hTTi

Thank you for that.

Gosh. Ours specifically said, get a job, it'll be cheaper for you because we'll only take Beiträge from the wage, which is what we then did for a year.

OK, this is an old chestnut, but having read everything the search showed up on here, maybe this topic hasn't been directly asked on this new forum. A chap an hour and a half down the road who is an employee here in Germany and also a veteran (UK) started getting his mil pension in April and the GKK...

Yup, last year (I think) I posted about the free tomato shelter we picked up off kleinanzeigen, which turned out to be made of steel and glass and weighed a ton, and caused much whinging from my house elves. It is essentially a low bus shelter, a bit too low for the toms, really, but they are doing ...

Given what it has been like the last few weeks, I'm fully expecting it to stay a bit cooler until about halfway through September and then build up to scorching temperatures in October, just in time for my operation. ;) :) :lol: Lovely to see you back in the new space, Jeanie! Hope you enjoy it here.

Thanks Emkay, we'll give that a go, then

Yup, insulating our roof made a giant difference. Some friends stayed up in our loft bedroom on Monday when it was high 30s here, with a screen across the big south facing window and the small west window open for some air, and they said it was absolutely fine, not too hot at all. Before insulation ...

Emkay wrote: ↑Thu Jul 03, 2025 10:46 am Super cooling and seemed to repel mosquitoes too

Slightly odd question, but what does it smell like?

It looks interesting, if it doesn't smell like a hospital ward

(I once broke a TCP bottle in the bathroom and that ruined bathtime for weeks....)

The front of our house faces north and the side of a hill, so that side of our house is always cool. I am sat in the study and it's nice. Outside looks like a furnace, but kid#2 who has just moved the Foodi cooker out there for me says it's not so bad on that side outside either. He hung washing out...

Well this post was a massive relief and well-timed. Kid#4 finally remembered to bring his paperwork folder home with him so we sat with the Buhl software he bought on your recommendation, Panda, and made our way through his depressing tax return - and it became clear that unlike Kid#3, he only has i...

Presumably though, some of this type of stuff is going to be more expensive outside cities, where there is less competition, fewer customers and maybe crappier supply chains. So mid-nowhere-in-the-Eifel is quite possibly more expensive than Munich or Hamburg or the other massive cities. Or not, I am...

We've got a pretty crap tenant who has been through periods of not paying his rent etc, but it is his home, and he has a dog - it wouldn't be easy for him to find another home, and the house is not mortgaged. So I suck it up. It is a cheap house and we are not talking lots of money and we don't coun...

Yeah, we've started asking family not to send parcels over. If they forget to tick 'gift' you get the Zoll and then DHL charge you for refusing (in my case) to deliver the parcel anyway. So annoying.

Ooh, nice. As a result of visiting the Welterbe site at Bad Wilhelmshöhe (really quite middle) I was looking at other Welterben in Germany and came across the whole Moravian thing you've got going there in Herrenhut. Looks like a nice place to live. What has you living in that corner, if that's OK t...

Well, absolutely!

We have been carefully obeying the 'buy it and cancel it before the 10th' since the start.

This is a game changer. Thanks to Panda.

And thanks to Bethann for her report - always good to see a follow-up.

Franklan wrote: ↑Thu May 01, 2025 4:24 pm This leads me to recomment a clay animation short film called Harvie Krumpet, it is just lovely. Well spend 23 minutes, I am confident you will enjoy.

This was a great recommendation, thank you - I watched it shortly after you posted it and it was fabulous.

Does your kid's German school offer exchanges with schools in other countries? If so, you could ask them what kind of insurance they recommend for kids going on such exchanges.

Slightly different Steuerbescheinigung question. We've had ours from the Commerzbank. It has 0 entered all over it. Looks as though we don't enter anything in to Elster. Last year we had a Festgeld Anlage which paid out 1,350 in June (2024). I also had a blob of money from Premium Bonds. This takes ...

That's nuts. So of the three you posted, the normal one was quicker by far. Sheesh. @alberto, I'm with FrauFruit on this one - the amount paid by the buyer for postage is paid by them for the service they chose, just like in an online shop. You don't get to give them a cheaper service and keep the r...

Thank you

We used the Fünftelregel to put an extraordinary income sum onto our Elster tax return for 2022. The details were still sat there last year, and are still there now, but I think we should get rid of them - I think it gets entered the once, the maths is done, payment made, and everyone is finished wi...