Brilliant news if you intend to live or holiday in a caravan in the Mediterranean! Whether you plan to buy a mobile home in France, Spain, Portugal, Italy or the Greek Isles, you’ll be pleased to know that the pound to euro exchange rate has shot up in the past 2 years, to 1.40, a full +20 cents higher than in January 2014. So, when you exchange currencies to live in a ‘Caravan in the Sun’, you’ll now get far more euros.
To put this into context for you, were you to exchange £16,500 for site fees, utilities and for day-to-day living in a newly built mobile home in for instance in Tenerife or the Costa del Sol, you’d now get €23,100, +€3,300 more than if you’d bought your caravan 22 months ago, back at the start of 2014. Hence, this favourable exchange rate will make living in your dream mobile home, whether in France, Spain, Portugal or the Greek islands, all the more affordable!
After all, just think of what you might do with an extra €3,300 available to you. You might even use the extra euros to buy or rent a car, and explore the Mediterranean from the home base of your new caravan. You might splash out at a French or Spanish restaurant, and enjoy some authentic continental cuisine. Or, you could use the extra euros to pay off your caravan maintenance costs too, enough to cover your ground rent for 1 year* (*Varies from park to park but 3,300€ would cover annual ground rent on various parks).
Moreover, living in a caravan in France’s Loire Valley or Portugal’s Western Algarve could soon become even more attractive, if sterling continues to climb. The pound to euro exchange rate may rise further, because the Eurozone economy expanded just +0.3% between July and September, –0.1% less than hoped for. This signals that the currency bloc is still in second gear, and may hurt the euro.
With this in mind, it’s the ideal time to live in a brand new mobile home in the Mediterranean, as this favourable exchange rate cuts your costs!
By Peter Lavelle at foreign exchange broker Pure FX http://www.purefx.co.uk