Watched the video above? Scroll down for the raw numbers behind our stalled move to Alsace, the forensic breakdown of why 30 acres of Massachusetts land is a financing trap, and the exact French VLS-TS visa rules forcing us into a $15,000 short-term rental bleed.
12 Months of Limbo: By The Numbers
- Days since boarding our scouting flight to France: 373 (October 28, 2025)
- Scouting stay duration in Colmar: 76 days at La Petite Venise with Sylvie and Rhys (Amanda was only able to leave her job at City Hall for a single week over Christmas, which she spent bedridden with the flu)
- Fleet and equipment liquidated on an attorney’s handshake: 2 cars (Acadia, Impala), 1 utility trailer, ATVs, and motorcycle
- Time on the market for our 30-acre parcel: ~6 months of dead ends
- Heating oil price change since February: Doubled (+100%), with the tank gauge currently resting on dead zero
- Massachusetts roll-off dumpster cost: $700 to $800 per drop
- Short-term furnished rental cost in Bristol County (for 4 people): ~$5,000/month ($10,000 to $15,000 equity bleed while waiting on visas)
The Handshake That Cost a Year
Before Sylvie, Rhys, and I boarded our flight last October to find out if a walkable, human-scaled life in Alsace was actually real, I made a fatal tactical error: I counted money that hadn’t cleared the bank yet.
A local attorney gave me a firm handshake agreement to buy our 30 acres of raw land here in East Taunton. Because he was an attorney and not some random tire-kicker off Craigslist, I treated the deal as money in the bank. I stripped our multi-car household down to a single Subaru, sold off our gear, and shut down my service provider accounts on contractor platforms weeks before departure so I wouldn’t get hit with emergency IT or repair calls while in Colmar.
Then the attorney vanished. A full year later, our heating oil tank is empty, New England temperatures are dropping, and my own house feels like a minimum-security holding cell.
Why Selling 30 Acres of Raw Land in Massachusetts Is a Nightmare
In the video, I vented about buyers wasting our realtor’s time for the last six months. If you have only ever bought or sold single-family homes, here is the mechanical reality of why raw, unimproved acreage in southeastern Massachusetts stalls out so many deals:
- The 30-Year Mortgage Myth: Retail buyers show up assuming they can put 5% or 10% down and get a standard 30-year conventional mortgage on 30 acres of woods. Banks do not lend on raw dirt like they do on houses because there is no livable structure serving as collateral. Most raw land loans require 35% to 50% down in cash, higher interest rates, and shorter amortization schedules.
- Utility and Site-Work Reality: Every week, someone wanders through the trees shocked that 30 acres of woodland doesn’t already have municipal water mains, town sewer hookups, natural gas, and streetlights waiting for them. In rural pockets of Bristol County, building on raw land means paying out of pocket for perc testing, engineered septic systems, well drilling, forestry clearing, and running power hundreds of feet off the road.
- The 48-Hour Adrenaline Cycle: A buyer walks the property, talks a big game for two days, and then disappears the moment their loan officer or excavation contractor gives them a reality check.
The French Visa Catch-22: Why We Can’t Apply Until We Are Homeless
Because we cannot afford to sit through another freezing Massachusetts winter waiting on a land buyer, our realtor advised us to list our half-renovated house immediately. For anyone researching a move to France with kids on a Long-Stay Visitor Visa (VLS-TS Visiteur), selling the roof over your head first triggers a brutal bureaucratic Catch-22 at the Boston consulate:
- Paper Equity Is Worthless at TLScontact: You cannot walk into your visa interview in Boston and hand the officer a Zillow estimate, a tax assessment, or even a signed Purchase and Sale agreement. To approve a family of four on visitor visas, France requires proof of liquid financial self-sufficiency sitting cleared in a bank account. Until our house actually closes and the wire hits our account, we are broke on paper and cannot submit our applications.
- The 90-Day Application Window: You can only apply for a French long-stay visa within 90 days of your intended departure date, and processing plus appointment lead times mean budgeting two to three months between closing on the house and boarding the plane.
- The $5,000/Month Massachusetts Housing Gap: The day the house closes, the money hits the bank, the final dumpster drops in the driveway, and we hand the keys to the buyer. That leaves two adults and two teenagers needing a roof in the Taunton area for 60 to 90 days. Around here, $3,500 a month gets you an unfurnished apartment with zero utilities on a mandatory 12-month lease. For a furnished, short-term setup where four people can function out of six suitcases without signing a year-long lease, the real cost is closer to $5,000 a month. Unless of course you try to do it through AirBnB, then it’s more.
Moving twice means lighting $10,000 to $15,000 of our freshly liquidated home equity on fire just to exist in Bristol County while waiting for four passport stamps.
How We Survive the “In-Between”
When you are stuck in indefinite relocation limbo, “box paralysis” eats your brain. You pick up a kitchen tool or a bin of coaxial cables, stare at it, wonder if you will need it four months from now or if dealing with 20 flakes on Facebook Marketplace is worth 15 bucks, and put it back down. Because we refuse to spend $800 on a roll-off dumpster today when we will still need another $800 dumpster on closing day, we ration the purge one week at a time: stuffing heavy black contractor bags inside official orange city trash bags and weighing them by hand so the city collectors don’t slap an “Overweight” sticker on them and leave them on the grass.
In the meantime, I keep grocery money coming in through local PC repairs and setting up streaming boxes for people cutting their cable bills, work that doesn’t wreck my back or require buying heavy tools I’ll just have to sell again. I also digitized our entire tax and document history, feeding thousands of pages through a desktop scanner so we aren’t hauling paper across the Atlantic.
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How Did You Handle the Housing and Downsizing Gap?
We already burned the boats, sold the fleet, and severed ties to normal American routines. Staying in car-dependent suburbia after watching Sylvie and Rhys taste real autonomy and freedom in Colmar is not an option. If we have to move twice to get back on that plane, we move twice.
If you have made an international move (or purged decades of family life down to suitcases): How did you break through the downsizing paralysis when you didn’t have a firm departure date yet? And if you had to liquidate your primary house to show liquid funds for your visa, where did your family live during the 60-to-90-day consulate processing gap? Drop your advice in the comments below.
