Insurance & Provisions.

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Review, Cancel — or Keep

If you keep a property in Germany, every policy needs a review: some you can cancel, others you’ll still need — and sometimes you even need to check in with the insurer directly. If your house gets rented out while you’re away, not everything falls away: certain policies need to keep running precisely because of that.

Health Insurance

The Biggest Fork in the Road

Do you cancel before you leave — or deliberately not cancel? One option many people don’t know about: standby coverage (in German: Anwartschaft). Your actual coverage goes dormant, but your membership formally continues uninterrupted — for a reduced monthly fee of around 70 to 85 euros.

The benefit: you avoid cancelling — and with it, the health screening or loss of accrued entitlements if you return one day.

What we only realized too late, and what we learned from it, we tell in our Journal: The standby coverage we found out about too late.

Insured Abroad

International — or Deliberately Without

For long-term life abroad, there are dedicated international health insurance plans — which one fits depends on the country, duration, and your situation. And some people even deliberately decide against health insurance: because they live in a country where paying out of pocket for a doctor’s visit is cheaper than any monthly premium. Whether that works for you is a very individual calculation — with more variables than it seems at first glance.

The Time Factor

Don’t Cancel Too Soon

The most important rule from our own experience: don’t submit any cancellation before you truly know and have weighed all your options. Because a wrong decision here can’t be undone — once entitlements are lost, you don’t get them back. Explore first, decide after.