Financing at the house bank - Offer evaluation

Yes, better wait. [Bereitstellungszinsen] are 3% p.a., with 350,000 EUR that's a hefty 10,500 EUR. And why the interest rates should still rise now... no idea. Inflation this month is around 3%, which is almost already within the target range of 2%.

150m as the crow flies from your planned property, I assume?
Well, then it fits.

150m from the planned property, 850m from the current rental apartment :D

Let's hope it stays with home office and employers don’t call people back to the office again at some point. Then many life plans will start to falter... Mine too, at least for part of the year.

That's true. Currently, we are on average in the office four days a week, which makes sense especially with a new job. And it’s not that far for us either. I think the option to work from home when the child is sick / black ice / whatever will remain.

Just don’t overdo it. 600k for a house... I don’t want to start the same old song about a cookie-cutter house again... It’s definitely possible for much less.

The related builder who will also take over our construction is indeed talking about 3500€/sqm for turnkey massive construction. For wood from the big catalog provider, it’s somewhat cheaper; the cheapest he managed to build in 2023 was with regional carpentries. Absolutely individual and still "cheap" 2800€/sqm for a turnkey (!) house.

Yeah, better wait. Commitment interest is 3% p.a.; with 350,000 EUR that’s a hefty 10,500 EUR.
And why interest rates should still rise now... no idea. Inflation this month is about 3%, which is almost the target corridor of 2%.

Thanks for the assessment. Our feeling also tells us we should rather wait.

I think the basic idea is "the KFW300 is so cheap, so you repay as little as possible!".... But honestly, the construct with the building savings contract still doesn’t really impress me. [...] Probably the only help is to create an Excel sheet yourself and play around a bit.

Thanks, I’ll do that!

With longer fixed interest periods, you have a special right of termination 10 years after full disbursement and from then on you are basically flexible again, possibly to refinance or to combine modules or just to continue running everything.

Good to know, the banker didn’t tell us that.

Otherwise, 4% for 10 years seems high to me as well (since the beginning of November, interest rates seem to be slowly going down again)

Me too, those were practically the interest rates the Sparkasse shows on their homepage in the loan calculator. As a loyal customer I expect more accommodation :p

We have currently been offered 3.5 for 15 years with similar collateral ... I find the 4 enormous. Today there was another drop of 0.1 percentage points compared to yesterday

ui, may I ask who the offer came from?

At 1822direkt (Sparkasse Frankfurt) via Dr. Klein

(...)
The relative who is a contractor and will also take over our build is definitely talking about €3500/sqm for turnkey solid construction. (...)

Oh dear. Turnkey? Then floors and painting work still need to be done, which are usually not included in the typical definition of "turnkey."
At 1% interest, I would have said you have the money, go all out...

But with a monthly payment of €2,600, I would take another look at the money.

We really are not extravagant when it comes to furnishings... but when you move into a beautiful new house, in the end you don’t want to bring all the old junk from the rental. And you need much more because the rental simply doesn’t have 170 sqm.
By now, we’ve surely put easily 30-40,000 euros into our own work like floors, doors, painting, attic conversion as storage, and stuff like kitchen, furniture, lamps, curtains, decorations... I sometimes wonder myself where we still had that money lying around...

... and we haven’t even started outside yet. You can easily spend another 20-30,000 euros there, if you do almost everything yourself.

Now with two people, the calculation looks quite relaxed and the €2,600 rate seems manageable. Just add 1 or 2 kids. It won’t get tight, I don’t claim that. But you do have to watch the money sometimes.

€600,000 for a house... we are now also around €550-600k for everything. Land (€220/sqm), house, ancillary construction costs including ridiculously expensive deep foundation, interior finishing... so that always seems very high to me... maybe scale back a bit on the fittings?