Taxes, taxes, taxes and even more taxes!

We all know that the main income of the governments are taxes. And there are taxes in all forms. Starting with income taxes, VAT, health taxes and property taxes. To bad I do live in a country which can be crowned as World Champion in taxes.
I don't mind paying taxes if the money is used correctly by the government.
Sometimes it still does feel weird that the I have to pay VAT with the salary which already had income taxes on it. But it is as it is.

Today we did receive our property tax. If you do own a house, the government also wants to get some income from that. But the calculation is pretty weird.
First each house does get a presumed annual rental value, which is the start of the calculation. This value is pretty fixed. Only when you do a massive overhaul someone will come by and estimate a new revenue cadastral. But there are some strange rules. For instance if you do build a new house with a swimming pool, the swimming pool is integrated in the revenue cadastral. But if you do extend the new house with a swimming pool after the revenue cadastral has been estimated it doesn't have an impact on it. Strange isn't it.

But back to the calculation. In Belgium we do have 3 autonomous regions. And depending on the location of the property one of the three regions does collect the taxes. The tax rates do differ, in the Flemish region is it for instance around 2.5% while it is only 1.25%.
So we do start with the cadastral revenue, due to the fact that this is based on the virtual annual revenue somewhere in the seventies, it is indexed. For this year the index has been set on 1.9084. So if your cadastral revenue is 1000, 1908.4 is used in the calculation.

The first piece is for the autonomous region you do live in. They aren't that greedy. The region wants 3.97% of the indexed cadastral revenue. So, with a cadastral revenue this is 75.75 euro.
But we aren't there yet. The next one who does want a piece of it is the state you do live in. They do use a surcharge on the amount you do have to pay to the region. While they are a little bit greedier than the region, it is still acceptable. The surcharge is 214.52. Meaning that for each 100 you do have to pay to the region, they do want 241.52. In this example this would be 162.5.
But there is one other party which does want a piece of the cake. And this is the city you do live in. They are the greediest of them all. Worst case is that they can set the surcharge themselves, and of course this does vary a lot from city to city.
The city I do live in does use a surcharge of a whopping 1039. So for each 100 you do pay to the region they do want 1039. In this example this does result into 787.04.
You can imagine that this all does add up.
There are some discount for kids and handicapped persons. In our case that is 183.27.

We do have 2 months to pay it. How generous of them :)
So, your net income is in fact a lot less than you would think. You still do pay VAT, surcharges, excises and so on.

Cheers,
Peter