- Former US Navy Seal Rick Jones and his wife retired to Paris in 2018.
- The 72-year-old said they were an adventurous couple not tied down by kids or other family in the US.
- He shared the pros and cons of leading an ex-pat lifestyle in France.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Rick Jones. It has been edited for length and clarity.
My wife, Ellen Bryson, and I have always been adventurous people who've lived in Buenos Aires and different cities in the US, such as Norfolk, Virginia, and San Diego.
Ellen worked as a professional dancer in London when she was younger. I served as a Navy SEAL officer for 20 years and was stationed in the Persian Gulf at one point.
We met when we were 40. Our lives have been characterized by not having children, allowing us to move as often as we have without worrying about interrupting the school year.
Ellen was a member of Alliance Française, an organization centered on learning French and understanding the culture in France. In 2016, she came home from a meeting and said, "Why don't we move to Paris?"
I'd been enamored with the city since first visiting in 1979 as a college student. We went on a three-day retreat and talked it over. If we sold our house, we'd no longer have a mortgage. We did the numbers and decided that it made sense for our retirement.
It took a couple of years to get everything in order. Then, after Ellen found us an apartment on the Left Bank, we took the plunge in 2018.
It helped that we belong to the Association of American Residents Overseas, which has about 1,000 members in Paris. It's helped us integrate. The organization has social events, but it also represents our interests, such as voting rights and tax treaties.
We enjoy our lifestyle here, where the pros outweigh the cons. Here are three things I particularly love about Paris — and two that bug me a little.
The food markets are phenomenal
On any given day except Monday, Paris hosts huge, open-air food markets where farmers arrive to sell their fresh produce.
There are more food choices than you would ever see anywhere in the US. The market in our neighborhood has about six different butchers on Sundays. One guy specializes in organ meat, where you buy anything from lamb brains to beef hearts.
The restaurants are great, but many people cook at home and share recipes. I'm the cook in the family and take the time and thought for food preparation three of four days a week.
We experiment with new dishes. With so many different foods available, you can't help but try them.
It's a walkable city
Paris is the most walkable city I've ever been in. The only other city that compares in terms of walkability is San Francisco, where I was stationed there for two years.
My goal is to walk 7,500 steps a day — about four and a half miles. It's easy to achieve in Paris. The most I've probably walked in a day is 16 miles. At one point, I decided to walk the length of every metro line.
A friend who's lived here for 40 years told me that Paris is inexhaustible — it never ends. Every time walk, I find new streets I've never been on, some quirky little shop or an interesting-looking restaurant.
The architecture is beautiful. You never get tired of looking up at the facades. It's almost as if, for centuries, everything that was built was built simply to delight the eye.
The railways are quick, inexpensive and efficient
It's rare for a French train to be delayed. You can tell the exact time when it pulls away from the platform.
Ellen and I tend to travel on high-speed trains called Trains à Grande Vitesse (TGVs). It's due to their excellent performance. They get you places fast and inexpensively.
One of our favorite destinations is Marseille, in southern France. The trip is about three and a half hours each way and costs the equivalent of around $220 round trip.
We'll stay in a hotel in the old port for three days, which is fascinating.
Or we'll use the train for day trips outside Paris. Within an hour to an hour and a half of the city, there are many interesting places to visit.
The amount of red tape is mind-boggling
There is a conventional wisdom that the French are thin, especially compared to Americans. I joke to people that, to some extent, it's true. "It's because the French subsist on paperwork — they eat paperwork," I'll say. The bureaucracy is unbelievably frustrating.
When applying for an apartment, you must assemble a dossier of documents that cover your whole life. The file can be about an inch thick.
As for banks, I've been working with one for over a month to try to get the paperwork done to make international transfers. It's hard to be patient.
Things can be overly rigid
Most people think of the French as being very liberal, with things like going topless on the beach or producing explicit movies. In terms of their excellent social policies, they certainly live by their motto of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity."
However, I've found them to be a conservative society in some regards. They stick to the Napoleonic Code — establishing uniform laws in France in the early 1800s — and rarely question it.
Paris has a housing shortage, yet there are so many empty apartments. Parents have to divide their property equally between their children after they die. You might have an apartment or a house, and two or three or four kids are involved, and they can't agree on what to do with it. And so it just sits there empty for years.
There have been big demonstrations against change. People don't want to change the retirement system, even though everybody knows it can't continue to function economically. In 2023, President Macron wanted to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, and the whole country was up in arms.
I've heard three or four French people who have spent time in either the US or Canada and then moved back to France. They say they admire Americans' constant willingness to try new ways of doing things.
Do you have an interesting story about retiring outside your native country that you'd like to share with Business Insider? Please send details to [email protected].