Home financing ever possible? Probably not!

Private schools are much cheaper. I have something around €160 as the limit for public private schools in mind. Because even "private" schools operate for the most part with state money and are therefore not allowed to be very selective with their fees.

Our little one will probably also go to a private school. Less because the public schools in BW are bad, but more because the nearest high school from our place is a Catholic girls' high school (yes, that still exists;) ) with a good reputation. That makes the decision easy, and we will gladly invest the money in education rather than a vacation.

I did an internship at a Montessori-oriented school. Tuition five years ago was €240 per month.
Great system, no problem finding teachers. They even had waiting lists. If we hadn’t placed our daughter in the Danish system, it would have been this school, and we would somehow have made it possible.

Since the increase in the salaries of employed teachers in the public school service in Berlin, private schools have been losing teachers and are increasingly becoming a dumping ground. Constant teacher turnover is the result.

I am honest and can say that outside of this forum I have never read about people who are currently buying a house and planning it (because I simply don’t know anyone who is currently in that situation). It feels like almost daily the press writes that the dream of owning a home is becoming less and less likely. So I still believe that the trend really goes that way, but here in the forum it is apparently the case that people can afford their own home anyway, even if it brings them to financial limits. In the end, I think it’s just a question of willingness and how much one is ready to give. (I have also read from some that they were able to raise the equity completely on their own, but those are really rather exceptions). Whether that is good or bad, I can’t judge yet. We will definitely keep searching.

With the financially biggest decision in life called owning a home, it is usually hardly avoidable at the beginning that one is financially tight for the first 2-3 years. I also first sweated when I saw our future rate for the next 15 years. With the right employer/collective agreement and the associated salary increases, however, the monthly burden should be comfortably manageable after a few years.

I wouldn’t let myself be unsettled by the high real estate listing prices. What you currently see on the portals are only offer prices. Nowadays, properties often sell for much less. For our house (bank), among other things, I settle the commissions of our realtors, which result from the commission earned. That is currently going clearly down after it always went massively up in recent years. In fact, one realtor at our place has already quit and wants to orient himself back towards property management because he said the party is over. So I do think that something suitable will soon turn up for childless dual-income households like you. Yes, there are people with thick equity, but the main group is usually young families and they are currently mostly out of the game. Just patience.

I still think you should just dare...

The money is worth less later anyway, or the loan installment will be devalued over time.

I just laughed a moment ago....
My wife already got a raise before she even started....

So again 200€ more net or less burden from the loan installment.

Yes, different times are dawning for the brokers. 20k for a few photos, a listing on ImmoScout, and one day of viewing are definitely over. But I don't necessarily find that wrong; we encountered some bad brokers two years ago, and a cleanup is urgently needed here.

Yes, different times are coming for brokers. 20k for a few photos, a listing on ImmoScout, and one day of viewings are definitely over. But I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing; we encountered some bad brokers two years ago, so a cleanup is urgently needed here.

Absolutely true - but to be fair, you also have to say that brokers didn't really have a chance to keep up with the workload given the rush of recent years. For example, if we had listed a prime property in the newspaper or on ImmoScout over the weekend, by Monday there would be 70-100 inquiries on the table that needed answering, and on top of that the phone wouldn't stop ringing. In that respect, not every broker is unhappy that the market has cooled down significantly this year and that there is once again some breathing room to properly attend to individual interested parties. Moreover, this also largely eliminates the usually unpleasant task of having to disappoint 9 out of 10 interested families in the end. Sometimes the colleagues even had to do some telephone counseling when the dream home went to someone else.
The properties that you can sell easily and pocket 20,000 euros in commission are only one side of the coin.
The other side is the worn-out shacks where you go through them with interested parties 40 times and still can't sell them.

So as I said, I think that since the largest group of competitors is currently prevented from buying, it shouldn't take long until a childless engineer couple can get a chance. At the moment, it would even make sense again to place an ad yourself, since many owners are again tending to save the broker's fee and sell on their own.