Building with a small budget feasible?

Who is supposed to decide how much is appropriate?

I agree to that. For 1 per mille of all real estate transfer taxes, even by individual case decision.

I also don't know of any solution, but the well-off have many things made easy for them, while the vast majority simply have no chance.
When I look around here, many houses are paid for out of the petty cash of big-city dwellers. Some municipalities now levy a second home tax, but that is probably negligible as an argument against buying...

The point is also that owning a holiday home is hardly justifiable from a business perspective. For the maintenance costs you pay every year for a holiday home, you can stay in a rented holiday apartment/house for some time. Then you either have to mow the lawn, cut trees, etc. at the holiday home on your free weekends yourself, or you pay someone to do it. So a second home tax doesn’t really make much of a difference.

Jean-marc: that is just totally arrogantly written.... Without the Aldi cashier or the forklift driver you probably wouldn’t have even made it into a land register! Such an attitude annoys me...

I can assure you that this was in no way meant to be condescending. However, I find the development very worrying, gradually eroding former taboos in financing or continuously shifting the limits of reason just to keep demand consistently high, pumping more and more money into the completely overheated real estate market and thereby causing prices to rise even further. When I read here "house repayment at 75 - so what?" then that surely cannot be serious. It is precisely this kind of indiscriminate real estate loans that ensure the reasonable and disciplined-savings part of the middle class will soon no longer be able to afford anything and then only has the choice to either go along with this madness or give up the dream of homeownership. And that annoys me - although from a professional perspective I should actually have an interest that the colleagues one floor below me close as many mortgage loans as possible. But from a private and moral perspective, I can only reject overstretching the limits further and further. Fortunately, the majority of those interested in mortgage financing and their advisors still reckon traditionally, but woe if Pandora’s box is ever opened too wide...

If I read here "Paying off the house by 75 – so what?" then that can't be serious.

Honestly – isn't renting at 75 something different? And that works for tenants (that's 53% of Germans) as well. I'm not talking about American circumstances now. Buying, financing variably and then paying off the loan through the sale and pocketing the increase in value. I'm talking about a sensible arrangement with perhaps 25-40% loan-to-value ratio. What could happen there that couldn't happen to you as a tenant? You can't become unemployed as a retiree anyway ;-)

But one of the main reasons for the house for us was and still is that it relieves us in old age, no rent, more of the pension to spend.

... and hopefully NOTHING breaks in retirement age :eek: