“Welcome to the AGBC. Welcome to Deutsche Bank.”
These words, spoken with a distinct German accent, began the seminar on Estate Planning at the American-German Business Club of Stuttgart last night. What followed was an interesting lecture on the basic concepts of German inheritance law.
We heard about the difference between “vermachen” and “vererben,” about required inheritance rules, and about the new inheritance tax structure that will likely be coming out in the next few months.
While some things are quite simple, like the fact that you can hand-write a valid will in Germany, others are not. For example, you must write the whole will by hand, in YOUR handwriting, and include the date, signature and location of the writing. If you are married and one of you dies, the surviving spouse does not necessarily get everything. In some cases, children inherit, in others, parents can inherit.
One interesting example: You are married and have a child. Your parents make over their house to you, so as to avoid big inheritance taxes, knowing you’ll always let them live there. You divorce. You die. One month later, your child dies. Who inherits? The ex-spouse. Your parents are now subject to the will of your ex. Could be tricky.
Like I said, interesting discussion. At the end, the Deutsche Bank presented its value proposition to the audience: they provide bank statements in English upon request, and also have online banking in English. Also, they are allied with Bank of America, so there’s a relatively large network of banking professionals to meet American needs. Disclaimer: I jsut heard this – I don’t have either an account at DB, nor can I say anything about the quality of the banking services.
Dear Karen,
I like to follow your blog. It’s funny to see ‘my’ country and culture from others point of view.
I visited so many countries and met so many different people. And everywhere some English people and Americans.
I know, my English is far away from being perfect and my pronunciation used to be ‘German’, somehow.
Everybody made jokes about that. But, I tried to learn and use a foreign language, even french, spanish, some chinese.
Americans and English never did. So, do they have the right to laught about “German accent”?
How’s your German?
Just think about…
Chees
Mark
Please don’t think I was making mean fun of the man’s accent – I only intended the statement to set the atmosphere for the post.
Thank you for reading the blog. I have a bad German accent, in contrast to my daughter, who is essentially accent-less. When I lived in The Netherlands, I spoke Dutch with a very good accent, but there was one word which I could NEVER say correctly, the word for onion: Ui. Simply impossible.
The reason the man’s accent stood out to me last night is because I work in an American company, and my German colleagues have marvelous English accents. But please don’t think my comment was mean-spirited, because I meant only the best affection.
hehe….Dutch is easy, it’s only a German dialect…
(no, just kidding)
enjoy your time here, you are warmly welcome…