Use Riester pension for financing?

Interesting. I am also facing the question of whether I should include my Riester contract. That way, you could sensibly get out of a product with rather low returns.

However, you can also use Riester with every new loan. So, for example, if you arrange your follow-up loan in 10 years, you can also include Riester then.

Our lady, with whom we once discussed the financing (still quite superficially), also recommended not to use it or to use it later. She mentioned that a fictitious account is created and amounts then have to be taxed. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite understand it. When I asked if it wouldn’t be better to take the 12k now and start paying taxes from now on, or to withdraw 24k in 10 years for example and pay taxes until retirement, she dodged the question. The process is still not quite clear to me either.

Dafür all die nachteile jetzt in Kauf nehmen?

What are the disadvantages?

This is basically quite easy. You have to pay taxes on your pension from [Riester]. If you withdraw the money for home financing beforehand, then there is no pension from that to be taxed.

So, a fictitious interest rate of 2% per year is assumed, and you then pay taxes on the total amount when you retire.

For example, if you withdraw 10,000 euros and retire in 30 years, you have to pay taxes on the fictitious amount of 10,000 * 1.02^30 = 18,114 euros.

What are the disadvantages?

Housing promotion account is one thing. Sale / rental or possibly moving out of the EU does not make a Riester-subsidized property easier to handle

With your equity, you initially get reasonable offers, so Riester is currently not necessary. The disadvantages have been presented. In particular, using it for the residual debt after the end of the fixed interest period I consider an interesting option.

Regarding your other question: You have the choice to either terminate the contract and receive the value of the funds paid out, or you continue the contract regularly and have a partial amount paid out (at least €3000 must remain in the contract).

Thirdly, you can put the contract on hold in the second option and from then on make your Riester payments on the loan. For these payments, you will continue to receive the Riester premiums, but the housing promotion account will also increase accordingly.

Since you are still far from retirement, with 2%/year a few euros of "interest" already add up for taxation (taxation always occurs only at retirement, either all at once with a discount or annually proportionally).

So käme man aus einem ziemlich renditeschwachen Produkt wieder sinnvoll raus.

However, I disagree, at least when it comes to fund savings plans. My contract currently has >30k with just under 20k in contributions, and the tax refunds have not even been factored in yet.

Okay, thanks for the answers. Then I will not touch the Riester and just let it run normally.