What is the upside of opening a company there if you can incorporate in a EU country with much much lower taxation say Cyprus or, you have a EU citizenship and the company is in IT field, Malta, and pay just 5% tax (and 0% tax on dividends from it if you move there and become a tax resident)? It effectively means increasing your income 2x-2.4x depending on how high the revenue is, vs paying 30% profit tax and then on…
Because you usually have to move to the other EU country, or at least live there for half the year and many people still like to live in Germany. Optimizing taxes might not be the main goal in life.
But there are plenty of companies that provide substance
The amount of notaries in Germany is very limited. . You can’t just study that and open a notary in Germany. They are cash cows that obviously don’t want competition. During Covid Germany was the only country of its neighbors that did not do remote attestations. From 2000 to 2020 the number of notaries in Germany had almost halved. How is that normal for any country ? Unless they replaced notaries with automation whi…
Almost halved = 30% less https://www.juve.de/markt-und-management/notariate-immer-wen...
Also it seems that 30% loss was mostly in regions not experiencing economic growth. While others actually saw growth in the number of notaries as well.
I'm not doubting your experience but mine is different. I'm doing business in the Köln/Düsseldorf area and while the experience could be nicer, it is far from terrible. I have been involved in founding five companies (four GmbH and one GmbH & Co. KG) and closing one down in the last 10 years and I would have no qualms to go for another one. Each founding took about 6-8 weeks from first filing to entry into the regist…
Can you recommend any company in that area that offers these services to buy a "ready to run" shell company?
Notaries often have a list of available shells and can set you up quickly. That's what we did, so talk to your notary. Another way is to use a specialized service like [1].
The relevant keywords for research are "Vorratsgesellschaft" or "Mantelgesellschaft". The former are empty companies with no business activity, the latter are older companies with business history but inactive now. Mantelgesellschaften are nice because they bring a credit history along making stuff like leasing easier but cause a little bit more effort at time of purchase.
Japan immigration (if you have a college degree) seems to be pretty high up there. PR takes a while, and processing is a bit of a black hole, but generally speaking you apply, application extends your visa a bit, and they get back to you within the period. And it’s maybe $100? People complain but its generally predictable save for applications for a 3 year visa can lead to a 1 year visa or a 3 year visa or a 5 year v…
Isn't Japan the industrialized nation with the lowest fraction of foreigners?
AFAICT, Japan has the easiest immigration for skilled professionals, by far. However, this has been the case for less than 10 years, as they totally revamped their immigration laws in the 2010s sometime to try to attract more such people, so of course it's going to take time to see the difference. Japan is also somewhat difficult for foreigners to live in because of the language barrier, but Germany isn't that different here: in my experience as a tourist there, it's nothing like Netherlands where everyone and their dog speaks perfect English. In Germany, the college-educated people generally speak it quite well, everyone else, you're lucky if they know any at all, and it seems like you won't do well living there if you can't speak the language. In Japan, it just depends on your company: a lot of people here have lived here for years or decades and still don't speak Japanese, because their job is in English. German is probably easier for European-language speakers to learn though.
My sympathy for your troubles, but please keep in mind: Everybody is processing Ukranians and Arabs. The system was never meant for such a rapid influx of people. The people working on immigration are not lazy or unmotivated, they are exhausted.
Have you gone through the process? The system wasn’t “designed” at all, it’s completely broken and chaotic. It is 100% the fault of this system and not that of the immigrants going through it. Some of the people involved can also be extremely unpleasant to deal with, even if you speak German.
>Some of the people involved can also be extremely unpleasant to deal with, even if you speak German.
Isn't this just German culture, though? I had that experience just buying groceries and going through the checkout line!
Minimum initial share capital of €12,500 to found a company where liability is limited to the firm seems like a very regressive impediment to business. For comparison in the UK, there's a £12 registration fee, and a £1 (one pound) minimum initial share capital. It must put limited liability out of reach of so many people.
Reading a lot on Germany business culture, my takeaway is that Germany is not made for lean founders who start small but aim big, i.e. your typical startup. It seems to be aimed either at well established business magnates who want to open yet another business (and 25k€ is nothing in that case) or small bakery-on-the-corner businesses who will go for GmbH anyways (and hence no reason to cough up 25k€). There's no pat…
Start with a "Einzelunternehmung". Registering that takes 15 to 30 minutes at your local mayors office and costs 30 Euro. From there on you can make something like 20k Euro turnover per year, if you grow out of that, you can still "invest" in a GmbH or whatever suits your needs best.
On the other hand, if you are sure that you're building the next Facebook, getting the money for a GmbH together on day -1 should be no problem at all. It turns out that most companies don't make it that far, though...
100K is damn hard to break into if you're on the strictly technical path nowadays, but maybe it's just my line of work (embedded). I've been trying to learn some web stuff and go and C# to maybe expand my job options a bit.
100K is easy to break as a freelancer. You'll obviously have more things to consider - multiple clients, accounting, legal and potential downtime, but its totally doable. I think embedded could actually be a good discipline to work as a freelancer, most IoT products usually have a more rigid and defined development cycle than web platforms.
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…
You should see Spain... basically the same but impossible even to get an appointment. There are dodgy third-party people that sell them on Facebook (I guess they use bots to get them), that's how bad it is.
Having immigrated to Spain, it's not so bad. Everything is done digitally. There is a unique personal identifier. Something like filing tax returns is genuinely very easy.
I lived in France, in China and now in Germany. I would say that somehow, France and Germany are quite similar, it's just that one suck more than another on specific areas and vice-versa. The net salary is somehow higher in Germany but the amount of subsidies you can get from the state is lower also so it's pretty much the same. I prefer the decentralized aspect of Germany (unlike France where everything is just cent…
China has 0.07%, France 10.3%, and Germany 18% immigrants. It's obvious how this explains the difference and why no lessons can be learned from Chinese bureaucracy about how to deal with immigrants.
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…
> Everyone who is extolling how simple the UK is, that's lovely. What a shame about brexit though. A part of the argument for Brexit was to enable simplifications of bureaucracy (obviously not for the specific case of someone in the EU migrating there, but for everything else). So that's not necessarily a great argument. It hasn't been capitalized on to any great extent yet because the current government is weak and…
What exactly did EU law block in the UK that wasn't blocked in other EU countries?