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Freedom28 Sept 202612 min readupdated 29 Sept 2026

Nobody taught you money. So I built this site.

Three in ten people in the EU can’t pay a surprise bill. Nobody taught them money, and somebody earns well from that. Hence this site.

Markus Behmann
Step one: look at where you want to go.

The short version#

I don’t really plan on retiring. Partly because I don’t want to: I’ve been running my own companies since 2017, VEONIO first and Nerdy.Money later, and I like the work, the money and the freedom that comes with both.

But also because it’s pretty much a financial mistake to trust your dear government to hand you an amount that covers your needs a third of a century or more from now. Some states aren’t even that old.

Most people never get to choose. Not because they’re stupid. Because nobody taught them how money works, and because somebody kept telling them it was all taken care of.

So I looked up the numbers. For Europe, wherever somebody counts them. And for Germany in detail, because my roots are there and I know it best. They’re worse than I expected.

The numbers. Brace yourself.#

Guess first

First what people know, and what they can pay:

CountryHigh score in financial literacy, 2023Compound interest question right, 2023Can’t pay an unexpected bill, 2025
EU2718%45%29.2%
Netherlands28%59%15.3%
Germany24%56%31.9%
Austria21%44%20.9%
Italy18%39%25.6%
France17%47%28.8%
Poland15%36%22.5%
Spain13%37%36.4%
Portugal11%35%29.2%

The first two columns are from the European Commission’s Eurobarometer, the third from Eurostat. In the whole EU, only 20% of adults know what rising interest rates do to bond prices.

Look at Germany. One of the better pupils: fifth of 27 in the first column. And almost a third of the country still can’t pay a surprise bill. That’s the scary part.

Then what people own:

CountryPeople living in a home they own, 2025Net wealth of the typical householdHouseholds with fundsHouseholds with listed shares
Euro area (home ownership: EU27)68.5%€140,10014.2%11.4%
Germany47.2%€103,30023.7%17.6%
Austria54.2%€124,70011.6%6.4%
France61.4%€149,0009.7%12.6%
Netherlands68.8%€143,50016.9%6.3%
Portugal71.2%€151,8004.9%5.4%
Spain73.6%€151,6009.6%12.5%
Italy77.1%€162,8009.3%4.4%
Poland87.2%not in the survey

Home ownership is from Eurostat. The rest is from the ECB’s household survey, wave 2023, published in June 2026.

The typical German household owns less than the typical Italian, Spanish or Portuguese one. Read that again. The first column tells you why: the others bought the flat.

One thing Germany does better: funds sit in 23.7% of its households, more than anywhere else in the table. That’s still fewer than one in four. In Italy it’s one in eleven. The rest has a savings account and an opinion about the stock market.

Take Germany, because I know it best#

Guess first

The detail, for one country:

What is countedFigureWho counted, and when
Adults in Germany with no money left at the end of the montharound 30%BaFin survey of 2022, in an OECD report of 2024
Net wealth of the typical renter household in Germany€18,300Bundesbank, 2023
Net wealth of the typical owner household without a mortgage€450,200Bundesbank, 2023
Renter households aged 30 to 44 with enough savings to buy a home5.7%LBS and empirica, 2025
People in Germany aged 14 and older who own shares, equity funds or ETFs19.9%Deutsches Aktieninstitut, 2025
Germans aged 18 to 65 who save nothing for old age31%Civey for Deutsche Bank and DWS, 2025

What these figures leave out#

I read every number like a company’s annual report: useful, and written by somebody who wants something.

  • The Eurobarometer score mixes knowledge with behaviour that people report about themselves. On the knowledge questions alone, 26% of EU adults score high and 24% score low.
  • The Eurostat figure is self-reported, and the amount differs by country. For Germany it was €1,300 in 2025.
  • The ECB survey counts households, not people, and the interviews ran between 2022 and 2025, depending on the country. The ECB itself warns against comparing countries too precisely. Claims on state and company pensions are left out.
  • For Germany the Bundesbank asked 3,985 households. Its net wealth leaves out claims on the state pension. Fair enough: those are promises, not property.
  • The Deutsches Aktieninstitut speaks for listed companies, the Landesbausparkassen sell home savings contracts, and Deutsche Bank and DWS sell pension products. People who sell pension products found out that you need one. Shocking. Their surveys are still the best count available, so I use them. With one eyebrow up.

None of that turns the picture around. Three in ten people in the EU are one broken boiler away from a loan.

Renting, owning and the gap between them#

In Germany, 52.8% of people rent. In the EU it’s 31.5%. Germany has the lowest ownership rate in the union.

Renting isn’t a mistake. Renting and not investing the difference is. See the gap in the table, €18,300 against €450,200? That’s what decades of it look like.

And before the homeowners get smug: owning is no automatic win. In Germany, 13.0% of owners with a mortgage live in households that spend more than 40% of their disposable income on housing. The EU figure is 5.0%.

Why nobody taught you#

School#

Take Germany again. Education there is the business of the 16 states. Financial education is encouraged as part of consumer education, sprinkled across several subjects like parsley. The OECD looked at it in 2024 and found the coverage “not systematic”. Mandatory in some states, optional in others.

So you can leave a German school able to take a poem apart and unable to read a loan offer. The poem, by the way, will never charge you interest. In the same OECD report, 26% of adults in Germany couldn’t answer the question on compound interest. And Germany is near the top of the class. In Portugal, Poland and Spain, not even four in ten got the Eurobarometer’s version right.

Banks and insurers#

Guess first

Your ignorance is somebody’s margin. Here’s the receipt:

  • German households held €9,490 billion in financial assets at the end of March 2026. Of that, €3,550 billion sat in cash and deposits, which is 37%. The Bundesbank notes that the real return on deposits was negative. Again.
  • Banks in the euro area paid households 0.28% on overnight deposits in July 2026. German banks charged households 9.40% on overdrafts in the same month. And at Christmas they send you a calendar.
  • BaFin surveyed 54 life insurers. For contracts with a 30-year savings phase, a good half of customers have often ended the contract after 15 years. In the most expensive quarter of the market, a unit-linked policy ended that early costs about 3.2% a year.

Nobody is forced to sign any of this. But a product that only works on people who never do the maths needs customers who never learned it. Guess who isn’t going to teach them.

Here’s the lesson they skip: what inflation does to money that just sits there.

$ inflation --years 30
€
years
%

Open the full check

The state#

I don’t see a conspiracy behind this. A conspiracy takes planning skills, and we’ve all seen how the state builds airports. What I see is zero incentive to change anything: a saver who understands compound interest starts asking awkward questions about a pension system that has none.

What nobody showed you#

That’s the idea behind the question that 55% of EU adults did not get right. It takes four lines. It should take one school lesson.

The costliest assumption of all#

Ask people and they’ll tell you they don’t trust the state pension. Then watch what they do.

My example is German again. In a survey for Deutsche Bank and DWS, 83% said they no longer consider the state pension future-proof. In 2019 it was 54%. And yet 31% of the same people save nothing for old age, and another 23% put away €50 a month at most.

The OECD report fits: 90% of adults in Germany plan to draw on the state pension, and only 18% hold investment products.

I believe the wallet, not the survey. If you distrusted the pension, you’d go looking for an alternative. The same people spend an evening comparing mobile phone contracts and drive to another supermarket for cheaper butter. Their own old age gets less time than the butter. That’s trust in the state, whatever they tell the pollster. And doing nothing is a plan too. Just the one with the worst return.

I think relying on the state to fix your finances is the costliest assumption you can make. The reasons, with the budget figures, are in Own your future. What the pension system has promised you, and what it can afford, is at your pension.

And your own business#

Same gap, different place: working for yourself. The numbers are German, the pattern isn’t. About 690,000 people in Germany started a business in 2025, after 585,000 the year before. Seven in ten did it next to a job. A sudden outbreak of entrepreneurial spirit? KfW suspects the labour market: unemployment rose for the second year in a row, and companies announced job cuts.

Covid worked the other way. In 2020 the number fell from 605,000 to 537,000, and KfW writes that short-time work kept people from founding out of need.

In the KfW survey for 2025, 20% had no better way to earn and 77% saw an opportunity. In the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, where several answers count, 62.1% founded to earn a living because jobs are scarce. In 2021 it was 40.9%.

And how long do they last? KfW’s figures up to 2024: about a third stop within three years, about 61% are still active after five. The business register counts companies and is harsher: of those founded in 2017, 38.1% were active five years later. Most who stop name personal reasons. Only a small fraction goes insolvent.

Money stops people earlier. In 2025, worries about financial risk and trouble with financing each almost doubled the probability of giving up a plan. 28% of founders named missing business knowledge as a problem. And KfW found: the better people rate their financial knowledge, the rarer both money obstacles.

Here’s what I make of it. The jump of 2025 is a labour market story. Pressure is a good recruiter and a lousy teacher. The biggest hurdle is the subject nobody taught. You can learn it. Preferably before the job gets shaky.

What I offer instead#

I can’t fix the school system. But I can build the thing I would have wanted at 25.

  • Free tools. Eight calculators at Tools. They run in your browser, so your salary stays on your device.
  • A free course. Plan B has eight levels, from the first budget to the exit. No e-mail gate.
  • Straight talk. Numbers with sources, opinion marked as opinion, no product tips and no affiliate links.

New here? Start here puts it in order. Then find the number that makes you financially free.

Nobody taught you. Their failure. From today it’s your job. It pays better than waiting for a ministry.

Made with AI#

This site was made with the help of AI, the same way we work at VEONIO every day. The views are mine, and every number has a source you can check. Please do.

This article is education, not investment, tax or legal advice.

Sources#

Education, not advice. I don’t know your situation, and past returns promise nothing. Check my numbers, then make your own call. You’re a grown-up.

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