Penny's activity

Thaks Arty. I just seem to have encountered it first that's all.

Hi Pauline - this thread started as some of us are being denied inscription to the health service or only being granted 12 months despite us being permanent residents too. Are you in Marche and if so which comune and ASUR area please? It is very useful for my ongoing fight to know this. Thanks

A&R - it's not just the young with families who won't have a pension. We're in our 40's and there'll be no pension for us either (except the pittance we'll get from the state - if it still exists by then). We also have to earn a living in the meantime and that in Italy is very difficult. SanG - I agree the fruit and vegetables are generally higher quality here but I lived in the countryside in the UK and used farm shops where the quality was excellent and prices reasonable. We also had fantastic butchers.  I personally think, like mosts things in Italy, there just isn't one simple answer. Some things are cheaper, others more expensive. As someone else said, it also depends on how you live & shop. In the UK I did a weekly (sometimes fortnightly) shop and threw a lot away and spent a lot more because of it. Here I shop every day and use it that day, because here I have the time to do that. I'm also not paying £500 a month in train fares just to get to work but then I am paying a fortune to run a vehicle. I can't say I have noticed prices increasing here in the last few years. I think restaurants are a little dearer but then again others haven't raised their prices in 6 years. It all depends on where you eat. Bread & petrol went through a phase of being expensive but both have now come down in price and I have always found meat expensive here. Vegetables at the beginning of the year were also expensive due to the ridiculously long and wet winter we had. I agree that it is more expensive to live here than in the UK if you convert everything back to GBP. But that is not a very good comparison in my opinion. I too get paid in GBP so have been very badly hit by the exchange rate change but even so, after nearly 6 years here, I long ago stopped converting things into pounds when shopping. I just do it the once on pay day and that's it. Sebastiano is absolutley right about the horrendous cost of running a business here. Our outgoings for the cycling business are over €7000 per year (excluding tax) regardless of whether we earn a penny. For a seasonal (6 month a year) business that is crazy. Imagine how many bikes we'd have to rent just to cover our outgoings!! So much of this seems to be governed by how you setup in the first place. As ever, there are so many loopholes and "other" ways of doing things (all legal might I add!) that we are still only just learning about. Forget the difficulty of learning the language (at least this you can just apply yourself to and get learning) it is understanding the administrative/tax side of Italy that is the steepest learning curve. In my experience, Italian advisors (e.g. accountants, lawyers etc.) just do not understand that we do not just "know" the same things as Italians. How can we? We are foreigners. Many costly mistakes get made due the the advisor assuming we know and us not knowing to ask. "Piano, piano" as they say   

Sorry Anne, I missed that bit. So, apologies to Angela too!

BCC Picena do mortgages but will only lend 50% to non-residents. It seems that most banks also prefer/inist upon a guarantor.

I pay €4.65 a month for everything so I would say you rcharges are very high.

Interesting, thanks Andrew (and Anne for asking!) Hopefully we'll make it on Sunday!

Direct Line will accept your UK no claims bonus regardless of who you were insured with. You just need to produce your renewal document showing the no. of years discount and they are a lot cheaper. Just remember the lower the "bonus/malus" number when doing your quote, the greater the discount. If you make a mistake then it will be adjusted when you send them the documents. Italsure quoted me £1200 fully comp for my Italian registered car. I have just paid €660 third party fire & theft plus cover for vandalisation and natural causes with Direct Line - cheap for Italy. It is a 2005 diesel Mercedes Vaneo with 7 seats.

Maybe we're just lucky but we honestly have absolutely no noise whatsoever. We're only 100 from the main piazza and even when there is a band on we still can't hear it. Our street is a dead end so we don't have any cars passing us either, our house is detached with a walled garden and we aren't adjacent to any other properties - they are all in a row opposite, so no-one is watching us come and go. So I can't really relate to people's experience of living in town at all. Maybe we really are lucky and have all the positives and none of the negatives! I am sure feuds aren't exclusive to towns either. There are plenty of them in the countryside

My auntie (who travelled the world several times over whilst working for the World Bank) told me that Orange Pekoe are the leaves used in PG tips. I have tried them in the States and as long as you can get them to make water hot enough, they really do taste like proper English tea. But - I've never seen them here and I get my Tetley teabags sent by my mum.