Early repayment after the fixed interest period expires

Bad enough. My experience says that bank employees can basically provide good advice, but unfortunately the banks themselves are sometimes too inflexible to offer an adequate proposal in non-standard situations (and by that I don't just mean the best conditions). Example: When I moved from the Lower Rhine to the Bergisches Land back then, one (local) bank had a problem with the old property (because it was from the Bergisches Land) and the other (local) bank had a problem with the new property because it was from the Lower Rhine. Both were large, nationwide operating banks. In the end, it was done by the very dedicated and competent (former savings bank employee) independent advisor. Personally, I definitely would not have had the time or the patience to inquire with ten different banks myself.

I ended up at the Sparkasse, my advisor was very good. With him, I was even able to renegotiate the terms, although the advisor himself said I would then have to provide a competing offer, and the board would approve and agree to the corresponding adjustments. That’s exactly how it happened. The positive thing, of course, was that my salary account was with them.

The Volksbank in the area was less flexible. They said that the terms and funding programs could not be combined according to my wishes because all loans are directly passed on to the Volksbank headquarters (I don’t remember the exact term) and the local cooperative itself doesn’t want to have loans on its balance sheet due to some reasons I can’t recall. Very strange.

Even the comparison portal with the annoying TV advertising was useful. The advisor was probably somewhat constrained there, but that meant she was always brief and didn’t ramble on. Very pleasant when you know what you want.

The only bad and stressful experience was with the independent broker because he wanted to broker with exactly one bank and only that bank. It was then 0.3 percentage points more expensive than the Sparkasse. The problem was probably my extensive renovation and the fact that they weren’t allowed to send an appraiser through the house beforehand. Colleagues with new builds all ended up with the advisor at exactly that bank because in their cases it was really cheap.