5 Tactics to Avoid Paying 658 Euros in Fees in Germany

Germany is known around the world to have a lot of rules that are strictly enforced across a wide variety of situations. It may be a stereotype, but from my experience I would say that it has some basis in truth.

I am certainly not opposed to living in a disciplined, rule-based society, but the challenge for foreigners is knowing what the unwritten rules are! More often than not, I become aware of the existence of a rule in Germany by inadvertently breaking it and then suddenly having to come up with the cash for my violation. In fact, I have had a tough run of rule infractions over the last 12 months that led to more than 600 Euros in fees being taken from my pocket!

It can feel as though you either arrive poor in Berlin, or you become poor as the fees nickel and dime you to death, so I have shared my learnings here to help you to avoid the same mistakes that I made and save more than a half thousand Euros in fees while living in the German capital.

How I Got Charged 658 Euros in Fees

The fees in Berlin come often and in relatively small amounts — there was no one thing that comprised the majority of the fees that I have paid over my first year in Berlin. There are rules (and associated fees) on basically everything in German living, and I have been on the receiving end of a frustratingly large number of them this year. Let’s take a quick walk through my fee-filled 2017, going from highest to lowest fee amount.

Paying for Insurance Between Jobs (217 Euros)

Germany does have a great healthcare system that I would strongly recommend to my American friends considering making the move abroad. I am on a public healthcare plan like many others and have yet to pay for a doctor’s visit other than a deep teeth cleaning at the dentist.

The issue that I had this year was not with the quality of the help or the price of the insurance itself, but rather with the way that insurance works when changing jobs. I recently left my position at ResearchGate with my final day on November 30 in preparation for starting at Deca Games (maybe I will tell more in a future blog post). My initial contract from Deca Games had a start date of January 1, but I was concerned that I could not start until after returning from the United States, so I tried to see if we could move the start date to January 8. In Germany, it is customary to start on either the 1st or 15th of the month, so we decided to start on January 15 and I would get a signing bonus equal to the work that I would be doing on the week of the 8th. Both parties were happy with the arrangement, and I eventually signed on the dotted line.

While the contract was in the final stages of being drawn up, I got in touch with my insurance company to alert them of the employer change. I was expecting to have to pay for my own insurance while between jobs from November 30 to January 8 and so they sent me some paperwork via snail mail (as is still customary in Germany) and then I called to speak to someone about how to fill it out properly. At first the insurance person said that I did not need to fill out or pay anything if the time between my jobs was a month or less, but when he found out that my time between jobs was ~6 weeks long, the conversation quickly turned to the fact that I had to pay the full insurance amount out of pocket.

What this meant was that if I had kept my start date as January 1 instead of moving it to January 15, I could have saved more than 200 Euros in insurance payments! That was a disappointing realization to come to with the expensive holiday season quickly approaching, and it has been the most expensive avoidable fee that I had this year.

Electricity (166 Euros)

To set the stage for this story, it is important to know that when you get a flat in Germany, there are essentially two types of rent that you agree to. One is called ‘cold rent’ that purely represents the cost of living in the flat itself, and another is called ‘warm rent’ that includes the expected costs of gas and heating onto the cold rent. Note that the warm rent does not include electricity!

When I moved into my flat in December 2016, the electricity was already running. I had expected to get a bill for it in the mail, but nothing showed up after waiting for a few months. I was busy with trying to get the new apartment to feel like home, following up on getting wireless internet (which took 4 months!), and working on a new job search that I started in January. There was so much coming at me that I will admit that some things got left on the wayside, and ultimately I figured that I was mistaken about the situation and that the electricity must have been included in the warm rent. I mean, how else was I getting electricity in my apartment without issue and still no postal mail about it in my mailbox?

On one cool September morning at 8:30am before leaving for work, the power suddenly went down at my apartment. I waited a few minutes expecting it to come back on after a generator or something kicked in, but when my room stayed dark for 10 minutes, I decided to write my landlord an email asking about the situation. Then I opened my apartment door, saw the staircase lights on and knew that I had a real problem. I found the grounds keeper at the entry floor of the apartment and he informed me that he had just let someone in to cut off my power! You would hope that he or the electrician would at least have the decency to inform me about what was going on, but no, that is not the way that things are done in Germany.

I called the electric company that my landlord referred me to and the phone representative actually apologized (the first time I received an apology from customer service since moving to Berlin!) when he discovered that the apartment’s account was still under the last resident’s name for some unknown reason. He could not quickly get my power back on over the phone, so I had to go to their offices to pay the unpaid bills in cash in order to get my power turned back on the next day.

I made the trek down to the electric company’s offices to get this all sorted out during my lunch break. The customer service representative agreed that indeed my account was in the previous renter’s name, and we quickly got a new contract in place. It turns out that they had sent many mails to the previous renter’s name over the months that I had lived in the flat and all of them had been returned after failing to find the address to deliver them to. This happens in Germany because the name of the mail recipient needs to actually be posted on the mailbox itself or the letter will be undeliverable. With my name on the mailbox and the previous tenant’s name on the letters, all of the mail was consistently returned to the electric company. They had even had someone come to try to find the correct mailbox after several letters were returned to them — I know this because there was a specific additional line in the fees that I had to pay for this person to come to my apartment building!

This whole situation was made even more infuriating when I looked in my mailbox that morning after the power was cut and found a paper card inside letting me know that indeed my power had been cut. The area on the card where the electrician is supposed to write the customer’s name had a large “?” written in ink as though the company did not know my name, but at the same time they managed to know which mailbox was the right one for the power that they were cutting. They didn’t know my name and yet they slipped the card inside the mailbox with my last name on it!? From my perspective, this means that they could have knocked on my door or put a note in my mailbox if they had really wanted to, but instead they decided to alert me in writing only once they had turned off my power. Annoying, right?

I complained as much as I could about paying the 160+ Euro fee that covered the cost of the electricians coming out to shut off my power and then returning to turn it back on again the following day, but as usual, I lost. Even though it is true that if I had actually received any mail from them I would have paid without question, in Germany it is always the customer’s fault for not reaching out, following up, etc. I fight the system as much as I can here and generally expect that I will lose in the end — I just prefer to take the fee abuse standing up instead of sitting down 🙂

Contracts (128 Euros)

It turns out that you have to cancel contracts in Germany far in advance, often 3 months or more from the contract’s final date. I knew about this situation to some degree when I moved to Berlin, but in this particular case I did not realize I was in a renewing contract. In my first weeks in the city, before I started working, I had a lot of free time. The sun was shining, I only had a few hours of class in the morning with free and open afternoons, and so I thought I would start going to the gym again. Full of hope and motivation, I joined the local McFit gym for ~20 Euros per month. The only problem was that I did not have a German bank account yet, so I had to do a wire transfer from my US account and pay for a year upfront. I paid the money, got my membership card, and made good use of it over the first few months.

As most gym stories go, I got busy and stopped going to the gym. I certainly remembered that I had the membership card, but I figured that my membership would be up when the year was over. Unfortunately, McFit had other things in mind. It all started when I got a notice that I had not paid in September, one month after the initial one-year period ended. I thought it was in error and told them as much, but the contract I signed had actually continued through after the one year that I had paid for, and so I needed to cancel it if I did not want to pay anymore. I tried to cancel immediately but still had to pay for a total of six months before my membership would be fully expired due to the fact that I had not canceled within the cancellation window that had ended months before the final day of the initial one-year period.

At this point, they only had my postal address and name, no email or current bank account information, so I thought that I might be able to play dumb and not pay. However, I have a good feeling that the debt would hang around until I would have to eventually pay it one day for a lot more than the 128 Euros that it would cost to cancel it today. Thus, once again I did my best to make peace with the losses and parted with the money to give myself the peace of mind that the gym contract was truly going to be finished.

Transit Tickets (60 Euros)

I returned home from Greece in November on a Sunday. I have been buying monthly rail passes since moving to Berlin and saw that my current one was up on Tuesday. It felt too early to buy another pass on Sunday, so I waited. Monday, same story. Tuesday, I managed to completely forget about the pass. Wednesday, I had forgotten about the pass and the fact that it had expired… until all of a sudden there were ticket checkers approaching me on the train.

Panicked, I looked outside and saw that we were definitely too far from the next station to be able to make a run for it. I was with two friends that have monthly passes, and you can take friends with you on the train after 8pm on weekdays or all day on the weekends. Unfortunately, it was only 7pm on a weekday.

I did not have any other ideas, and my time ran out. The ticket checker finally approached us and all I could do was show him my expired ticket in hopes that he would see that I was trying to make it work with a monthly pass expired by only one day in hand and next to friends only one hour from the time where we could freely ride together. Unfortunately, he did not appreciate the work that I had put into trying to follow the rules (even with a one day expired monthly ticket) and handed me a 60 Euro fine. I was told that I could either pay there or have a letter sent to me that would also put the infraction on my record. Reluctantly, I paid the plain clothes ticket checker the required 60 Euros, took the receipt, and tried to make the best of the rest of the night.

Household Repairs (52 Euros)

A couple weeks before Christmas, I had friends over to watch a movie. Usually when I have house parties, I am able to push a button on the intercom to unlock the front door when someone rings. This time, when someone buzzed my room, no matter how many times I tried to unlock the front door via the intercom, it would not open. Therefore, I had to go up and down the four flights of stairs between my apartment and the ground floor a dozen times to let everyone inside the building. I was exhausted and knew that I needed to get the door fixed.

I told the landlord the issue and a few days later two electricians came to my apartment. They easily fixed the intercom in my room, but they also proceeded to fix the front door button panel so that I could actually hear the guests that were buzzing the door and communicate with them. Ever since moving in, I have heard nothing through the phone next to my door and could only buzz people in without talking to them. It is quite unnerving to buzz someone into the building even if you cannot be sure who they are, so I figured something was wrong but did not know enough to tell my landlord up until that point as it is my first flat in Europe. It turns out that a repair person had pulled on the cables from the buzzer board hard enough to disconnect the communication part of my intercom system, so luckily these electricians put everything back together again. I thanked them for fixing it up and then they left.

A couple days later I was informed by my landlord that the cost of the electricians visit would be taken straight from my bank account. I protested the best that I could but lost once again when I was told that the rental contract stated that all apartment repairs under 120 Euros would come out of my pocket. When you have something like that in your contract, what can you do but accept the charges and move on? C’est la vie….

Bank (35 Euros)

When I first moved to Germany, my company Fyber advised me to open a personal savings account at Deutsche Bank. They set me up with an appointment and I was happy to have a real German bank account under my name. After starting work, I heard from colleagues about other banks that were more technologically advanced and open to foreigners, and so I quickly moved all my money out of the DB account into a new one.

Unfortunately, what I forgot to do was actually close the original account. After not using my DB account for more than 6 months, I had to pay the back charges for low account balance of 5 Euros per month totaling 35 Euros when I asked to close the account. Knowing that I could not fight these charges, I told them to take the money and close the account as quickly as possible so that I could leave the bank and never have to deal with them again. Luckily they heeded my requests, and I was out of there with one bank account and 35 Euros less within a few minutes.

Tactics to Avoid Getting Fees in Germany

As these stories show, I have been through a lot of annoying and frustrating “learning experiences” in Berlin over the last year. Though they have been painful to stomach, I have learned a lot from them in terms of the way that Germany works and how I can best move forward to get fewer fees. I have compiled 5 tactics below to help you to avoid getting into the fee blackhole that I have fallen into this year:

1. See how long you can get your insurance coverage extended between your old job end date and new job start date, and then plan your new job start date accordingly in order to avoid paying for insurance yourself.
2. Read your contracts as fully as you can so that you can understand the unique peculiarities of each of them. Learn what expenses will need to be paid when, if you need to contact any other parties on your own, and the steps required to break the contracts, so that you will not get your electricity cut or have to pay for an additional 6 months of unused gym memberships. If you do not hear from another party when expected, take the time to reach out yourself rather than waiting until you are in a tough spot.
3. When you sign a contract in Germany, it will be around until you cancel it in the proper fashion (usually through a handwritten note many months in advance). Use volders.de to track when your contracts will be coming due so that you can pick a new plan or cancel your contracts at the right time.
4. Buy an annual rail pass and get it to automatically renew so that you can get the cheapest price per month and not have to worry about the date of your monthly pass expiring. Alternatively, buy multiple monthly passes upfront, or buy your next pass a few days in advance by setting the start date to the date that your current pass expires. You could also just buy a bike, but be prepared for cold winters and year-round rain!
5. Don’t go with traditional banks in Germany, get an account with an online bank like N26. I have had no issues with them whatsoever and love to be able to control everything from my phone in English!

Summary

I have been told on multiple occasions by Germans that if I had learned to fluently speak the German language (“a language spoken by more than 80 million people!”) that I would not have ended up in this predicament. However, I do not agree with that idea. Certainly learning a country’s language can help you to communicate with locals and gain a deeper understanding of the inter-workings of the culture, but I do not believe that speaking a language more fluently will give you deep insight into all of the unwritten and unexplained rules of the society. These rules are easy to break without even realizing it and even occasionally give Germans trouble as well.

Learning how to do things in a new country is a common pain for expats moving to a new country around the world, but I think Germany can be especially challenging given the sheer number of rules that you have to discover and navigate. If you are unlucky enough to encounter the same or similar challenges to the ones that I have shared here, then at least you can find some solace in the fact that there are plenty of other foreigners experiencing similar frustrations at the exact same time across the globe 🙂

Feedback

Feel the same frustrations that I have? Disagree with me entirely? Have a story to share? Let me know in the comments below!

Originally published at www.davidemcneill.com on December 30, 2017.