Save tax during or after your studies, even though you don't pay any yet? Sounds strange. But it is possible! Costs that you incur during your education can be deducted from your taxes later. Here we explain exactly how this works and which documents you need for it.
A lot of costs arise during your studies. You pay semester fees or tuition fees, specialist literature, the journey to university, excursions and a laptop. You can reclaim a lot of these costs on your tax return by declaring them as income-related expenses or special expenses.
Unfortunately, the Federal Court of Justice recently confirmed that only further education and training count as income-related expenses. This means that one cannot deduct initial training from income-related expenses. Now the case is before the Federal Constitutional Court and will be decided in the coming years.
If you have not completed any other vocational training before the Bachelor's degree, the Bachelor's degree is regarded as initial training. In this case, you can only deduct the costs for the Master's degree. The advantage of income-related expenses is that you can still deduct them afterwards. So if you pay little or no tax in a year, the study costs are initially left unmentioned until you actually earn money, at which point you can claim them for tax purposes.
This does not work with special expenses, for example. Special expenses can only be claimed in the year in which they are incurred. On the other hand, you can already deduct up to €6,000 of your study costs during your bachelor's degree, if you pay taxes as an employee at all during this time.
Income-related expenses can be claimed retrospectively, but so far only for the second degree. Special expenses can also be claimed during the Bachelor's degree, but only to the amount of €6,000 and only for the year in which they are incurred.
In any case, it is important that you have the right documents at hand quickly. In order to keep an overview, you can use fileee to compile the information you might need later from emails, letters and portals while you are still studying.
If you link your email account to fileee, the invoice from Amazon for the laptop or the booking confirmation for the excursion will land directly in your file. If you then scan the receipt for the latest textbook with your mobile phone and manually add the semester fee notices, you have everything you need for your tax return in one place.
Once the documents are in fileee, you can either tag them to see them collected with one click, or you can simply find them with the full text search. If you work with a tax return tool such as smartsteuer, the programme will automatically provide you with the right keywords that you can then search for in fileee.
Since the receipt requirement will be abolished as of the tax return for 2017, receipts no longer need to be submitted directly. However, this does not mean that they are no longer required. If the tax office requests the original receipts, they must still be sent in.
To ensure that you can also find your originals without extra effort, you can use the fileeeBox. If you search for a document in the original, the fileee app shows you in which box and at which position in the stack the document can be found - and all without filing and sorting.
It's not that hard to save tax during or after your studies, as long as you keep the right documents. If you want to know more about how a student tax return works, there are many providers that can help you. Some are studentensteuererklaerung.de or meine-erste-steuererklaerung.de.
If you have more questions about tax returns and how you can best use your fileee account for this, then take a look at our tax return page.
