Finance another house...

Another story that has not been mentioned at all so far would be to rent out the old house and use the rental income to pay off the house. The effect would be that you would have something left for retirement.

Of course, it depends on whether the condition of the house would be OK for renting.

The positive aspect would be that renovations could be tax-deductible in the rental property, and with your salary, you probably pay enough for that to be worthwhile... The house would then increase in value and thus fetch a higher price upon a later sale. But as already mentioned, it must also be rentable; 200m² over 3 floors is difficult to rent out if you can't make 3 separate apartments out of it...

Since we are both very busy professionally, it unfortunately didn’t work at all. There is actually no progress to report, the work stress has increased and apart from garden maintenance and repairs, not much is happening.

But the house needs to be renovated again before renting it out. With a third loan? I would definitely sell the house, otherwise there will be no money left to live on with that lifestyle. And in general, having two houses is way too risky. Selling only when it gets tight is always a bad idea.

But the property needs to be renovated again before renting it out. With a third loan? I would definitely sell the house; otherwise, there won’t be any money left for living given that lifestyle. And besides, holding two houses is way too risky. Selling only when it gets tight is always a bad idea.

That is certainly true; there are plenty of examples where freshly renovated houses are made in need of renovation again by rental scammers in a very short time. Then you're really in trouble. That’s why we preferred to sell, even though the apartment was paid off.

Or, since you overestimated yourselves and had no time to renovate/repair: forgive the whole thing, hire companies. If you are very lucky, you will break even on a sale. Unless the hut is located in Downtown Schduargerd.

I will try to resolve the questions and assumptions.

There will be no children, that has already been taken care of.
And there hasn’t been any vacation so far, otherwise I would have preferred to do something on the house.
I simply didn’t have any, and my wife did a full-time training during her last vacation.

The house itself is a single-family home with 3 floors, which however cannot be separated. The whole thing is a passive house, solar thermal with several thousand liters of storage, photovoltaic system, geothermal collector with air-water heat pump. The roof, the complete electrical system, water supply and drainage date from 2010. 300mm full thermal insulation, rainwater cistern for the toilet etc.

What I’m still missing is the controlled residential ventilation, which is only prepared, the living room, dining room, main bathroom and hallway are in shell condition.
The outdoor area is also not finished yet, I’m looking at 50-70k € depending on wishes, just for paving the driveway with front garden 20k are due. And then I still need a retaining wall etc. The single garage and the shed are unfortunately damp, it’s probably the ceiling, fixing all that would be another 25k. All in all, to get it fixed would probably be 150k, although I have no cost estimates, these are just rough estimates from the craftsmen who have looked at it so far.

It’s unfortunately not quite Stuttgart, about 50km away. But at least the standard land value is also at 260m² and we have 700m² of land, but that probably doesn’t say much either.

Renting out is not possible with the shell condition and also the entire solar and heating control is not really rentable, it took me a while to understand the control and also to be able to program it myself.

Basically, the problem is that we no longer want to live in a half-finished house, that costs us quite a lot of mental strength. I also can’t take a vacation when there are construction sites everywhere here. Since we have long admitted to ourselves that we took on too much and can’t manage it alone, the idea came up to have the whole thing done. A quick inquiry at the bank only resulted in the fact that we cannot simply get another 100k, only if we renovate or modernize, but everything that falls under that we already have. So the only option is to keep doing small parts or have them done over the next 10 years and live in an unfinished house during that time. But honestly, I can’t even look at the house anymore, because in every corner I look at, I see a construction site.