An error: maternal leave pay is capped around 1800€. So it’s rather 1/3 of salary for white collar worker. This feature makes having kids for middle class even more expensive. A year later comes the nightmare with not enough kindergarten places. It’s a good time to start looking for kindergarten during pregnancy.
Depends on on how you define what the middle class is. Historically "middle class" never meant e.g. the middle 50% but rather the somewhat comfortable, well-off people who have assets but still have to work for a living (everyone ranging from small/medium business owners to doctors, lawyers, (sometimes) civil servants, high skilled professionals etc.
The average/median person was always dirt-poor and struggling to survive. Of course in the developed countries that has changed quite a bit in the last 60+ years. Still, since it feels like we are slowly reverting to the pre WW2 status quo, I'm not sure we shouldn't entirely base it on population percentiles (instead of using some more "arbitrary" wealth/income cut-off that's adjusted by inequality)
That's not to say that buying in Germany is absurdly difficult and expensive. It absolutely is. But if you think 4k net doesn't make you well off in average Germany you're really extremely bubbled.
You won't be buying in downtown Munich, but that's very far from average Germany, and you could definitely be buying within half an hour of decent public transport to downtown munich.
"You won't be buying in downtown Munich, but that's very far from average Germany, and you could definitely be buying within half an hour of decent public transport to downtown Munich." - Please show me an offer for a decent house in this region.
The mortgage is estimated at 1600€ / month, S-Bahn to Hauptbahnhof is 22 minutes.
It's not super comfortable (as you'll be paying bills on top) but absolutely doable on a single 4k€ net income.
It took me about 2 minutes to find this.
Edit: To note, I claimed it's easily doable in the Berlin area, not in the Munich area. In the outskirts of Berlin 4k Net is more comfortably doable. Berlin is also geographically larger, so travel times will start being significantly above 30 minutes, too, though.
It's a 30-year-old house, at the moment I live in a similar old house. There is a considerable amount of renovation that needs to be done on houses that old, this house also has an energy efficiency rating of F, which is the worst. You need to invest at least €150,000 on top of that to have a reasonably modern house. It's also not decent to live on a 250m2 plot, which is probably the smallest space you can put a house on.
Fail. This property is rented to 2 families. So it’s price reduced by at least €200k compared to an empty property. You’ll never get out 2 families at once as long as they pay rent.
At least in Berlin, there's a coming surplus of day-care spots. It's a difficult problem because the pay for day-care teachers isn't great, and training one takes several years, but demand is difficult to predict several years in advance since most kids start when they're 1. But right now day-cares have actually started to have to advertise for kids. (Reference: ex-partner was a Kitaleiterin.)
