81–90 of 1001 posts
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Do you want to take the risk of losing your home just to start a business?
Maybe the real difference is that such things might be possible in the US, but sound laughable in Europe? What would you need to mess up to be liable for huge sums as a single consultant company?
Not to brag, but there are so few things to actually feel some civic pride for in America, and business registration is one of them, so I guess we have that. I can get an IRS EIN (tax ID), register an LLC, obtain a sales tax license (only required for selling stuff), and open a business checking account in about 2 hours in Colorado. Someone who knows what they’re doing and doesn’t spend time researching banking optio…
Unless you're opening companies on a daily basis to evade taxes or whatever, I fail to see why you would need the process to be that fast. Because with such short delays, nobody will have actually checked anything, so the only winners are fraudsters, in the end.
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Germany loves endless bureaucratic paperwork which absolutely must be done in person (and good luck getting an appointment in Berlin), despite the many years of bleating about Digitalisierung which has apparently amounted to nothing.
From what I heard the cut the public funding for Digitalization by 90% last year. It truly is like going into a a -20yr time machine living here. Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!
Sorry to hear it's still the same.
i could not find the most important question while skim reading: does it have to be germany. i would rather sit in boiling water than found a company there again. you don't always have to move away completely to have a non germany company though i can also recommend that final step.
Bingo. I live in Berlin. I know loads of folks who found Delaware corporations, use deel.com to work for them, and eventually found a GmbH when they need to.
Of course, the immigration question wouldn't matter for other immigration situations like holding German or EU citizenship, German permanent residence or EU long-term permanent residence, family reunification permits, or anyone who actually gets explicit approval to be self-employed. And the health insurance question wouldn't matter for people switching from employment (with public health insurance) to self-employment.
Not sure if that's common in Germany but you can use services which offer "empty" but legally established companies and you just change the name.
To be honest, I don't think much of notaries and believe that they stifle innovation and harm the German economy, especially SMEs, but also clubs and citizens. For example, the purchase or sale of a property can only be carried out with a notary who reads the purchase contract for both parties. For this service, he charges a fee of around 1.5% of the sale price. The entire profession is strictly protected by law and…
The Notar does much more than just read the contract; he is liable for the correct administration of the transfer of ownership (done by a three phase process which guarantees that the seller cannot get the money without transferring the property and the buyer cannot get the property without selling the money). The concept of title insurance doesn't exist in Germany as the Notar eliminates the risk.
To be honest, I don't think much of notaries and believe that they stifle innovation and harm the German economy, especially SMEs, but also clubs and citizens. For example, the purchase or sale of a property can only be carried out with a notary who reads the purchase contract for both parties. For this service, he charges a fee of around 1.5% of the sale price. The entire profession is strictly protected by law and…
The Notar does much more than just read the contract; he is liable for the correct administration of the transfer of ownership (done by a three phase process which guarantees that the seller cannot get the money without transferring the property and the buyer cannot get the property without selling the money). The concept of title insurance doesn't exist in Germany as the Notar eliminates the risk.
There's often lots of post hoc justifications in Germany for "why it is that way" (and has to be that way). But nobody ever seems to stop and think: ok but the rest of the world seems to get by OK without these reams and reams of bullshit?
The problem with Germany is not that it is stuck in the 20th century and completely backwards, but that nobody seems to care that it is. Worse, if anything there seems to be a degree of pride among Germans of the "process". As soon as you criticise some piece of particular bullshit German bureaucracy (as opposed to bureaucracy in general, which generally you're permitted to criticise) then they start circling the wagons (often pointing to other countries where the situation is supposedly the same or worse). So it is never going to change.
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That sucks. I can see how it costs thousands of euros per year to do the annual financial statements, but 15 000? Is that common, or were there special circumstances?
nothing special i think this is on the cheap side, does not even include lawyers or any huge fights, just a "normal" shut down. Remember you have to include work time of founders that would be spend earning money otherwise. If germany forces you to do 2 hours filling out forms for bullshit you have to include your hourly wage to get the total costs. Usually everything in germany assumes "work to deal with government…
I've heard similar Kafkaesque stories from German relatives of mine. And from what I gather, most digitalization efforts by state and federal government essentially resulted in digitizing existing bureaucratic procedures.
I moved to Germany about 10 years ago, and my wife and I bought a house here last year. I think the money went to the seller some time in October, but to this day, we're not just yet the official owner of the property because we're still stuck somewhere in the red tape. We're almost there though though (we hope), it's just that change of ownership of a house is a super complicated multi-step procedure here that must involve a notary! Good stuff. And mind you, I'm not talking about anything special about this purchase, just a young family buying a home from an ordinary person who moved away.
(We're hoping it's only a matter of weeks now, though, wish us luck!)