Practical guides, how-tos and comparisons to get the most out of our free online tools.
Furnishing a flat moves it from one tax code to another: 50 % of the rent is written off instead of 30 %, and a landlord on the full regime can depreciate the building. Since 15 February 2025 that depreciation is clawed back on sale, which changes the whole calculation.
Marco Bianchi · 10 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.
Camille Laurent · 16 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.
Camille Laurent · 13 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.
Camille Laurent · 11 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.
Camille Laurent · 10 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.
Camille Laurent · 11 min read
What happens to the header row, what happens to rows of unequal length, what happens to types — and the one thing transposing is regularly mistaken for and cannot do.
Daniel Okonkwo · 13 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.
Camille Laurent · 21 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.
Camille Laurent · 19 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.
Camille Laurent · 13 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.
Camille Laurent · 12 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.
Camille Laurent · 8 min read