This morning someone rang the doorbell. When we opened the door, the postman asked for a signature for a letter he was carrying, and it looked quite suspicious, as the letter was sent by Radio Television of Slovenia. Usually, from our experience, nothing good comes out of letters that require confirmation of receiving! When we opened the letter, we were quite shocked by the info inside!
The year has not yet started, and we are sent another notification of a monthly payment requirement! This time it’s a TV tax or an obligatory contribution (RTV-prispevek), as they call it, which we have to pay every month, even if we don’t live in the house permanently and do not watch local TV or listen to the local radio at all. Basically, the letter states some local law, according to which if our house is connected to the electricity network and we have at least one device that can receive the signal of TV/Radio Slovenia, we are doomed to pay this tax Forever! This money goes to the national TV and radio of Slovenia because of their “cultural significance” for the nation. We are not Slovenians, and as non-Slovenian speakers, we cannot enjoy this significance, but yet we have to pay for it. The amount they ask is 14.02 euro every month, which is 168 euros per year! A lot of money for something we don’t use or understand. We don’t mind some small annual fee, but almost 170 euros per year is an unreasonable fee. Even Netflix and HBO do not charge so much per month! Even if you pay monthly for cable TV, this tax still remains on top of that.
Apparently when we applied for our temporary residence, we were forced to search for a lawyer because Upravna enota (the administrative unit that deals with such stuff) did not see any economic reason for our presence here, ignoring the money we spent on our house, which was gladly accepted by a Slovenian seller. Now when we became temporary residents, all sorts of institutions found a very good economic reason to swamp us with different fees and taxes, like the one we got today! As temporary residents, we are only considered a part of the Slovenian society when it comes to taxes and community fees, for anything else, we are classed like foreigners.
Sadly, we now have to support a TV that cannot sustain its activity like other private media. They run ads, which should be enough to support their activity, but at the same time, they need financial help to survive? Even if you are unemployed, you are still obligated to pay. Frankly, taxes combined with social contributions in Slovenia are quite high, and yet there is not enough money in the budget to finance RTV-Slovenia, so the money for it has to come again out of our pockets.
Watch the video in our YouTube channel to see what this RTV tax is about and how we feel about receiving this letter. Please use the comment section of our video to tell us how you feel about paying a TV license fee, if there is such in your country.