Who else lives on your income

Early in Spider-Man (2002, directed by Sam Raimi), Peter Parker has just discovered powers nobody else has and promptly used them to beat up a boy at school. His Uncle Ben, played by Cliff Robertson, tells him that being able to do something does not give him the right to do it, and then adds the line Peter repeats at the very end of the film: “Remember, with great power comes great responsibility.” The film did not coin it. The sentence first appeared in 1962 as the closing narration of the comic Amazing Fantasy #15 by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko.

Most of us have no superpowers, but a great deal in many households rests on the earning power of one or two people. Rent or mortgage, childcare and the weekly shop come out of that income, yet few people know in any detail what would be left if it stopped because someone died. In Germany the statutory pension insurer, the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, pays a widow's or widower's pension if the couple were married or in a registered civil partnership, usually for at least a year, and the person who died had at least five years of insurance. According to the insurer, the larger survivor's pension is generally 55 per cent of the pension the partner was drawing or would have drawn. A survivor who is younger than 46 years and six months (the threshold for 2026, rising to 47 by 2029), is not raising a child under 18 and whose earning capacity is not reduced receives the smaller version instead: 25 per cent, for two years at most. Any income of their own above an allowance reduces it by 40 per cent of the excess. Children can receive an orphan's pension.

Couples who live together without marrying get no survivor's pension at all, however long they have been together. Term life insurance (Risikolebensversicherung) can fill that kind of gap. It pays out only if the insured person dies and, as Germany's consumer advice centres point out, it is not a way to build savings. Our page on disability income protection covers the other half of the problem, losing your income while you are still alive, and the Daily The folder only you understand looks at making the paperwork usable for the person left behind. The order stays the same: understand where you stand and whether you have a buffer, protect what would be hard to replace, build from there, and review as life moves on.

Hakan is 40 and a shift supervisor at a brewery in Dortmund. He and Nele, who works part time at a dental practice, have been together for fourteen years. They never got married because, as Hakan likes to put it, there was never any rush. Two years ago they bought a terraced house, and most of the monthly repayment comes out of his salary. On Friday evening their son Mats, who is twelve, settles next to him with a bowl of popcorn and insists on watching the old Spider-Man film, while his sister Ida, seven, is already asleep upstairs. When Uncle Ben delivers his famous line, Hakan mouths it along with him and Mats rolls his eyes.

Once the children are in bed, Nele clears away the bowl and asks, almost in passing, what would actually happen if something happened to him. “You'd get a widow's pension,” Hakan says. “I've been paying in for twenty years.” Nele reads the pension insurer's website on her phone for a while, then holds the screen out to him. “Only if we're married. Mats and Ida would get an orphan's pension. I'd get nothing, and the house is in both our names.” Hakan reads the paragraph twice and puts the phone face down on the table.

Neither of them says anything for a moment. Then Hakan looks at her and asks the question he had not thought of until now: “And if something happened to you? Who would pick Ida up from school at lunchtime, and who would do everything else you quietly take care of?” Nele gives a short laugh, but she has no answer either. They stay at the kitchen table long after the film has finished, and for the first time they talk about both sides.