If you live in Germany, and OWN your property.....you are settling into the new scheme of things....a major renovation has been implemented.
What I can generally say....it's a bit bureaucratic in nature, and requires some data impute into the system.
FYI, there are around 36-million private properties in Germany....some owned by one single person....some units (houses or apartments) owned by one single person.
A 'portal' has been created....where you build an account, and the data is transferred to the state government....where they will assess your new property value, and property tax.
My wife (German in nature) spent around six hours in the chaos of building this account.....only to be told (over and over).....you put the wrong data into the wrong fields. At some point, she finally realized she gave them too much data, and blanked-out five or six fields....then the system approved her account.
Her tax? Presently unknown. In a normal year.....before all this change, it would have been around 600 Euro for what is a urbanized property in Wiesbaden, with three apartments in the building. I asked her how it will escalate, and she's 'willing' to accept a 10-percent rise....meaning up to around 700 Euro a year max. Beyond that.....she'll get a bit hostile.
All this extra and new data....not required before? That's the whole little 'twist' to this story. They made up a general number to the value they assigned to it, and that was the basis of the property value.
Now? Well....they added parking spots provided by you (the owner/landlord). They also want general ground value.
After viewing this portal effort....I would say that probably 30 to 40 percent of Germans aren't that computer literate, and this may end up requiring some tax account....doing 20 minutes of effort to complete the stupid submission.
2 comments:
The wife and I built a new home from the ground up about 4 years ago (meant for retirement). After much research, we discovered, the people who live 2 streets over will pay about half of what we do. I still, have yet, to figure the new system. This new property tax will only benefit the bureaucrats who thought it up.
The unknown factor is what journalists have continually pointed out. You could have two identical houses...same size property....same type of village, one mile apart....one in this state, and one in a second state....with one guy paying half of what the other pays.
My wife didn't have a problem paying 10-percent more. If this were double in terms of the yearly amount....that will weeks of complaining.
My only grumble to this...parking spots or a double garage...will figure heavily into this.
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