Wohnriester - Is the housing subsidy account controllable?

Good day,

I have found a property that I like. The financing offer presented to me apparently includes Wohnriester, which seems to be standard for Schwäbisch Hall. So, it is an advance payment loan that is redeemed upon allocation maturity by an associated retirement savings building society contract. I am aware of the functional principle of the "Wohnriester," the housing promotion account. At least, I think I am.

All received subsidies and tax benefits are credited to an account and interest is paid at 2% p.a. The whole amount is taxed upon retirement. This is not detailed or described in fine detail here.

I wonder to what extent I can "control" the housing promotion account. Are payments made to the building society contract account automatically declared as special expenses in the income tax return? Can I waive claiming these special expenses? That would not burden the housing promotion account, would it?!

The same question applies to the subsidies – i.e., €185 per person plus €300 (child), totaling €485 p.a. – are these automatically paid out, or can I opt out of these subsidies?

Can the utilization of the tax benefits and subsidies vary annually? Are there restrictions due to the advance payment loan?

Does anyone have experience or similar thoughts on this?

Kind regards

Maybe I misunderstand you, but obviously you were offered a Riester building savings contract, from which you now want to omit the Riester (allowances and special expense deduction). What remains is a normal building savings contract, which you can also conclude with them if you want.

I do not know the details of individual Riester products. It concerns the product from Schwäbisch Hall: "Altersvorsorge-Bausparverträge Tarif Fuchs Wohn-Riester 04". The overall financing variant with the advance payment loan is titled in the contract as "Tilgungsaussetzungsdarlehen (Zinszahlungsdarlehen) mit Ablösung durch einen Altersvorsorge-Bausparvertrag".

The provided conditions are highly interesting to me, as other offers are considerably more expensive. However, I get relative apprehensions about the Wohnförderkonto. Therefore, I am asking whether I can also use the product like a normal Bausparvertrag.

I suspect this will not work. Because you pay into a Riester contract, which means it is subsidized capital. Whether you then apply for the allowance or not should not matter for the basic product. Likewise, no one forces you to declare it in the tax return. If you lose money with it - your bad luck.

Just ask directly about the offer with a regular home savings contract.

Riester without the subsidies doesn’t make any sense. Are you sure you understood everything correctly? What exactly are the conditions if they are so interesting? Have you ever offered a square, practical, good annuity loan and compared it? I might be biased, I have no good experiences with Schwäbisch Hall.

I also can't really imagine that Riester makes sense without subsidies. Is there actually a formula to calculate at which point it is worth withdrawing something, e.g. for annual special repayments or to reduce after a fixed interest period? From then on, you pay 2% on this housing account, so simply put, the interest rate of the loan would have to be >2%, right? Or is there something else to consider?