use it usually especially if you go directly without agency if you go directly to an owner they will ask you for the last three salaries what kind of contract you're having is it a safe contract CDE versus CBD so you have to provide all that information so that your folder is they're gonna look at it but the good thing about that is like once you have an apartment there is no lease to break in a way that you have to pay a lot of money in the US you just say you're going to live and in two to three months you can leave the apartments without paying anything that's great the other thing I haven't talked about is that a lot of this is just luck um it's really lucky that I found a job that is in line with my career and that I Vibe with the manager that is a CDI that's gives me a Visa for four years like all of that is lucky you know I could only control the things that were in my power which were the number of jobs I applied to the amount of time that I spent and what that meant was that I needed to wake up really early to do interviews sometimes I had to do them on my lunch break at work don't tell them that and sometimes you know I had to give up on going out for a night or something like that in order to be prepared for the interview in the morning um yeah those are just the little sacrifices that you have to make if you're willing to come here in conclusion people will say that this is a pipe dream or that it's unrealistic or that it's something you shouldn't do and I'm here to say that if there's a will there's a way uh I did not have a rich family to pay for me to do this I did not have connections at a company to help me do this uh all you need to do is dedicate some time to this and prioritize it and if I can do it then you can do it so yeah I hope that that gives you some inspiration so let me know if I miss anything in the comments below feel free to leave me some questions I will be doing a part two which will be a little bit more qualitative it'll be more about like life in France versus life in the US which I think is important if you're thinking about moving here so yeah leave those questions as well and I will see you in the next one I forgot what I was gonna say okay hold on uh What's My Line have you started Googling the best cities to move to and he was living in Dallas at the time and after that he moved to it's really weird to talk about you like you're not here because you're like sitting right there

Channel: Gioya L

Views: 28,440

Keywords: gioya, gioyal, gioya in Paris, Paris vlog, life in paris

Id: urJSA6nDS2I

Length: 19min 23sec (1163 seconds)

Published: Tue May 30 2023