•  edutational content typical of high end children’s magazines (offering illustrated stories, games, stickers and a poster)

• and true instructional content that parallels what children are to be learning that year in school, ie:
  •  Math
  • French language
  • and History and Geography content.

In a country where there is a real worry on the part of parents as to what their children are learning in school, given the comparatively poor results the French educational system has had since the 1970′s, this magazines is clearly designed to calm their angst.

The magazines are beautiful, with a glossy cover, thick paper and brilliant colors, and the instructional content in appealing to the eye as well as in its approach.  A six year old boy not particularly known for his love of school work was found deeply interested in the magazine’s exercizes, not only in the ‘ fun ‘ sections!

They are bi-monthly publications.  They are sold in French press kiosks by the unit and on a yearly subscription basis.  They cost about 7 euros each in a kiosk and 36 euros a year for a  6 issue subscription, in France.  Prices will be higher outside of France no doubt.

Milan Presse is the French publisher behind the idea.  Milan was recently acquired by Bayard Presse, a worldwide leader in children’s magazines, with tens of language adaptations of its leading French titles such as J’Aime Lire, called Adventure Box in the UK.

– > More on Champions du CP et du CE1 and on subscribing

Its truly fascinating to see the hundreds of comments she gets from faithful readers, ie, pre-teenagers, to every post. She talks about everyday issues these pre teens face in France: the end of year school show, arriving late at school, being nervous about going to summer camp, etc…

–> Lulu’s Blog

– > Astrapi magazine information online

FEES:

There are fees of course:

• Homes are not all listed in all real estate agencies. I know of one network, ORPI, that lists its properties through all its network’s agencies, but this is a recent and novel approach.

• Agency fees are about 6% (but run from 5% to 10% depending on the price of the home)

• State fees are about 8% on homes more than five years old, and 4% on recent homes.

So that’s right there between 10% and 14% of the house’ s cost in fees!

Then there’s the administrative hassles.

LEGAL and ADMINISTRATIVE CONSTRAINTS :

Think you’d like to renovate, and maybe add some rooms to your new property? You’ll have to ask for a building permit ( ‘permis de construire’), which may take up to 3 months to be granted or refused, for reasons you often do not completely understand.

There are rules pertaining to the land you may be buying, restricting how much you can enlarge the home. In one instance, even though the house is on 5 800 square meters of land, ten minutes from a city, the only possibility is to enlarge up to twice the size of the existing home. In this case it was not a huge home, with 170 square meters. This means the owners can only up to 85 square meters to the home, leaving a huge part of the land unused for housing- thereby reducing its value.

Information on the land and the home is supposed to be maintained by the local town hall ( at what is called ‘ le cadastre’) , but it is often incomplete and not considered as legal proof.

In conclusion, be forewarned, buying a home in France is an adventure!

France Home Finance is a Paris-based company I’m familiar with who helps non resident buyers find loans.

- > Here’s a good page they have on buying a home in France.