Why We’re Building Aelos
Why we built Aelos, why we started with France, and what we think the next decade of cross-border living looks like.
Retiring abroad sounds romantic until you actually try to do it.
The trouble is rarely one big catastrophe. It's ten small administrative problems stacked in the wrong order, each one quietly depending on something you were supposed to handle three months earlier:
- You miss the window to turn your visa into a residence permit.
- You can't sign a lease without a local guarantor.
- Your wire transfers lose two percent to fees no one mentioned.
- Your American accountant doesn't know the tax rules where you moved, the local accountant doesn't know the American side, and the two never speak.
The worst of these mistakes stay invisible for years.
The hard part was never finding the answers
Almost everything you need to get this right is already out there. The catch is that both ways of reaching for it leave gaps. Hire professionals and you first have to figure out who's actually good. Only a handful are genuinely strong on the cross-border piece and fairly priced rather than quietly overcharging, and if you pick wrong you usually don't find out until it's too late. Even when you choose well, no one coordinates them, and most people only hire for two or three pieces and stay in the dark on the rest.
Do it yourself instead and you lean on forums, where the people answering aren't experts and are each reacting to one narrow question. They can't see your whole situation, so they miss what you actually need, and the advice you took to save money often costs you more later. Either way, the expensive mistakes happen in the gaps between the pieces, not in the pieces themselves.
One woman we spoke with answered a single question wrong in her French visa interview. The officer asked whether she planned to stay longer than a year. She said no, because she honestly wasn't sure yet. She was handed a one-year visa instead of a place on the residency track, and twelve months later she flew back to the US to start the whole thing over. Her consultant had filed the paperwork but never sat her down to walk through what the interview would be like.
Another retiree tried to do it all himself. He spent more than fifty hours across Facebook groups, Reddit threads, and expat blogs, piecing together a plan from strangers who each knew one corner of it. None of them mentioned that California has no license exchange agreement with France. So he arrived, found his US license stopped counting after the first year, and had to start from zero: months of lessons at a French driving school and around two thousand euros, for a license he already held. An hour of the right advice beforehand would have prevented all of it. Instead he paid in money, in months, and in the quiet stress of learning each rule only after it had cost him.
Neither of them was careless. One trusted a consultant who filed the paperwork but was never scoped to prepare her for what came next. The other trusted the forums, full of confident answers and quiet on the one thing that ended up costing him. In both cases the gap stayed invisible until the damage was done. They were each left to coordinate the whole move alone, in a new country and a new language, expected to spot what they didn't even know to look for before it was too late.
What Aelos does
Aelos handles the move and the years that follow it, for Americans retiring in France. We take on the categories that decide whether a move actually works:
- Immigration: from the visa through long-term residency
- Tax planning and filing: coordinated on both sides of the Atlantic
- Banking: opening a French account, and moving money between dollars and euros without losing a cut to fees
- Healthcare: enrolling in the public system and the private top-up that goes with it
- Housing: the rental search and the French guarantor most Americans don't have
- Estate planning: wills and assets that hold up in both countries
- Community: your new support system once the paperwork is done
The licensed work stays with licensed people. Tax, legal, and healthcare administration are handled by specialists we've vetted. Our job is to coordinate them so you're never the one figuring out which form comes before which appointment.
In practice, that means you answer a question once instead of five times, and upload a document once instead of every time a new professional asks for it. The system checks what you give it against the requirements of every step ahead, and flags problems before they cost you anything. Your CPA, your estate attorney, and your healthcare administrator all work from the same file, with you out of the middle. A compliance calendar runs quietly in the background and surfaces the right form at the right moment. And when a letter shows up that you can't make sense of, or a deadline you're unsure about, a real person who already knows your file picks up.
The software takes away the friction. The people make sure nothing important slips, and that you're never doing this alone. The visa interview that cost one woman a year, the driving license that cost another two thousand euros: those are exactly the failures Aelos exists to prevent.
A look at the product below.
Why this is personal for me
I've lived a version of this my whole life. I was born in Morocco, moved to France at seventeen, and spent the years after in Ireland, the UK, and the US. You learn that changing countries is rarely hard for dramatic reasons. It's hard because banking, taxes, healthcare, pensions, and insurance all quietly assume you'll never move. The seams only show once your life crosses a border.
Earlier in my career I helped build this same system at Stripe: Stripe Atlas allows founders around the world to set up a US business entity – just like a relocation, but for businesses.
The founders we worked with didn't struggle because lawyers and banks and accountants didn't exist. They struggled because no one tied them together. Atlas worked because it sat in the middle and held the pieces: PwC for tax, Orrick for legal, Mercury for banking, Stripe for payments and everything in between.
Why France and why now
Americans are living longer, and retirement can now run twenty or thirty years. People in their sixties today are healthier and more comfortable thinking globally than their parents were. Some want a lower cost of living, some want better healthcare, some simply want a slower chapter that still feels full.
France offers a remarkable amount of all of it: excellent healthcare, infrastructure that works, beautiful places to live, and a cost of living well below what most people are leaving behind. Under the US-France tax treaty, American retirement income is treated unusually fairly. My co-founder grew up there and I lived there for seven years, so we know the country well, and we built deep relationships with the right people on the ground. Put all of that together, and France is hard to beat for an American retiring today.
Where this goes
France is where we start, not where we stop. The same tangle of scattered expertise and hidden dependencies shows up in every cross-border move: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Mexico, and in time well beyond retirement. The software, the vetted network, and the hard-won knowledge travel with us, and each new corridor gets easier for what we learned in the last one.
Fewer and fewer people spend their whole lives in one country, and almost none of the systems they depend on were built for that. We think someone should build for the way people actually live now. That's what we're doing.
