411–420 of 1001 posts
Awesome writeup, i did a similar years ago. One important thing you missed is VBG Berufsgenossenschaft. Mandatory to register within 10 days after the notary. Even as a one person Gmbh you need to register there. Running costs: https://www.on-promise.cloud/en/compendium/01-how-much-does-...
I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…
I completely agree. I have been living here for 8 years, and recently applied for a permanent settlement permit. My application went into a blackhole for more than 4 months, while my existing permit expired, essentially making me a prisoner here (I can stay and work in Germany but if I travel internationally, I won't be allowed entry back). Meanwhile, my applications for a temporary travel permit were unanswered for…
There is also a brutal and inflexible exit tax. Should you decide to leave Germany, even temporarily, you will be faced with a tax of ~30% of the current valuation of your worldwide shareholdings (in companies in which you have >1% ownership). I commented on this in more detail in another post a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39786934#39788110 In the author's case, because he is using a holding comp…
Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wegzugsbesteuerung#Derzeitige_...
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> I am a bit flummoxed how you can stay in the country after a permit expires. In many countries this is viewed as "it's not your fault, it's the state's fault that the state hasn't processed your application yet, so we will not punish you for the state's tardiness"
Hmmm… that makes more sense. My experience was getting a visa automatically extended for N months on application, and applications not ever being processed slower than that. But I can totally see the US having wild backlog, for example
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Isn’t that already an option in Italy with the SRL Semplificata and initial capital starting at 1€?
Yes, I lit the fuse on that. I took a look at your site and the first thing I saw was about a guy who lives here in Bend, Oregon, where we moved from Padova. Small world!
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I completely agree. I have been living here for 8 years, and recently applied for a permanent settlement permit. My application went into a blackhole for more than 4 months, while my existing permit expired, essentially making me a prisoner here (I can stay and work in Germany but if I travel internationally, I won't be allowed entry back). Meanwhile, my applications for a temporary travel permit were unanswered for…
I am a bit flummoxed how you can stay in the country after a permit expires. I’m not for stricter rules but I’ve heard this from several people (I think people in the US as well) and it seems like “permit to enter/leave” is a very weird structure instead of “permit to be here”. I think most immigration offices in the world are pretty much black boxes, mainly because that’s their coping mechanism to deal with the infl…
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If foreigners are in of the hated groups, my personally lived experience serves a counter point. During my naturalization I was caught by surprise by how quickly my application had been handled. The agent giving me the exam winked and said: "it's election season". Whatever that means.
Are you highly educated? My father has only a certificate and no degree or anything like that. It took him 20 years to get citizenship. We came 3 years after he come here and we all became citizens together. My friends whose parents were doctors or had masters degree would get their GC and citizenships in like 5 years.
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> a customer (UK Ltd) who declared bankruptcy owing us a money and then then next day founded a new Ltd company and tried to act like he didn't owe us the money because it was a new entity. That is... how bankruptcy works? He literally didn't owe you money anymore. Obviously you shouldn't extend his new company credit, but extinguishing old debts is the exact purpose of bankruptcy.
I think the idea here is that you can't just "declare bankruptcy" in Germany, it's a Process with checks and balances.
Corporate insolvency requires an “insolvency practitioner” to be appointed by the directors; this is a regulated profession, and this ensures that the company is wound up according to the regulations and statutes.
You cannot just “declare bankruptcy” in the UK either.
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So you basically just made up a number to make it sound worse?
I did not make up anything. it was nearly 100h (so i did not even use a high hourly rate for estimating) of work for me, took ~2 years and the pure cash cost was nearly 10k. i think its really fair to simplify this as saying it cost 15k. I am really fed up by people downplaying the cost of labour imposed by ruthless beurocrats and i think its toxic to banalize this.
Yes, time spent is a problem, but then communicate it in form of TIME SPENT, not just inflate the costs into some arbitrary number so you can make it sound worse while whining. It's dishonest.
I document German bureaucracy for a living,[0] and everything is like that. Every life event - immigrating, getting a job, getting married, having a child, buying a car - is mired in slow, paper-based bureaucracy. It is a constant, significant impediment to life in the country. Just last week, I was telling people that the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark. I cannot overstate how terribl…
German bureaucracy is (in)famous for paperwork and using faxes. Citizens/residents have no unique identifier (more and more weakened recently) and need to present documentation for everything. If you have no paper birth certificate you are not born...
Finland has had much higher digitalization for decades. You have a person number and authorities store everything centrally. A big brother nightmare for Germans.
20 years ago many processes in Finland went quickly, much more smoothly than in Germany. However, recently more and more authorities went into meltdown. It takes 3 or 6 months to renew a passport (or you queue in the street for many hours to get it done without an internet reservation). Certificates needed for inheritance processes delayed for many months each, so in the end heirs don't get access to their property until years later. If an elder person needs a legal guardian because they are unable to handle banking or similar anymore, you are more or less openly told: Does not make sense queuing, they will die first.
Where the degradation came from I have no idea. At least digitalization is not a guarantee that things work smoothly. In some areas (but probably none of those examples I mentioned) failed IT projects are the direct cause that processes break down.