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Comment by pyrale | Hacker News Reader

Salaries (and cost of living) are significantly higher in Denmark than in Germany, it makes little sense to compare numbers without that context.

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We're still getting wrecked compared to Americans. I get enough recruiters in my inbox that I'm just flatly stating I won't consider less than 100,000 DKK a month. With taxes as high as they are, that's a take home of less than 50,000, which is 6800 USD a month, which is just 81,000 USD a year. That in itself is a travesty but most shops here are trying to get devs at 45,000 DKK a month here pre-taxes.

And they wonder why it's so difficult to fill empty spaces at their companies.

> most shops here are trying to get devs at 45,000 DKK a month here pre-taxes.

Do companies pay something on top of this like pension scheme or medical insurance? If not, that feels really low even for juniors.

Medical insurance is covered by the state. We have public pensions furnished by the state but those amount to very little on their own. 90 percent of Danish workers are covered by occupational pensions that are (usually doesn't have to be) a mix of a mandatory contribution by the employee and employer.

So the result is a percentage of your wages end up in this occupational pension that gets added to the public pension when you retire. But because our elderly are getting older, the age at which you can retire is getting pushed up and up.

Ok, I was trying to compare that to french salaries, where companies pay into retirement, health and jobless schemes.

The numbers look slightly better than what they're in France factoring in CoL, but that's probably more telling about our housing situation than about tech salaries.

Holy hell and there are no tax breaks? Like could you invest in some insurance or something to get a tax return?

There are a number of tax-laws that you can utilise if you know what you’re doing and you work for the right companies. You can invest 14% of your yearly pay in stock options or regular stock if your company has financial programs to deal with the legalities, of those 14% the first 57000kr will be taxed at 25% and the rest will be taxed at 42% when you sell the options or stock.

Other than that you can deduct things like your mortgage, and you can put more money into your pension investments, and a range of other things.

Most of these are methods that a lot of people don’t know about, mainly because they are financial tricks that nobody teaches you about.

You have to understand, however, that a lot of us Danes are quite happy with our high taxes because it pays for everything. I have ADHD for example, and though I don’t need it, my Elvanse medicine cost me around 80kr because the state pays the other 2400kr. We’re of course not always happy with how the politicians handle our taxes, especially these days where they seem increasingly unable to meet citizens need, leading to many smaller towns setting up communities to run things like schools because the public schools are closing. But over all, I think that even though we have 13 different political parties were basically mainly different branches of social democrats.

The number of deductibles we can take advantage of are tiny. You can browse all of them in less than a minute and they aren't significant.

You can, however, put it in your pension and that's how most do it but I'm of the opinion that waiting until I'm at death's door to enjoy the good life is a waste of a good life.

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