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belgian id card
I plan on retiring in June and leaving my rented house in Belgium.
I will then spending 2-3 months on holiday in France before returning to belgium for a few of days to sort things out and then go back to the UK to retire.
My question is can I keep my belgian ID card whilst I am on holiday and hand it in when I come back even though I would not have a legal address in Belgium - I would not have a legal address in the UK ?
Ask your commune but normally the card will be cancelled automatically when new tenants are registered at your former rental home. You can't use it to travel and, until you return it to the commune you will continue to be liable for tax in Belgium.
This is on the assumption that this is a E+ or E card, if it is actually a Belgian ID card then the commune will tell you how to register at the Belgian embassy in the UK and you obviously keep the card.
Keep your Belgian bank account open as you will probably be due a tax refund and it might anyway prove useful.
The other misgiving I have, and it isn't related to the card, is that it sounds as if you will be of "no fixed abode" for a period of some months and that might not prove to have been a wise choice in today's world, it could make it very difficult to open (or even retain a current) UK bank account, for example.
What you call your "belgian ID card", isn't actually an ID card, it is a residence permit. As BECASSE notes above, once your tenants have registered at your address, you can't also legally be living there, so in any case it will be invalid.
Also, for the life of me, I can't actually understand why someone would want to keep it anyway? You no longer live here. Just go to the commune and deregister.
You have a UK passport I assume. So you are British and can holiday in France. UK does not require a fixed abode like here, so I don’t see the problem in returning your card. Even a hard Brexit shouldn’t matter. But check the points already mentioned.
Although Wezembeekwanderer is quite correct in saying that the UK does not require a fixed abode, you will not be able to open a bank account or even register a car there without being able to prove (with a utility bill in your name for example) that you have one.
You can legally have 2+ "menages" registered at the same address. Someone registering with the same address does not cancel out the registration of someone already registered with that address.
We apparently lived with another family of 5 in our house for over a year when we first arrived in Belgium. It had its advantages - the water company calculated the water bill on the basis of 11 people living at the property instead of 6! It did take over a year before the maison communale cancelled the registration of the family who left without deregistering - I gave the commune the google links which indicated this Italian family was now living in Roma and finally their names were removed from the foreigners' register.
I've also had a friend living with me for a few weeks, before she moved on to her own place. We had 2 separate "compositions de menages" and it was no problem at all.
