Sarah Olney Ross sold her home in Gloucestershire for £175,000 and moved to France debt-free

In 2016, Sarah Olney Ross had been “struggling” with an interest-only mortgage when she sold her cottage near Cirencester in Gloucestershire and decided to move to France.

She now lives in Uzerche in the south west of France, in a home that she describes as a “Harry Potter medieval house, meets New York loft”.

Sarah had always wanted to live in France, and took the plunge in early 2016, before the vote for the UK to leave the European Union.

It enabled her to go entirely mortgage-free, after selling her UK-based home for £175,000, and buying the French property for €108,000, which now equates to around £94,000.

“I moved as soon as someone made me a cash offer – I honestly think I may have been repossessed if I had stayed given where the economy is. I was a Brexit escapee in that I moved knowing it was going to be an ‘out’ vote,” she says.

“Owning your own home and knowing nobody can chuck you out is excellent. Once you know you’re safe, that’s something to aim for,” she adds.

Sarah’s townhouse has a large cellar, a terraced garden, and two standalone apartments, which she used to rent out, but she now offered to friends and family to stay.

Sarah is one of an estimated 3.8 million Women Against State Pension Inequality (Waspi) women affected by major changes to the state pension age.

These campaigners say that women born between 1950 and 1960 were not given enough notice about the increase in their pension age and ended up receiving the payment later than expected.

Sarah’s home in France. She moved before Brexit, in early 2016

“I rented out the room as I needed an income stream at the time. I had worked in PR and marketing but was a bit burned out and did not want to do that at the time,” she says.

She now gets the full state pension plus a workplace pension which totals around £1,360 per month and also has restarted doing some freelance work for a PR company called Albador Bishop, which is run by her friend.

With the extra income from work, she has bought a second home on the Italian Riviera, which needed extensive work doing.

Sarah has no regrets about moving to France, and says her adult daughter encouraged her to do so.

The interior of Sarah’s home in France. She also has a second home on the Italian Riviera

She says her decision to move abroad on her own raised eyebrows from some people, but that it can be an enjoyable experience if you go into it with the right “mentality”.

“Friends are just people you haven’t met yet. That’s the mentality you need to do it with,” she says.

As well as the advantage of being mortgage-free, she also says that other elements of living in France are far cheaper.

She says: “The quality of food in France is excellent. If you want to eat well the food is better and cheaper.

“You can get a two course lunch that is excellent quality for €17 or less. That might even include a small carafe of wine.

“The French government also capped energy price increases during the inflation wave, which really helped on that front.

“A bus fare can be as little as a single euro and we still have the excellent network of rural public transport that the UK does not.”

She now says that being entirely debt-free is very important to her, so although she spends money, she avoids owing it.

“I have a credit card, but I don’t even want to owe money on that,” she explains.