One of the great joys of moving to another country is discovering that things you assumed were universal are, in fact, not universal at all. Let’s take finance (please!). You arrive thinking you understand how banks work, how people borrow money, how credit cards work and what it means to be financially responsible, only to discover that your new country has quietly taken the whole thing apart and put it back together in a slightly different order. France does this rather well.
There are the obvious differences, of course. The paperwork, the paperwork required to prove that you have completed the paperwork, and the occasional requirement for a document proving that you are the person who is holding the document proving that you are you. But underneath all of that is a genuinely different attitude towards personal finance.
Having lived in countries where your financial identity can seem to revolve around a credit score, credit cards and your ability to borrow, the French system can initially feel rather strange. It is not that borrowing doesn’t exist, or that French people never use credit, but the system seems to place considerably more emphasis on what you can actually afford than on how enthusiastically you have demonstrated your ability to borrow. And, as an immigrant, I have found that difference fascinating.
No. 1 – France doesn’t have a credit score
One of the first things that can be confusing, particularly for someone arriving from the United States, is discovering that there isn’t a single French equivalent of the familiar American credit score. A system where your financial behaviour is condensed into a number that can follow you around and influence whether you are considered a good or bad borrower.
That doesn’t mean French banks don’t care about your financial history. Far from it. They care about whether you can repay money, whether you have existing debts, how stable your income is and whether you have experienced problems paying what you owe. The difference is that this information isn’t condensed into one universal number in the way it is in the American credit-score system. Instead, the bank looks at your actual financial circumstances: your income, employment, existing commitments, spending, savings and banking history. In other words, rather than asking simply whether you have a good credit score, the French bank is looking at the rather more practical question of whether you can afford the particular financial commitment you’re asking it to take on.
France does, of course, have systems for recording serious credit and payment incidents. The Banque de France maintains the FICP, or Fichier national des incidents de remboursement des crédits aux particuliers, which records certain repayment incidents involving consumer credit, mortgages and overdrafts. Banks can consult these records when assessing applications for credit. So it isn’t that France has no concept of financial history or creditworthiness. It is simply a different concept.
There is less of the mysterious magic number and more of the rather straightforward question: Can you afford to repay this money?
Getting a loan can feel rather personal
In some countries, borrowing money can feel almost like shopping. You compare lenders, fill in an online form, enter your financial details, someone checks your credit score and, eventually, a computer tells you how much you are allowed to borrow. You may never speak to anyone who knows anything about you beyond the information contained in your application. The whole process can feel remarkably efficient, but also rather impersonal.
In France, particularly when it comes to mortgages, the experience can be quite different. You often have an actual conversation with your bank, whether that is in person, on the phone or, with some of the more modern banks, through email as the application progresses. There is still paperwork (obviously, it’s France), but there is also a sense that there is a person on the other side of it who knows who you are and understands your particular situation.
That relationship with your bank is one of the things I noticed most after moving here. French banking can feel slightly old-fashioned by the standards of countries where everything has moved towards apps, automated decisions and customer-service departments that seem specifically designed to prevent you from speaking to an actual human being. France certainly has online banking, mobile banking and all the other modern conveniences we have come to expect, but there is still a strong tradition of having a named bank adviser and developing an ongoing relationship with your bank.
If you have been with the same bank for years, the relationship itself can become part of the experience. You aren’t necessarily just an account number submitting an application into a machine; you are a customer whose financial history, circumstances and relationship with the bank are known to someone. It isn’t necessarily faster, and it certainly isn’t necessarily less bureaucratic. But there is something rather reassuring about a banking system where your bank might actually know who you are.
How much can you borrow?
French lending is also relatively conservative in one important respect, affordability matters. For residential borrowing, the French regulatory framework has established a general debt-service limit of around 35% of household income, subject to specific rules and limited exceptions. In broad terms, this means that the total burden of loan repayments is not supposed to consume more than around a third of your income. There are also restrictions around the maximum duration of many residential loans, with 25 years generally being the upper limit.
This can be quite refreshing. The question isn’t necessarily, “How much money will you lend me?” It is more along the lines of, “How much money can you lend me while leaving me enough money to live?” That distinction matters.
If you earn €3,000 a month (this is a liveable wage in France, though you might struggle in Paris) and already have substantial monthly commitments, it doesn’t particularly matter that you have never missed a payment in your life. The fact that you have been an excellent borrower doesn’t magically create additional income. The French system tends to take a rather practical view of this.
You have a certain amount coming in. You have certain unavoidable expenses. You have certain existing debts. What remains is what you have available to service another loan. It is not terribly glamorous, but it is quite difficult to argue with the arithmetic.
The French love affair with the debit card
Another difference that becomes apparent fairly quickly is the prevalence of debit cards. If you are used to a credit-card culture, in which it is perfectly ordinary to put everyday purchases on a credit card, collect points or cashback and then pay the balance at the end of the month, the French approach can seem strangely minimalistic.
You use your carte bancaire (debit card).
The money comes out of your bank account.
You have bought the thing.
And, well, that’s it.
There are credit cards in France, of course, and French consumers can use various forms of consumer credit, including revolving credit. But credit is not the default mechanism for everyday spending in the way it can be elsewhere, and there is generally less cultural glamour attached to having access to increasingly large amounts of borrowed money. The French banking card is, generally, simply a convenient way of accessing your own money.
You don’t need to earn points for buying your groceries. You don’t need to optimise your credit-card strategy. You don’t need to calculate whether putting €600 of supermarket shopping on one card will help you reach some mysterious annual rewards threshold. You can just buy the potatoes.
And then there is revolving credit
Now don’t misunderstand me, France absolutely has consumer credit. This is worth mentioning because it is one of the myths that can develop when comparing France with other countries. The difference is that borrowing money to fund everyday consumption doesn’t seem to occupy quite the same cultural position that it can in more credit-dependent economies.
France does have crédit renouvelable, which is essentially revolving consumer credit, and people certainly use consumer loans and other forms of borrowing. The point isn’t that French people don’t borrow; it is that borrowing to fund everyday consumption has traditionally felt less central to household finances.
There is a strong preference, at least in the idealised version of French household finances, for borrowing when there is a clear reason to borrow and otherwise living within your means. In example, a mortgage makes sense because you are buying a home. A car loan may make sense because you need a car. A loan for a major necessary expense may make sense, but borrowing money simply because you would quite like to have something now rather than save for it can attract a rather different reaction. The French response to “I couldn’t afford it, so I put it on my credit card” can sometimes feel less like sympathy and more like the financial equivalent of a raised questioning eyebrow.
Being in the red isn’t something to celebrate
The French word for an overdraft is découvert, and being à découvert means that you have spent more money than you have available in your account. Overdrafts certainly exist, and many people use authorised overdrafts from time to time. But persistent or problematic overdraft use can become a sign that something isn’t working financially, rather than simply being treated as an extension of your available spending power.
This ties into a broader attitude towards debt. There is nothing inherently shameful about having a mortgage. There is nothing particularly unusual about financing a car. Borrowing is part of modern life. But there is a difference between using debt as a tool and using debt to sustain a lifestyle you cannot otherwise afford. That distinction seems particularly important in France.
Are the French simply better at living within their means?
This is where things get interesting, because there is a sense that the French are cautious and generally less inclined to spend money they don’t have. There is certainly something to the idea, but in researching this it’s certainly not an absolute. French households absolutely get into debt. People struggle financially, people use consumer credit and people can become seriously over-indebted. France has an established system for dealing with surendettement, or over-indebtedness, precisely because financial difficulty exists here just as it does elsewhere.
But, there does appear to be a relatively strong cultural preference for saving and financial caution. And this made me wonder why.
A little French history
It is tempting to blame, or perhaps I should say credit, history. France has lived through wars, occupation, economic crises, periods of inflation and political instability, and several generations have experienced circumstances in which financial security could not simply be taken for granted. So I could say that French people therefore learned from their grandparents to keep money aside because you never know what is coming next. It’s my theory, but it is difficult to prove.
What does seem clear is that precautionary saving is important, and research from the Banque de France has found that uncertainty has been one of the factors contributing to the elevated household saving rate in recent years.
Perhaps the explanation is ultimately less romantic. People like having some money put aside because things happen. Cars break down, boilers die at precisely the wrong moment, jobs disappear, roofs leak and children develop unexpectedly expensive hobbies that somehow require equipment costing considerably more than you imagined.
And then, of course, there is the French tax office, which occasionally sends you a letter beginning with the words Nous vous informons…, a phrase that rarely signals that your day is about to become cheaper. Having some savings tucked away for life’s little, and sometimes not-so-little, surprises is therefore less about being unusually thrifty and more about recognising that financial inconveniences have an unfortunate habit of arriving when you least expect them.
Savings and wealth
So how much does the average French person actually have saved? I thought this was a simple question, until I tried to answer it. It turns out there isn’t a single useful number, because “average savings” can mean money sitting in a current account, money in regulated savings accounts, investments, life insurance, pension assets or total household wealth. What I could discover is that French households save a substantial proportion of their disposable income. According to INSEE, the household saving rate was 17.9% in 2025, which is quite a remarkable proportion when you think about it. And financial saving is widespread. INSEE reported that 90.5% of French households held some form of financial wealth in early 2024.
That does not mean 90.5% of French households have enormous savings accounts. It means that some form of financial asset, such as a savings account, life insurance, securities or another financial product, is extremely common.
Then there is wealth, which is an entirely different question. In early 2024, the median French household had approximately €205,100 in gross wealth, while the average was around €374,900. But those figures include property and other assets, so they absolutely should not be interpreted as “the average French household has €374,900 sitting in the bank.” The distribution of wealth is also extremely uneven, as it is almost everywhere.
So what does a normal French household actually pay for?
Obviously there is no such thing as a “normal” household, but there are some familiar categories. Housing is usually the big one. Rent or mortgage, electricity, gas, water, home insurance and, for property owners, the big one due in September – the taxe foncière (property tax).
Then there is transport, which might mean a car loan, fuel, insurance, maintenance and parking, or the cost of public transport.
There is health insurance, known as the mutuelle that many people use to supplement the costs reimbursed through the French healthcare system.
And then there are the usual modern necessities such as phones, internet, subscriptions and all the little monthly payments that somehow multiply when nobody is looking.
Food, obviously.
Children, if you have them, who appear to operate under a special financial rule whereby every activity costs €47 and every piece of clothing becomes mysteriously too small approximately three weeks after purchase.
Some of these are visible as bills. Others have already been deducted from your income before you ever receive it. That is one of the reasons the French household budget can look simple from the outside. Some significant costs have been collectivised or deducted earlier in the process rather than appearing as separate private bills.
The French approach isn’t necessarily “less expensive”
There is an important distinction to make when comparing household finances in France with those in other countries. It isn’t necessarily that life in France costs less simply because the state pays for more things. Rather, many of those costs are collected and distributed differently. The French social system is funded through taxes and social contributions, so the money isn’t appearing from nowhere. We all pay into the system, either directly or through deductions from our income, and in return some of the financial risks that might otherwise fall entirely on an individual household are shared across society. Welcome to socialism.
Healthcare is probably the easiest example to understand. A French household isn’t generally expected to pay the full private cost of healthcare whenever someone becomes ill, because the public system covers a substantial proportion of those costs. There are still expenses to deal with, of course, which is why supplementary health insurance, or a mutuelle, is so common, but the household is not carrying the same level of potentially unpredictable financial risk that it might in a more privately funded system. The same broader principle applies to areas such as pensions, unemployment protection and family benefits. Rather than each person having to build their own private financial safety net for every possible eventuality, some of that risk is pooled and funded collectively.
This creates a rather different relationship with personal finance. You still need an income, you still need savings, you still need insurance and you still need to keep an eye on your monthly budget, but you are not necessarily expected to personally finance every possible disaster that life might throw at you. That doesn’t make France a cheaper country in any simple sense. The taxes and social contributions are part of the price of the system. But it can mean that an individual’s exposure to certain large and unpredictable costs is reduced.
And I think that distinction is important when looking at French attitudes towards money. The French household budget isn’t necessarily smaller because French people have somehow discovered a secret way of making everything cheaper. It is structured differently because some costs and risks are dealt with collectively rather than entirely at household level. That changes not only the arithmetic of personal finance, but potentially the psychology of it too. When you know that certain major risks are at least partly cushioned by the wider social system, your savings still matter, but they don’t necessarily have to be your only line of defence against absolutely everything that could go wrong.
Maybe finance should be a little more boring
And perhaps that is what I find most interesting about it. Modern personal finance has a tendency to make money sound much more exciting than it really needs to be. In some countries you are encouraged to optimise your credit score, maximise reward points, leverage assets, use credit strategically, increase borrowing capacity and invest aggressively, all while building some kind of perfectly calibrated personal financial machine that is apparently supposed to turn everyday spending into wealth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with any of those things when they are appropriate, and there are plenty of sensible financial strategies that involve investing, borrowing or making the most of the products available to you. But the French approach can feel considerably less interested in turning personal finance into a career.
Instead, there seems to be something rather appealing about the idea of simply keeping the household functioning. You earn your income, pay your taxes, cover the household costs. If there is money left over, perhaps you save some more, invest some of it or spend it on something you actually enjoy. It isn’t particularly glamorous, and nobody is going to make a bestselling podcast out of “Pay Your Bills and Don’t Spend Money You Don’t Have”, but there is something reassuringly practical about it. And dare I say, less stressful. And who wouldn’t like a little less stress?
But then, there’s France’s finance…
Of note, what I’ve been talking about here is personal finance in France. The everyday business of earning, spending, saving and occasionally trying to work out what the bank is asking you to sign. As for the finances of France itself, though… With a rather sizeable national debt, persistent deficits and the small matter of trying to pay for one of Europe’s more generous social systems, that is a whole other financial story. One that has toppled numerous Prime Ministers and sparked a plethora of strikes. And for me, would require considerably more research and several glasses of wine to write about. Should I ever be bothered.
More French Musings
If you enjoy my musings, rants and whimsical delvings into France, you will find more in my French Findings.
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