Finance writer · View profile
· 16 min read
The 183-day rule is the most repeated and least understood sentence in cross-border work. It comes from one article of one model treaty, it has three conditions and not one, and it decides nothing at all about social security, payroll or your employer's exposure. Here is what each rule actually tests.
· 13 min read
Net sales divided by net fixed assets is one of the easiest ratios to compute and one of the least comparable. The same retailer scored 10× before the lease standard and 1.39× after it — same shops, same sales, same year.
· 13 min read
France caps the total cost of a mortgage at one third above the market average, insurance included. Portugal caps the monthly repayment at a share of net income — and on 1 August 2026 it cut that share from 50 % to 45 %. Neither ceiling means what the headline percentage suggests.
· 13 min read
Return on assets, return on net assets and return on capital employed are one family with two moving parts. On the same balance sheet they read 8.3%, 10.2% and 15.6% — and the two steps between them are exactly the two decisions you are making.
· 17 min read
The heating bill is real and it is small — about a fifteenth of the fuel a car commuter stops burning. The balance only goes negative in three identifiable cases, and one of them is a season ticket. Priced from Eurostat energy data, with the German tax system pushing the other way.
· 11 min read
France tapers the tax on a property gain to zero over twenty-two and then thirty years. Spain does not taper at all for anything bought after 1994. Portugal has no taper either — it has an inflation index and a fifty per cent haircut, which is a different animal entirely.
· 16 min read
The numerator is on your own invoices. The denominator is the problem, and the usual fixes make it worse. How to build one from what you can actually observe, why the served market and the total market give answers a hundred times apart, and why a share on the wrong denominator is worse than no number at all.
· 13 min read
Buying beats renting after a number of years, and that number is computable. On the same house, the same loan and the same year, it lands on 6 in Madrid, 7 in France and 8 in Catalonia — purely because of what the purchase costs on the way in. But the purchase cost is not the biggest lever, and this article shows which one is.
· 10 min read
France lets a parent pass 100,000 euros to a child free of duty and resets the counter every fifteen years. Germany allows 400,000 euros and resets it every ten. On the same 500,000-euro transfer the French bill is seven times the German one, and the gap widens with every decade you have.
· 11 min read
One flat worth 400,000 euros, one only child, three countries. France charges tens of thousands. Italy charges nothing. Spain charges anything from nothing to 76,000 euros depending on which of its seventeen regions the parent lived in — and that is not an exaggeration.
· 12 min read
One country gives you a formula that changes with the car's horsepower and the distance driven, one gives everybody the same figure per kilometre, and one publishes a table per model. All three are meant to cover the whole cost of running a car, and all three leave out things people assume are included.
· 13 min read
Two of these three things are usually not in the law at all, and the one that is works completely differently in each country. Here is what a statute actually guarantees, what comes from a collective agreement instead, and why an Italian leaving voluntarily walks away with more than a French employee who was dismissed.
· 21 min read
The threshold everyone asks about exists in France, and it turns out to be the scale figure itself. In Germany it does not exist for meals at all, and in Spain the employee never gets the choice. Three designs, with the instrument and the year behind every number.
· 19 min read
One person, one salary, one length of service, three answers that differ by more than sixteen thousand euros. The percentage is not applied to the same quantity in the three countries, the duration is built from a different fraction, and only one of the three cuts the payment after six months.
· 8 min read
The same document has opposite default effects on either side of the Rhine: in France a signed fixed-price quotation forbids any increase, in Germany an estimate carries no guarantee of correctness unless the contractor took one on. Plus the particulars that are general, the ones that are trade rules, and why a free quotation is not free.
· 13 min read
Nobody negotiates a company car as a pay cut, but that is what the tax treatment makes it. Three countries value the same car by three completely different methods, one of them changed in 2025 in a way that nearly doubled the figure, and in all three an electric car is taxed at a fraction of the same vehicle with an engine.
· 18 min read
The migration, the tooling change, the process fix: the most common business case there is and the least documented. The value is avoided cost plus recovered time — and on a $130,000 migration, 60.5 % of the recovered hours have to be genuinely redeployed before the five-year net present value even reaches zero.
· 15 min read
A day rate is a price, not an income. Between the invoice and the bank balance sit six separate subtractions, and in three European countries they are ordered differently, capped differently and paid at different times. Here is the whole chain with the 2026 figures that are verifiable and an honest note on the ones that are not.
· 13 min read
Four European countries, four different answers to the same question: at what point does a small business stop being treated as small? The thresholds matter less than the clock attached to them — some bite the day you cross, others wait for January.
· 13 min read
The gross salary on the contract is not the price of the job. Three European countries, the same monthly gross, and the employer's compulsory bill differs by nearly a factor of two — because of ceilings, not because of headline rates. Here is the 2026 arithmetic, line by line.
· 19 min read
The coverage ratio is the gate, the guarantee is the second price and the rate is an output. On a 400,000 loan, cutting the rate by a full point moves the coverage ratio by 0.018 — while two extra years of term move it by 0.216. The whole negotiation is in the wrong place.
· 17 min read
It throws away everything after the cut-off, ignores the time value of money, and ranks a project that returns early and then dies above one that returns steadily. Computed: payback prefers the worse project by 1.33 years while net present value prefers the better one by $19,571. And the popular shortcut — one divided by the payback — overstates the true return by 17 points on a five-year asset.
· 15 min read
The received wisdom is that the tax treatment of depreciation settles the buy-or-lease question. Modelled on a 60,000-euro machine over five years, it does not: it ranks third, and a long way behind. Here is the ranking, computed, and the conditions under which it flips.
· 15 min read
The usual rule — delegate whenever you earn more per hour than the help costs — is wrong, and wrong in a way that has a formula. Two thresholds, one for a household task and one for a business task, and the ratio between them is exactly one over one minus your marginal rate.