Utility bills, internet, radio

If you are looking for accomodation in Germany you can notice, that there are two rental costs in advertisements - Kalt and Warm, which can be translated as rent without (Kalt) and with (Warm) costs for utilities. Let's try to find out where this amount for utilities comes from and what else you have to pay when you move into your new home.

Utility bills

I’m not quite sure if it’s different from other countries, but here in Germany they calculate your utility bills at the end of the year. Once a year a specialist is called by the property management company to take readings from all the meters you have installed in your flat (water and heating consumption). This usually happens at the beginning of the year, so that the amount of water and heat consumed during the previous year is recorded. The property management company then calculates the cost of water and heating and sends you a "chain letter" some time between July and August requesting you to pay the calculated amount, indicating the details of all meters and the associated costs of maintaining the flat - rubbish collection, maintenance of the communal area, various repairs to the house, if any, and the cost of a "handyman" or Hausmeister. If you have a garage in the building and you rent a parking space there, this also includes the cost of maintaining the garage. The landlord will also need some time to figure out which costs they can give to you and which they have to pay. The end result is a certain amount that you have to pay at the end of the year for the heating and water you have consumed. But we remember that we already pay some amount for utilities in the rent each month. So this amount is added up for the whole year and deducted from the amount that the property management company and the owner of the flat have calculated. Then there are the options: if you have paid more than you spent, the landlord is obliged to refund you the difference to your account and may offer to reduce the monthly payment; if you have spent more than you paid for the year, the situation is reversed, the landlord will ask you to pay the difference and will offer to increase the monthly payment to avoid additional payments in the future.

Now for some interesting facts and case studies, or how it is perfectly legal not to pay for a recalculation.

The landlord is obliged to send you his calculations of your costs for utilities for the year before the end of the following year. For example, the landlord is obliged to send you his calculation for 2022 by the end of 2023 according to §556 Abs. 3 Satz 1 BGB. If he sends you a letter after December 31st 2023 then you are entitled to assume that you will not be charged any additional payments or overpayments due to the statute of limitations. Exactly the same situation happened to us. The owner of the flat died and his children had been inheriting for a long time and had completely forgotten, or maybe did not even know, about their responsibilities as a landlord. As a result, the settlement came to us in mid-January. After consulting with friends who have lived here for many years, we wrote a letter in which we explained that we would not pay extra, but that we agreed to increase the rent. Here it is worth making a remark. Since we moved from Moscow, where we have to pay water and electricity bills every month and have to track their consumption and make adjustments, we were not at all prepared for such cases and our cunsumption of water was extremely high. That's why we had to pay an extra fee of 700 EUR for half a year that we rented the flat. On the one hand it may seem that everything is ok, because we didn't pay 700 euros to the landlord due to his error, but the main surprise awaited us next year, because during all previous year we had paid low utility bill, but we didn't care about the consumption, and we learned about the consumption only from the letter of the flat owner. As a result, the next bill came inopportunely on time and we had to pay 2,000 euros for the utilities.

The attentive reader may have noticed that I didn't mention the cost of electricity when I talked about paying utilities with the monthly rent and will be quite right! The utilities or Nebenkosten that your landlord asks you to pay do not include electricity costs. Here you will be contacted by your electricity supplier (in Munich it's SWM, maybe there are other suppliers, I didn't find out) and asked to sign a contract, which will deduct a certain amount from your account every month, which is calculated on the basis of the average consumption per month.

So, to summarise: Paying for utilities in Munich consists of (if you are renting a flat):

• Monthly heating and water charge with recalculation for the year - to be paid together with the rent
• Monthly electricity fee - to be paid separately, according to the tariff plan chosen from the electricity supplier.

Well, moving on...

Radio or ARD

For those who thought that we were done with the mandatory flat fees, I have a little surprise - as soon as you register for your new place of residence, you will definitely be contacted by the ARD (or German radio). In a letter they will tell you that every adult in Germany is obliged to pay a TV and radio broadcasting fee, regardless of whether there is a TV or a radio at home. It's not possible to refuse to pay. The fee is usually small, €18.36 per month, and you can choose how often the bank account is charged - monthly, 3 months or a year. The payment is charged to the flat, so if one family member is already paying this fee, the other adult family members can indicate in the reply letter or on the website that payment is already being made for the flat and provide a number that is assigned to the person who is paying for the flat.

We had a very interesting case with the German radio. We rented a flat after we moved in and the woman we rented from had already paid for the radio and when we received the letter from ARD she told us not to worry and that the fee was already being paid for. We relaxed and put these letters in a folder and safely forgot. After a while we quit subletting and started renting directly from the landlord. Everything was fine, until 3 years later we received a new letter from ARD with a reminder that they have not received payments for the flat for 3 years and a request to fill in the form. In the end we have to indicate the month from which we started the direct rent with our account number. After that they sent us a letter saying that they have charged 700€ for the past years and will charge the rent from the indicated account shortly. In Germany, if you owe someone, they will not forget about you.

Internet

There is one option which is probably difficult to do without if you want to watch not only German television, but also channels in your native language or any films and series on various streaming platforms - I'm talking about the Internet. The terrible quality and inadequate prices for the internet have not been written about by only a lazy man and it is unfortunately true. I could write off my shock when I got used to pay nearly norhing for the internet in Moscow, but already here in Munich a colleague of mine from India also mentioned during the conversation that she couldn't understand why in the 21st century internet in Europe costs so much while in India it's practically for free. But let's take it step by step.

Technology

The most common type of connection in Munich is DSL, i.e. when you have internet over a telephone cable. Yes yes, that's the kind of Internet that the era of which passed in Moscow a few years ago. The pluses of such a connection - no additional outlets to the flat, that's where the pluses end. Cons - well prone to interference, unstable speed of the Internet (so it's better to take a rate with a little reserve, so that in fact there was at least half the claimed speed) and asymmetry (Download in this connection at least twice higher than Upload, so if you're going to record videos and upload them to YouTube - be patient).

All providers on their website mention fibre optics in every house, but most probably you won't have it, as the coverage area is so small that one can say that the era of fast and cheap internet in Munich has not come yet (those who moved from Moscow must be very surprised now, when they cancelled their contracts for 200 Mbit internet with dedicated line and TV for 2-3 big cups of their favourite coffee in a cafe near the business centre).

There is also some kind of cable connection on the operators' websites. I haven't experienced it personally, so I can't say much. According to reviews the quality is even worse than DSL, so I haven't even considered this option.

Choosing a provider.

As a colleague shared with me, here in Munich all the networks are laid by one single provider - Deutsche Telekom, and everyone else rents their capacity. In spite of that, they usually have the most expensive tariffs. As a colleague explained to me, they have the fastest support, because they work with their own equipment and check and repair everything themselves. Others have to go to them, as it's not their lines and they can't touch them. After discussing with colleagues and reading online reviews, we decided to connect to Vodafone, because about him were the most adequate reviews and he seemed more or less stable (for 3 years of using their services only once had a case of no connection). There is another provider with the name - O2, but I decided to stop at the previous option.

Examples of tariffs for the state of April 2023:

When choosing a tariff, you should pay attention to the small print on the price after the end of the promotional period, the connection price and the minimum duration of the contract.

For example, Deutsche Telekom (in the first picture) will charge €19.95 for 100 Mbit for the first 3 months and €44.95 from the fourth month. It is likely that the terms and conditions will also specify a minimum term of validity, as O2 (third screenshot) does, where the minimum contract period is 24 months. A very important point when you sign a contract: You can cancel the contract only 3 months before the contract expiry date. For example: The contract was signed in January and the minimum term of the contract is one year. To cancel such a contract I have to write a notice letter to the provider at the end of September or beginning of October. If you miss that point, you'll have to pay the same rate all next year. But it's not as bad as it might seem at first glance. In the case of a move, if the provider is unable to move your internet service to a new address, this is a good reason to cancel your contract outside of the general rules.

And again about internet speed, for those who don't remember what DSL is in practice. While we were renting a flat not directly from landlord, we had the cheapest tariff, not sure what the advertised speed was, maybe it was 50Mbit. In the evenings it often happened that instead of watching a new episode of your favorite TV series online, you had to watch something you had downloaded earlier, because the speed was dropping to such a level that it was impossible to watch online.

Connection

At this point, you have already selected an ISP, signed a contract, paid some money, and are expecting a specialist from the ISP to come to you shortly, bring you a router, and set everything up. There is some truth in this - you will have to wait a long time and one will indeed come, but not an ISP employee, but an employee of DHL, Hermes or another delivery service, to hand you the router, which you have to plug into a phone jack, which is usually located somewhere in the hallway. It seems easy, you will be given a picture manual with the router to make sure you get it right. But the hardest part is the wait. It can take a whole month from the time you sign the contract until you are connected to your home Wi-Fi. My guess is that during this time, the provider either sends their technicians or sends a request to Deutsche Telekom so that the specialists can already physically connect you to the internet at a hub near your home. I have no other explanation for such a long internet connection. In my country of origin I was already enjoying my new internet connection in a week. In Europe, with old technologies, you have to learn to be patient.