German pupils learn the ökonomisches Prinzip, the economic principle. It says that the ratio of effort to result should be as favorable as possible. It has two forms. The Maximalprinzip gets the most out of given means. The Minimalprinzip reaches a given goal with the least means, and it is also called the Sparprinzip, the saving principle.
School material from the publisher Klett explains it with a purchase. A man compares several offers for a laser printer.
In 2025 the Institut für Mittelstandsforschung in Bonn calculated the cost of bureaucracy for a model machine builder with 150 employees. The study was done for the foundation of the machine builders’ association VDMA. The researchers identified 3,900 rules that machine builders must observe in their usual business. Complying with them costs 2.18 million euros a year, or 6.3 percent of revenue.
The institute translated the cost into people. It equals the average salaries of 34 full-time employees.
The Notgroschen, the emergency penny, is money put aside for purchases nobody planned. The consumer advice centers, the Verbraucherzentralen, explain it in a series for young people, Auf eigenen Füßen: Laura zieht aus, On Her Own Feet: Laura Moves Out. Laura comes of age, starts work and is responsible for everything herself for the first time. Then the washing machine suddenly breaks down, the fridge stops working, or the smartphone screen stays dark. For such cases, the advice is a buffer of two to three months’ salary. It is best kept in an overnight savings account, a Tagesgeldkonto. The money does not belong under the pillow or in the coffee tin. The centers call the amount a rule of thumb that depends on each person’s situation.
The Federal Office of Civil Protection, the BBK, advises people to have cash on hand: Denken Sie daran, Bargeld zur Verfügung zu haben, remember to have cash available. The reason it gives is that cash machines also stop working in a power cut. It names no amount. In July 2025, Bundesbank board member Burkhard Balz said in an interview that cash can be decisive in a crisis, so that people can keep paying. Cash is independent of electricity, networks and digital interfaces. Bargeld lässt sich nicht hacken, he said, cash cannot be hacked.
When a German household insurance or car insurance pays for damage, it asks how the damage came about. If the customer caused it through grobe Fahrlässigkeit, gross negligence, the insurer may cut the payment. Section 81 of the Insurance Contract Act lets it reduce the payment in proportion to the severity of the fault. Before the reform of 2008 the rule was alles oder nichts, all or nothing. A grossly negligent customer received nothing. Typical cases are a candle left burning in an empty room, a red light run, a phone used at the wheel, and a window left tilted open when nobody is home. Cuts of 25, 50 or 75 percent are common, and up to 100 percent in extreme cases. In 2009 the Münster regional court dealt with a driver who ran a red light. Her comprehensive insurance paid half of the damage, and the court rejected her claim for the rest.
After the war of 1870 to 1871, the new German Empire created a war treasure, the Reichskriegsschatz, from French payments. It was worth 120 million gold marks. From 1874, it lay in 1,200 chests of gold coins in the Juliusturm, the Julius Tower of the citadel in Spandau. In 1913, the treasure was raised to 360 million gold marks. In 1914, at the start of the First World War, it was used for its purpose. The tower’s name came back in the 1950s. Finance Minister Fritz Schäffer held back budget surpluses for West German rearmament, and the political debate called the hoard the Juliusturm. His budget policy followed the principle of the guter Hausvater, the good father of the household. In the third quarter of 1956, the hoard reached more than seven billion marks. In the end, much of the money saved for rearmament went to social policy, above all to a pension reform that made pensions rise regularly.
die Vollkaskomentalität
the full-coverage mentality. Vollkasko is fully comprehensive car insurance. The word describes the expectation that someone should cover every risk in life.
Germans use the word to criticize themselves. In 2023 Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research, wrote: “Diese Vollkaskomentalität ist heute die größte Gefahr für die Zukunftsfähigkeit Deutschlands.” This full-coverage mentality is today the greatest danger to Germany’s future.
The Riester pension is private retirement saving with state subsidies. Its providers are required to guarantee 100 percent of the contributions paid in.
In the years of negative interest rates, the fund company DWS stopped selling new Riester contracts from 1 July 2021. A reform planned for 2027 keeps the full guarantee but adds a product with an 80 percent guarantee and a retirement depot without any guarantee.
In spring 2020 the German states paid emergency aid to small firms and the self-employed. The money went out sehr unbürokratisch und oftmals ohne große Vorprüfung, very unbureaucratically and often without much prior checking. In April 2020 North Rhine-Westphalia stopped payments for a time, after fraud attempts with fake application websites. Later the state demanded part of the money back. In March 2023 the Higher Administrative Court of North Rhine-Westphalia ruled the repayment notices unlawful. The court found it had remained unclear what the aid was meant to replace: lost sales, payment problems or living costs. The state could also have recalculated about 220,000 further cases, but said it did not plan to.
Under Section 3b of the Income Tax Act, extra pay for work at protected times is tax-free up to set rates of the base wage. For night work the limit is 25 percent, or 40 percent between midnight and 4 a.m. if the work began before midnight. For Sunday work it is 50 percent. For public holidays, and for 31 December from 2 p.m., it is 125 percent. The highest rate, 150 percent, applies to 24 December from 2 p.m., to 25 and 26 December, and to 1 May.