Price/sq meter varies between 100-2000€, so it really depends on your region, lifestyle and choices. If you have a normal salary (or both working) you can afford a small house. Mortgages also tend to be reasonable in Germany.
Munich, 28m2 flat, 1 room, built in 2019, price 720.000 EUR, location: right under the train tracks between inner and middle ring.
That's 25.000 EUR/m2 for a hole under the train tracks.
Old 100m2 flats between midle and inner rings go in munich for 1.5 million EUR if they are old and destroyed, and well over 2 million EUR if they are relatively new (2.5-3 million).
That's 15.000/m2 for old buildings requiring repairs and 25.000-30.000 EUR/m2 for new buildings.
So at least for Munich you are off by more than a 150x factor.
Saving 20k/year doesn't even give you 1m2 per year.
A flat in a horrible region of Regensburg (a very nice and very old Roman town in Bavaria) right beneath the rail tracks costs 5000-6000€/m2 (they will have nice interior though). And Regensburg is not even a high income city for software engineers in Germany.
If you do not inherit a good amount of money or earn incredible well (like >100.000€) you will forever be a "poor" man in Germany or you can sell your soul for a house and pray that you earn enough till you retire to pay back your mortgage. Taxes are just too high and income too low...
This. I'm a freelance here in Berlin and I pay 950 Euro/month for the (public) health insurance. The insurance covers only myself, while my kids are covered by my wife's health insurance, which is another 800 Euro/month (half covered by the employer).
Note that before moving to Germany I was living in Switzerland, where I had a private insurance that was WAY cheaper that the German public one and had all sort of perks.
Swiss here as well with kids... and the appartments (currently renting for 2400/per month) we look for at the moment are 1.2 Mio CHF which is nearly equal in USD and thats for 4,5 room 110sqm.
Would be interested if you did a good trade by moving to Berlin as I see loads of tech jobs overthere but afraid I would just make my situation worse to be even less able to afford something in Switzerland in the longterm. Do you have more or less money after all deductions and rents etc?
I think the 100 is a typo? :P [as in "... varies between 100-2000€..."]
I'm currently looking for a house in SW Germany, near the french border. I'd be happy if prices would max out at 2000€/m². I can not renovate a full building (both time and skill-wise), so - including necessary improvements - houses we're looking at start at about 1800€/m² and surpass 2200€/m². And we're not talking about "center of town" here or even "built after 1990". More like "neighboring municipality" or "no way I move so close to the Autobahn Zubringer". Obviously Munich or Berlin are much more expensive, and "middle of nowhere" (like in "also no or little tech jobs") is cheaper.
I don't think it is a typo. There are areas out in the sticks where nobody wants to move (because no internet, no mobile reception, no public transport, next city is 50km away, next supermarket 20km), where 100€/m² is possible.
But anything marginally close to a railway track, Autobahn or federal road or any bigger city at all is far more expensive.
I ask due to a mixture of doubt, but also curiosity: Can you point to areas with prices in the 100Euro/m² range? For a house that's suited for living, and not destruction? My grandma's house might sell for that range (~200 Euro/m²), but it has 120m², was built at or before 1900 (as a poor farmers house) and there have been no meaningful improvements since the 1970s. So, as sad as it is: Best thing one can do is scap the house and build a new one. But then it's cheaper/easier to just buy some empty land.
That town is pretty much "Arsch der Welt", though they now have 50MBit/s internet since a few years. Next city (a small Kreisstadt) has multiple super markets and is 20km away. Mobile reception in the town is okay, I think they just skipped 3G for a decade and now partially swap 2G for LTE. Public transport to/from the Gymnasium [45m bus drive] is three times a day: Going there in the morning, and returning for 13 and 18 o'clock (so pupils can get to and from school for both the regular 6 lesson days and the longer 10 lesson days). For anything else you need a car; an electric car might work, since for most interesting hacker jobs you only need a total range of maybe 150km per day (outliers in both directions apply). OTOH, even if people might seem a bit skeptical of newcomers at first, they turn out to be super friendly. After all, it's easy to know everyone by name if you're just 250 people.
Where I live (Saarland) the "Bodenrichtwert"[0] alone is usually between 80 and 120 Euro for the "affordable" areas I looked at. So little chance getting more than a ruin for 100 Euro/m².
[0] For non-Germans: The "Bodenrichtwert" is the average price per m² of "raw land", that is, excluding improvements like houses. It is updated every 2 years to include recent sales in an area.
Well, if the house should be worth anything, it won't be that cheap, yes. What you can find tons of is stuff like "Denkmalgeschützter Bauernhof Brandenburg" for really cheap, because the renovations will cost you big time. Same without Denkmalschutz (historical building protection), just not that cheap. A newly built house will cost far more than 100€/m² because building houses is expensive after all, and as you said, usually the ground is worth almost as much.
Well, then that's quite a fallacy to compare a house in the 100 Euro range to a 2000 Euro house, isn't it?
That's like buying an utterly broken, old Porsche for scrap value and then wondering how repairs like a new engine and a new $everything are costing you a fortune.
