Here’s my post that kicked off the question:
Being a freelancer in Germany and having to deal with public healthcare companies is like being shafted with hot poker from four ends.
First, you get charged a minimum of €250/month for healthcare, even if you have ZERO income (no, you don't need to eat or live anywhere, obviously)
Second, it's impossible to get a doctor or dentist or specialists appointment - so bad luck if you have any health problems. That's €3000 MINIMUM a year for nothing. They take about 20% of your income, or 100% of it if you happen to be a low-earner.
Third, you're legally required to have this expensive healthcare that is NOT available to you
Fourth, the 'healthcare' company will chase you down like the Mafia, and no I am not exaggerating on this one.
They literally give me sleepless nights and constantly demand paperwork, rejig what I allegedly owe them, conveniently 'forgetting' all about periods of time that I was abroad and had my payments reduced to the minimum per month via their impossible bureaucracy that took weeks-worth of my working hours away from me per year trying to deal with them, and endless phone calls.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I ceased being TK's customer on 23rd April 2022, and they are STILL HARASSING me 3 years later. (yeah, that date is burned into my brain)
No wonder the health 'care' companies are all going bankrupt, I've never seen anything less efficient in all my years of having inept government departments as clients.
I don't recommend trying to live in Germany as a freelancer. Stay Digital Nomad. I am absolutely done with this crap. I'm happy to die earlier if it would get them off my back, but I really think I'll live longer without them.
FYI:
TK claim on all their advertising to be able to speak English with their customers, yet on the phone they don’t, and pretend not to understand English when there’s a problem, and they ‘snail mail’ me bits of paper in German that have to be photographed and emailed to me (because I’ve spent much of my time in Germany officially homeless and use my partners parents address for snail mail)
Hello Rachael,
I hope this message finds you well. This may be out of the blue but I read your comment about living in Germany and its healthcare etc.
And then I read your last sentence, about you moving to Germany to be with your partner. I am funnily enough in the same situation. Is it smart to move right now given the current economic crisis and rising housing prices? Oh and both of us are fresh grads, one in the tech field and the other in education/literature. The idea has already been nagging me so much but thinking about living in Germany in such precarious situation for the next 4-5 years has me on the edge. Any advice would be helpful!
Thank you for reading this very random, non-Linkedin-esque message from a stranger.
Hope you have a good day!
Hi ***,
Thanks for your message. I don't want to give blanket advice, but I'll try to give you some insight based on my situation.
Firstly, do you speak any German, and if not, does your partner speak fluent German? If not, things will be really tough for you. Although some people in cities speak German pretty well , if you need to do anything official, they'll force you to bring an interpreter which will cost several hundred euros per time.
Housing - We got a really cheap sub-let through a friend. I hated it and we had to spend 4 full days renovating and painting it, and it still had a horrible filthy kitchen sink, tiny bathroom and we had to build our own kitchen. It was on the 4th floor, had no balcony or garden and got about 1 hour of daylight per day. That cost 600 euros per month will bills like elec, heating and internet on top. We only heated one room in winter.
I tried for 3 years applying to get a better apartment, but failed because we're both freelancers, so we never get to the top of the list to be the winner of the flat lottery. The winners are I guess 2 caucasian, full-time employed, highly paid people with no kids or pets. You never get any feedback about why your application failed, so it’s impossible to improve. The same goes for all job applications - never any feedback.
That brings me to racism. In my experience, Germany is almost as racist as Switzerland. I look caucasian, and still I'm not right because my German is very basic, so they can tell I’m not German. It was almost impossible for me to get a job - I applied for 3 years.
When I did get a job, they paid me far less than my skills were worth and treated me like shit because they knew my situation was desperate. They tried to extend an already long 6 months probation to 12 months* - against the terms of my contract, and then sacked me when I disagreed, pretending that my performance was sub-par (yet they wanted to keep me on under extended probation). I could not fight this in court, because the court could not give any estimation at all about the likely costs in either the case of winning or losing and, in my situation I couldn’t risk needing to pay thousands of euros even for winning.
* Being on probation means that you can't apply for a mortage or 'win' a flat application lottery, so this was really important to us.
I also ended up cleaning peoples houses for 12 euros an hour which is minimum wage, and I have an engineering degree and 20+ years experience designing and building digital products in tech. It was exhausting and started to ruin my health for a wage that didn’t even cover my basic living expenses. (Try paying 250 a month health insurance when you earn 12 euros times about 4 hours per day because the rest of the time is spent travelling between all the daily jobs)
All bureaucracy is horrible. People do not answer emails EVER. There is a joke that if you want a doctors appointment, then send a fax, but it likely works more often than an email. Germany is a digital wasteland. Just little things like opening hours on websites cannot be relied on, and certainly nothing else. I’m a digital Product Designer, and having to work with such digitally backward people is beyond frustrating.
The tax system is so opaque that you'll need to pay a tax advisor to do your tax. It's extremely difficult to get a doctors or dentists or specialists appointment, and when you do, the advice is usually very sub-par and basically all the health complaints I have right now are on hold until I can see a functional practitioner which costs 300 euros per hour. I noticed when I arrived in Germany that most people just seem to 'put up with' their health complaints, and now I realise why.
I could tell you much more, but basically, if you don't have to go to Germany, I would avoid it. It sounds like you have a decent situation where you are. Germany did not make me welcome, and I had to fight very hard just to be paid a tiny percentage of what I was paid in Australia and England.
Don't under estimate how hard it is to learn German, it's not just Der, die and Das, that's just the tip of the iceberg of how hard German is - see this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb5CySTKP8w
Basically, Der changes to 'dem' or something else based on it's location in the sentence.... so you have to have a mind like in the movie 'minority report' to hold a sentence in your head, translate it all, swap around the words, and then change all these articles and pronouns according to these really big tables. It's literally impossible to learn unless you were born to it
What I'm dealing with right now, is that when Brexit happened, I was given a 5 year residency visa, and that visa renewal is dependent on my spending a minimum of 3000 per year on healthcare payments. that's 15000 euros over 5 years (for nothing).
With that visa, they took my uk driving licence from me, which would have lasted until I was 70 years old, and they replaced it with a 5 year german licence. That licence runs out at the end of 2025, and I have no way to get back my uk licence unless I pay to go back to the uk and rent a flat there, which I don't want to do and can't afford now that Germany has brought me to my knees.
So, think seriously about why you want to go to Germany. It's not at all fun, not at all nice. Politically, the far right are on the rise, they are the racists and anti-immigrant ones.
The health system here is designed ONLY for well paid, middle class germans. If you're a freelancer like me, you'll be ripped off and hounded. The health companies can set ZOLL the border police onto you, they can seize your belongings (if you have any left) it's nothing to be blasé about
My partner insisted on living in Germany whereas I wanted to move around and see where we settled. He argued that his parents are here near Berlin. Now he's also set up a business with friends and has many work tools and a whole business infrastructure set up, and so it's clear that's not easy to leave now.
So I have no option but to visit him in Germany for up to 90 days at a time and then leave to go somewhere like Montenegro... however for that I need a driving licence, which is a huge problem now.
Basically I absolutely hate Germany. If you're not a well paid, German speaking, middle class German-looking person, (who’s digitally backward, but has no insight on that), this place will tear you apart.
Every time the healthcare company contacts me I get so stressed that I can't sleep and can't work and my health gets really bad for about 4 days until I can rest and recover. I’ ve now got PTSD from being harassed so much. The health companies are literally killing me and I just can’t have them in my life anymore, so I have no choice but to visit my husband like a tourist from now on.
It’s ironic really because this country desperately needs my digital design skills, but they’re so far behind, they don’t even recognise it. I also suspect there’s quite a lot of sexism and ageism involved with why I never got the work I deserved here, however even if I ever did get any job application rejection feedback, it would not say “ We think you’re too old and you’re a woman, so basically you’re useless”
However it’s become crystal clear that’s how they think. I’m checking out.
... and it's cold, and it's miserable. The only kind of fun they seem to have is drinking too much beer and hanging around in dark grungy smokey basements wearing all black, and then in the small hours going to a techno nightclub that only lets you in if you're 'cool' enough to wear S&M gear, almost naked in sub-zero temperatures in a 4-hour que. No thanks.
I’ve survived (barely) by building an existence from freelancing online and teaching design privately, and have started to build my own digital apps for subscription income, and a few other creative things. I can do this online from anywhere, and I will continue to do that whilst recovering the things Germany has taken from me.
