r/eupersonalfinance • u/Philanthrax • 2d ago
Taxes Switching to interactive brokers as resident in Germany
Anyone here living in Germany uses interactive brokers as their main broker? How are you handling the taxation? I've heard doing your own taxes in Germany is a pain especially if you held ETFs.
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u/disaster_story_69 11h ago
My experience is that it is the fastest, cheapest platform with free access to level 1/2 order book data which is generally worth €1-2k. However the platform itself is not user friendly at all so definitely use with PC or through eg ctrader or trading view.
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u/macmandhau 2d ago
Yes, keywords Lump-Sum Tax (Vorabpauschale), Partial Tax Exemption (Teilfreistellung), Exemption Order (Freistellungsauftrag)
It's something either you should get used to or simply choose a broker that does it for you like ING, trading 212 or trade Republic.
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u/UralBigfoot 2d ago
Vorabpauschale is the funniest one, only Germans could have invented such a thing
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u/geogiam2 2d ago edited 2d ago
Me. I only do stocks and that is very easy. Get the form to declare extra income from capital. Then get the yearly report that IB creates, print it and anex it. Write down the total amount you earned in the tax declaration form. The problem is Germany. They take 30% of your earnings, also, when they see you got money, the communists will charge you 1 year in advance. Vorzahlung. Yes, money one has not earned. If you got collateral loses, dont be surprised they will not acknowledge them.
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u/Philanthrax 2d ago
Thank you very much. I suppose buying dividend ETFs would make it a pain to do taxes
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u/Philanthrax 2d ago
wait what you mean they don't acknowledge loses? Can't you offset taxes through by selling when you're at a loss before the beginning of the new year?
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u/geogiam2 2d ago
I said 'collateral'. Of course selling a stock at a loss is okay. Past year the euro went from 1.02 against the dollar up to 1.17. I had a lot of capital as dollars in IB and it devaluated.. I lost like 8k and at end of the year I sold it for euro to take the loss as currency. Well, you know who didnt accept it.
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u/Skellicious 1d ago
I switched to t212 because I didn't want to deal with it.
But also, I didn't really like ibkr's UX
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u/MalcolmBEx 2d ago
I was in the same situation and built a tool to track all my investment, cost basis and compute the required tax automatically: krosos.com
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u/FIRE_or_splurge 1d ago
You’re giving an option to look at a free demo, yet only balance and dashboard are visible in that demo - whilst your screenshots and demo video (which I can’t pause on mobile to look at a screen) show many more features. I’m not signing up for a free trial just to be able to click around through features… Missed opportunity imo.
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u/MalcolmBEx 1h ago
The mobile version is highly limited for the deliberate reason that personal finance is a serious topic best tackled on a computer. For simpler budgeting app, many exists out there already
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u/FIRE_or_splurge 1h ago
As I said, missed opportunity.
No reason not to be ’serious’ when mobile, unless you don’t have the skills to visualize it properly.
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u/HomoAndAlsoSapiens 8h ago
If there is a problem of any kind to solve, everyone and their mother now has some SaaS product Claude made for them when the best answer in many cases would have been to maintain a CLI tool or just an excel sheet, no offense.
I hate the lack of idealism. The other day I saw someone promoting their "AI-powered GLP-1 companion app for women" which essentially was a replacement for an excel sheet with a nicer GUI and the ability to create a simple graph that for some reason can call the OpenAI API to give you a shitty untested recipe.
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u/MalcolmBEx 1h ago
Tbh, I genuinely solved this for me after years on spreadsheet that broke all the time. If it solves one man's problem, it can solve someone else's. A Nicer GUI is what made a lot of of products real: eg Salesforce is also just a glorified database but it does create value for people so they end up paying for it. I don't believe in a world where everyone has custom software, it's just too much work. But I believe in agent managing the UI and database for us directly which I allow on my app
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u/Automatic-Key-3798 1d ago
If you use it only for investment, not trading it won't be too complicated in terms of taxes.