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How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

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Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#431

Post by n_ary »

croes wrote: post #319
fleshmonad wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that I am a German. I would say there are few. Bad education, especially in schools, a broken railway and public transport system, as well as incredibly high taxes. You may say "free healthcare" and a point can be made here, but when you take a look at the high taxes you have to pay, it's not worth it, if your income is above average. All in all it's a mess and I haven't even begun speaking about German people a…

Incredibly high taxes? Denmark has higher taxes. And don't forget Germany has one of the lowest annual working hours in the world https://data.oecd.org/emp/hours-worked.htm

> And don't forget Germany has one of the lowest annual working hours in the world

Of course if you are a civil servant or part of some mega union, but for the rest of the private plebs it is often 9h daily(because lunch break is not part of contract) and most do a long commute(because of eternal housing crisis) which may raise it to 12-14h easily.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#433

Post by jmb99 »

mk89 wrote: post #108
robert_foss wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even! Not sure where you people live, but this myth has to stop, eventually. I can literally count on one hand the n. of shops NOT accepting cards - it's most of the times shops which, I guess, use cash to have flexibility in their accountings :)

Admittedly, this was almost a year ago. I found I could pay with credit cards in Berlin, but once I was in smaller areas I was looked at like I was insane if I tried to pay by anything other than cash. Probably didn’t help that my German was terrible.

In particular, I was staying in Nordhausen for work for a couple weeks. The hotel I stayed at tried to refuse to accept that I paid by card online in advance. Every small restaurant I went to refused to accept either a credit or debit card, and only a couple chain (read:overpriced) restaurants would accept Mastercard. When I tried to buy an Ethernet cable at a general store they refused to accept anything other than cash once they realized I was a foreigner.

Maybe it’s a myth in large population centres, but definitely not overall. I had roughly the same experience throughout most of Thuringia, with even gas stations in certain areas only accepting cash.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#434

Post by denotational »

freyfogle wrote: post #139
twixfel wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK but how is it that other countries get by without them for founding LLCs? Are there countless scams going on in the UK surrounding limited company for example since you don't need a notary there? 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…

I now have a German GmbH and had a UK Ltd in the past for 10 years. Definitely there is more seriousness/trustworthiness to a GmbH. I am not sure there are "countless" scams in the UK, but yes, in 10 years of commercial operation did come across a few oddities. Example - 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…

How does the involvement of a notary at the time of formation reduce the risk of the company going bankrupt?

Is the notary able to model creditworthiness (i.e. they’re acting as a rating agency), or do they just sniff out “undesirables” by some ad hoc, unregulated process involving their personal judgement, or is it something else entirely?

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#435

Post by data_maan »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #231
dpeckett wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can confirm that moving out into the bacon belt of Brandenburg drastically improved the quality of my public services interactions (as an immigrant). Getting an anmeldung done didn't require a 3 hour ordeal and the local Ausländerbehörde answers their emails. My favorite Berlin anecdote is when my wife (then girlfriend) and I first arrived in Germany, she was unemployed for the better part of a year as no-one would…

> My favorite Berlin anecdote is when my wife (then girlfriend) and I first arrived in Germany, she was unemployed for the better part of a year as no-one would give her a chance. She actually got quite depressed about it, and reached out about state sponsored integration courses as the language lessons she was taking were expensive and she wanted to do something more holistic. The authorities told her in no uncertai…

Duck this German "virtue"!

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#436

Post by johnloeber »

ufocia wrote: post #261
johnloeber wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not anymore. Online banks like Mercury will do it entirely remotely without any residency requirements, IIRC.

You still need to put up with various levels of KYC.

You really expect to open a bank account anywhere in 2024 without KYC?

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#437

Post by lifestyleguru »

microtonal wrote: post #403
elbear wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know the causes for why there's so much bureaucracy? I wonder what the potential solutions are.

The bureaucracy problem is compounded by not wanting to link databases between government organizations and a general resistance to anything digital that involves personal data (except Facebook et al. for some reason), which reduces efficiency a lot . However, this is understandable given German history.

Schufa, Rundfunkbeitrag, and copyright trolls have no problem cross linking personal data between government databases in Germany.

> However, this is understandable given German history.

So tired of this apologetics, modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#438

Post by raverbashing »

nicbou wrote: post #114

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…

> the best way to get married in Germany is to get married in Denmark

True. And not only for Germany

(The Netherlands might be a good second choice as well)

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#439

Post by Freedom2 »

amrocha wrote: post #324
Freedom2 wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on this? I had a friend who joked about paying a bribe in Japan or Taiwan, do you think it would work there?

No

Any reason why not? I'm genuinely curious about your previous comment.

Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

#440

Post by data_maan »

4ad wrote: post #189
nicbou wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that it is overdone. It's bad everywhere, and it's much worse in Berlin. If you've experienced anything like a modern bureaucracy, Germany is infuriatingly backwards. The article is painfully accurate down to the minute detail.

As bad as Germany is, it is better than average. Eastern Europe is harder, and Asia borders on impossible. Africa is literally impossible.

Maybe your information is not up to date. 10-15 years ago you were probably right.

Since then Germany is trending down and Eastern Europe is trending up - and bureaucracy along with it. Digitization, customer friendliness, you name.

Even some random office in Serbia seems more pleasant than dealing with Germany.

Germany is trending towards becoming a has-been, like the UK (with the difference that in the current geopolitical context it's even proving to be an obstacle).

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