Money isn’t everything

Geld allein macht nicht glüchlich

We had a lession on Geld in my Sprachkurs today. I was slapped with about 120 vocabulary words and they aren’t the easiest to remember. For example, einzahlen means to deposit, auszahlen means to pay out, like the bank gives you money out of your savings account, and bezahlen means to pay up, like the tab at a restaurant. Similar looking words and slightly different meanings. The same with abheben meaning to withdrawl and abbuchen meaning to debit directly.

There is place called das Bank which has the same meaning as a bank in the U.S. And now there is a place called die Post which is short for das Postamt or the post-office as is the meaning in the English language. However, as I understand it, there is also another meaning for die Post which is short for die Postbank, where one can do bank transactions but sometimes one can mail stuff there, I think. Now, at the die Post/das Postamt you can’t do banking there but you can mail things and place long distance phone calls there. Well Leo.org doesn’t explain it all. so…
Confused? No? Good, you avoided a headache…

According to Deloris, meine Lehrerin, Germans are just as uncomfortable with announce their salaries as people in the U.S. And they experience the same doof Salary Question during an interview. Germans also skirt around the question of how much one paid for a Wohnung to own. I find this fascinating why we as people are so secretive about this topic. I know I have reservations about the truth behind my Kleingeld but that is through society training… Well owning a home in Munich is close to impossible. An average German home, which is probably equivalent to the style of a 2-3 bedroom condo, is about 400.000 Euro (or ~$500,000 in USA). The bank won’t help finance the Wohnung if you don’t have 25% of the cost of the home to put down. Most average families don’t have 100.000 Euro so most everybody rents. Bye, bye real estate venture!