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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

#581

Post by mike_hearn »

hiq wrote: post #193
freyfogle wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh for sure it could be much better in Germany, and I hope that rapidly becomes the case. Definitely digitization needs to come faster. My complaint is simply people imagining it is perfect elsewhere. Really that is not the case, no where is perfect. All the people chiming in about the US being so easy, yes, wonderful. Now let's talk about healthcare and how your health insurance is tied to your employer. Everyone wh…

To your counterexamples: if you move to the US or the UK for a job, you don't really suffer directly from Brexit or healthcare being tied to your unemployment. Sure, these could make things worse in certain cases (let's say you get laid off while in the US and end up having to get your own healthcare for a while). The thing with bureaucracy is that it's part of normal life, there's no way around it. You can assume th…

Swiss bureaucracy isn't really better, in my experience. It's not as overloaded but things are still somewhat German-like.

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

#582

Post by redrove »

dewey wrote: post #545
bradhe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the benefit of doing that? You'd still be subject to the local laws if you are in Germany for more than > 6 months a year and the fees that Deel is charging for your salary are not that low either.

With high privacy jurisdictions such as Delaware, New Mexico, Wyoming, etc. they're essentially keeping the german tax authority in the dark about the ownership of those LLCs, which might change now with the new US mandated filing with FinCEN for UBOs.

They're all committing tax fraud and thinking they're in the clear, only getting away with it due to lack of international cooperation. It will bite them in the ass sooner or later, the taxman always gets his cut. The only way to avoid it is to physically move out.

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

#583

Post by 2rsf »

fl7305 wrote: post #103
alphager wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The concept of title insurance doesn't exist in Germany (Title insurance is where you must buy insurance when buying a house to guard against the risk that the house may have unknown liabilities or owners) It doesn't exist in Sweden either, because the ownership of houses is in a central register. You can't make a claim against a house if it is not registered. Funnily enough, there's no such register for condos in…

When I asked a real estate agent about buying a condo already owned by another they replied surprisingly "how can it happen? that would be illegal"

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

#584

Post by treprinum »

usr1106 wrote: post #420
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…

I am familiar with both German and Finnish bureaucracy. 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 everythin…

I suspect the degradation came from Eastern Europe, what you wrote is what I was told EE looked like in the 80-90s.

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

#585

Post by dewey »

redrove wrote: post #582
dewey wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the benefit of doing that? You'd still be subject to the local laws if you are in Germany for more than > 6 months a year and the fees that Deel is charging for your salary are not that low either.

With high privacy jurisdictions such as Delaware, New Mexico, Wyoming, etc. they're essentially keeping the german tax authority in the dark about the ownership of those LLCs, which might change now with the new US mandated filing with FinCEN for UBOs. They're all committing tax fraud and thinking they're in the clear, only getting away with it due to lack of international cooperation. It will bite them in the ass so…

That's what I suspected. The amount of misinformation regarding tax-residency and exit taxes that people just believe because they saw some YouTube videos is scary.

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

#586

Post by concordDance »

fransje26 wrote: post #538
concordDance wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see comments like this, but what's a good solution to the ever expanding cost of public services (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)? You do need to cut back if you're starting to run a significant deficit or more and more of your budget will go on interest payments. Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't ge…

> (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp) Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut. We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better educati…

> So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.

Basically all of them.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

Which I think is partially due to institutions becoming less efficient with time as more organizational scar tissue accumulates (certainly seen a lot of this at the companies I've worked for). Plus gov departments tend to accumulate extra low-return responsibilities from politician gimmicks (the mismatch between what sounds good in a headline and whats cost effective).

Which in turn I think comes from scope insensitivity, we just aren't good at understanding scale and underestimate defuse costs.

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

#587

Post by Rinzler89 »

fransje26 wrote: post #538
concordDance wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often see comments like this, but what's a good solution to the ever expanding cost of public services (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)? You do need to cut back if you're starting to run a significant deficit or more and more of your budget will go on interest payments. Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't ge…

> (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp) Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut. We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better educati…

>So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.

It's not the costs that have rise sharply, it's the revenue and taxes that have declined since WW2 due to increased competition from globalization and the offshoring of jobs abroad, plus tax heavens aiding big corporation avoid paying taxes locally in western european countries, meaning governments today are missing out on a lot of income they used to get in the past, income which is now in places like China and in tax heavens.

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

#588

Post by wouldbecouldbe »

pezezin wrote: post #518
wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try Spain, takes years

I guess that depends on the city and the procedure, but I had to replace my DNI last summer and it took me less than 30 minutes, and they gave me the new one on the spot. In comparison I also had to renew my Japanese foreign card and later my ID card, and both procedures were a royal PITA, and in both cases I had to wait a month to get the new card.

Yeah had a close person getting passport after marriage, took years, they made a mistake, another 1.5 years. Took over 5 years in the end.

Lawyers making mistakes, civil cervants making mistakes, making mistakes themselves. Big mess. They are actually breaking EU law while doing these things.

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

#589

Post by Hendrikto »

amonavis wrote: post #447
niemandhier wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I accompanied several friends through the process. My observation was that by simply changing the view on what is happening and extrapolating how to act based on that one can achieve quite a lot. I told people the following: 1. The person dealing with you is not there to help you, they are simply executing an act of governance. Rather than wanting them to help you, try to help them close their tickt. 2. You are the t…

To me this is a weird view of government services. I'm paying taxes to have a system serve me, and to have processes support my life not the other way around. Leaving all emotions out of the equation, the job of the jurisdiction under which I fall is so facilitate my legality so I can pursue a productive and enjoyable life. If I'm paying taxes and I'm expected to pitch in the governmental effort, then that's not wher…

You can either try to make that ideal work, or accept reality.

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

#590

Post by AdamN »

concordDance wrote: post #515
anewhnaccount2 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The degradation comes from waves of austerity politics by right wing governments. These services are expensive and require staff to keep things going. Austerity ideology dictates that there simply must be inefficiency in public services, and cuts are the cure to this disease since this will cause the public sector to "make do and mend" and end up running more efficiently, rather than having a knock on effect and decr…

I often see comments like this, but what's a good solution to the ever expanding cost of public services (to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)? You do need to cut back if you're starting to run a significant deficit or more and more of your budget will go on interest payments. Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't ge…

High government spending doesn't mean the government is bigger necessarily. The big expenses are just getting moved right back out to the private sector for agricultural subsidies, energy subsidies, etc...

The better metric would be how many employees work (directly or indirectly) for the government and then compare those numbers.

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