A €100 Raise vs Fixing €100 of Leaks: Same Money, Very Different Math

Route two: a fixed leak is net money

Now the other route. You go through one bank statement, find a €12.99 streaming service you stopped watching, an €8.99 app from an old resolution, an overpriced phone tariff, a duplicate insurance policy, and you cut €100 a month. That €100 is net. It was already taxed when you earned it. Nobody taxes it again on the way back, there is no form to file, and it repeats every month until you resubscribe.

Which means the honest comparison is not €100 vs €100. To match €100 of fixed leaks, you would need a gross raise of:

• Slovakia: about €144 (100 / 0.6934),
• Czechia: about €136 (100 / 0.734),
• Germany: roughly €180 to €200 for a single average earner.

In Germany, fixing a €100 leak is worth almost two €100 raises before tax. That is the whole point of this model in one sentence.

Why the leak route is usually faster

The tax math is only half the story. The effort profiles are completely different:

• A raise needs a counterparty. You have to ask, justify, wait for a budget cycle, and your employer can simply say no. The timeline is measured in months and the outcome is not in your hands.
• A leak needs an evening. The information is already sitting in your statement. Finding and cancelling three payments is a unilateral decision with a same-week effect.
• A raise can leak away. Extra income tends to dissolve into lifestyle upgrades unless you deliberately capture it. A cancelled subscription cannot creep back on its own.

The honest case for the raise

This is not an argument against raises, and the model would be dishonest if it pretended otherwise. A raise compounds over a career: future percentage increases build on the higher base, and pension and social insurance entitlements in all three countries grow with your contribution base. Leaks are also finite, you can only cut what exists, while income has no ceiling. The rational order is simply: fix the leaks first, because that result is fast, certain and tax-free, then negotiate the raise from a calmer position. We wrote a separate guide on that second step: How to Ask for a Raise.

What €100 a month becomes if you keep it

Either route only matters if the €100 goes somewhere deliberate. Suppose you invest it monthly, with deposits at the end of each month and monthly compounding at an illustrative ~7% a year. That figure is illustrative, a rough long-term stock market average: past performance does not guarantee future results, the value of an investment can also fall, and nothing in this article is financial advice.

• 10 years: deposits €12,000, value roughly €17,308 (100 × ((1 + 0.07/12)¹²⁰ − 1) / (0.07/12)).
• 20 years: deposits €24,000, value roughly €52,093 (same formula with 240 months).

Both formulas can be checked in any spreadsheet. The gross-vs-net gap from the first half of this article decides how hard that €100 was to obtain, not what it grows into.

Finding your €100 of leaks

The model assumed the leaks exist. In practice most statements hide more than people expect: a step-by-step routine for extracting them is in How to Find €300 a Month in Your Own Statement.

If you would rather not search by hand, upload one statement at app.vestelonflow.com. The analysis runs in your browser, you see your recurring payments and your number in about a minute, no account and no bank login needed, and nothing leaves your device without your consent. What you cancel afterwards is entirely your decision, VESTELON FLOW only shows you where the candidates are.

The one-line summary

A raise is taxed on the way in, a fixed leak is not. In this 2026 model, €100 of cancelled leaks equals a gross raise of about €144 in Slovakia, €136 in Czechia and up to twice that in Germany, and it takes an evening instead of a negotiation. Do both, but do the evening first.