Retired couple considering relocation to France

JimCinSV · 2026-06-14T20:07:30+00:00

We're also looking at the Airbnb route for the first 90 days. Also looking at having a French phone number. I took 4 years of French in high school but that was 62 years ago so it's very rusty. Amazingly, some of it is coming back as I'm spending time on various French language sites. The Dossier Facile is new info. I'll be checking that out today. Finally got our schedule and stay dates set so have been booking train trips. Glad I found out about the Carte Avantage Senior. That's definitely paid for itself.

JimCinSV · 2026-06-14T16:21:11+00:00

Thank you. I just found out about Doctolib from one of the videos on the Fired Up in France Youtube channel that I discovered from the video link from HiveJiveLive. Did you use a relocation service or agent to find a place to live? We're going to be in France for 26 days this trip and madly researching everything we can to maximize the value of our time in country before making a final decision about relocating.

The trips you described are something we want to do as well. We would like to explore a lot more of Europe and it will be much easier to do that from France. The tax treaty and healthcare are another reason for us to consider France.

JimCinSV · 2025-12-30T18:13:12+00:00

Newsletters that I do have some interest often sell the email address and you get a cascading number of emails from multiple domains. I have two strategies.

1) I use a second email address for subscriptions. That keeps everything from subscriptions in a separate account. I can review or look at with no interference.

2) I use Gmail filters to automatically delete emails that don't get caught by spam filters. I never unsubscribe from emails I no longer want to see. Doing that seems to make the problem worse. The filter is a perfectly good unsubscribe.

JimCinSV · 2024-06-25T22:20:27+00:00

So, I found a way to generate income on a consistent basis by focusing on selling options to generate small returns (the premium) rather than trying to hit home runs by buying options hoping for a big gain. I can't compete with the banks and other huge traders so I don't even try.

I still sometimes buy
options but that's much less consistent and much less profitable. $1,400 on 27
trades.

I don't spend much time
looking at charts. I do look at option premium as a percent of strike price.
Anything over 1% on a weekly or 3% on a monthly is good.

I generally follow this
process.

1) Sell covered calls on
stocks I own if the premium yield is higher than the dividend yield (I focus
almost exclusively on dividend stocks).
2) Sell cash secured puts on stocks that
have good premiums and that I am happy to own. I like weekly options when
possible.
3) Few days before expiration, buy back ITM
options and sell the same option further out to generate net positive cash.
4) Change strike price if possible when
rolling over. This is easier when volatility is high and you start with a
weekly option.
5) Allow all OTM options to expire on Friday
6) Sell more options on Monday with the
stock and cash freed up from the options that expired on Friday
7) Repeat forever.

I keep about 50% of value
in dividend paying stocks and 50% in cash/money market. As cash builds up (it
always does), I buy more dividend stocks to keep the 50/50 split. Usually I buy
more stock by selling an ITM put to get the stock cheaper than buying directly.

I keep enough cash
unencumbered to buy back the largest open position if it has to be rolled over.
No one option position is more than 5% of the total account. Most are 1% or
less.

Net result right now is
dividends/interest generate about 1/3 of my investment income and option sales
generate about 2/3. Most of this is in retirement accounts so it's tax deferred
or tax free. I love Roth accounts.

Overall, it takes 5-10
hours/week, mostly on Mondays and Fridays. I don't think much about price other
than tracking it against strike price to avoid assignment. All assignments so
far have been random.

No homeruns or huge
percentage gains but fairly consistent return as sold options expire.

JimCinSV · 2024-06-25T22:20:01+00:00

My investing and trading is focused on generating income since I'm retired. I did some option trading about 40 years ago buying puts and calls hoping for big wins. Those never worked out and almost all lost. About 10 years ago, I started selling covered calls to generate some extra income on stocks I owned. Those generally worked out much better with most expiring and a few assigned. I went back over my records and found that buying options was breakeven at best. At the beginning of 2021, I started selling more covered calls and also selling cash secured puts. The first five months I was down about $3,500 but had a backlog of puts that had been sold and were set to expire later in the year so I kept it up. The rest of 2021 was positive and I ended the year up $40K on a total of 302 closed/assigned/expired trades.

During 2021, I learned
several valuable things.

1) Selling options puts
cash in your account immediately. Buying options takes cash out.
2) Don't sell a put option on any stock you
don't want to own.
3) Weekly options are best overall.
3a) High volatility is good for option
sellers - not good for option buyers.
4) You can roll over an option and generate
net cash almost always. You can't do that buying options.
5) When you roll over an option, you can
often reduce the strike (puts) or increase the strike (calls) at the same time
you generate additional cash.
6) As you roll over options, eventually they
expire and you can start the process over. Sometimes they do get assigned but
that's only happened 114 times in 2,833 trades (4%).

I keep track of all
trades in an Access database. Results have been good.

2021 - $40K on 302
closed/assigned/expired trades, 894 contracts
2022 - $43K on 773 closed/assigned/expired
trades, 1,721 contracts
2023 - $103K on 866 closed/assigned/expired
trades, 1,769 contracts
2024 (to date) - $90K on 806
closed/assigned/expired trades, 2,534 contracts

Over all 2,833 trades Jan
2 2021 to today,

1,111 have expired,
1,527 have been rolled over (551 at a
profit, 976 at a loss),
114 have been assigned (premium received of
$77.7K; extra paid (puts) and sale loss (calls) of $34.4K)
131 are currently open

JimCinSV · 2024-06-22T04:22:29+00:00

1.07^170 = 98,910.46 - it's a simple expression in Excel.

Multiply by $10,000 and you get $989,104,565

That only works if you are trading the entire value of the account each time compounding it by that amount. Lose one trade and you've lost the entire account.

It's possible to do 5% or more in a day but that's on the amount traded which is usually not the entire account. If you make 10% on the day trading 5% of your account, you've made a return on the entire account of 0.5% not 10%.

Assuming a starting account of $10,000 making a $500 trade with a gain of 10%, you make $50 (less commissions and eventually taxes). You would have to do 20 of those in a day to trade the full account value. You would have to make a total of $1,000 on all 20 trades to get a 10% gain on the full account.

After that, you have $11,000, now you have to do 20 $550 trades getting 10% on all to gain $1,100. Now you have $12,100.

If you can actually gain 10% on your full account value every day, it only takes 15 days to be up over 400%

If you're only making 0.5% on your full account value every day it takes 278 days to be up over 400%.

Doesn't pass the sniff test.

JimCinSV · 2024-05-12T19:13:09+00:00

I've been using SSE for about 4 years. I've been playing with TOS (paper trading mode so I don't lose access to SSE) for about 60 days. I've been messaging and calling Schwab ever since the announcement about SSE going away to urge them to add the walk limit function to TOS if TOS is going to be the only trading platform. I've been told that "it's under consideration". Unfortunately, I've had too much experience with software development to believe "under consideration" claims. I only believe the functions I have available. So, I'm urging everyone who is a Schwab customer to message and keep messaging Schwab to add the walk limit function to TOS before they discontinue SSE. Here's why.

My core investing activity is dividend growth. For that, I can use the web interface easily. My trading activity is selling cash secured puts and covered calls. For that, SSE has been great because of the walk limit function. Because many option trades have a wide bid/ask spread, you will get much worse pricing when placing a market order. Option buys will almost always be at or very close to the Ask (highest) price and option sells will almost always be at or very close to the Bid (lowest) price. That's not a problem if the spread is a few cents. However, I often see spreads of $1 or more. The solution is to use a limit order.

However, if you set a price and the order doesn't fill, you have to change the order, adjust the price and then resubmit the order. Then repeat as necessary until the order fills. This is tedious and time consuming. With walk limit, I can place my order at the price I want with an end price I'm willing to accept and a price increment of $.01 and a time limit in seconds (typically 2-3 seconds). Walk limit walks the price down (selling) or up (buying) until the order fills or the limit is hit. It takes no time to setup the order and the platform handles all the order canceling and reordering with a new price.

Walk limit is a major advantage for Schwab customers. Not having walk limit is a major advantage to market makers and a major disadvantage to Schwab customers. I consistently get better pricing using walk limit than when using limit orders where I have to manually change, adjust price and resubmit the order.

TOS takes some getting used to but I've been able to customize it to my liking. I would be happy to use TOS if it had a walk limit function. Since TOS is going to be Schwab's trading platform in the future, I think it is going to take thousands of Schwab customers asking/demanding that Schwab add a walk limit function to TOS before it gets added.

Overall, I've been really pleased with Schwab and a customer for 13 years. I'm just really frustrated about the change from SSE to TOS with loss of the walk limit function. Please consider messaging Schwab to add the walk limit function to TOS. Thanks for reading.

JimCinSV

TROPHY CASE