Haha actually everything here is that insane :)
How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
641–650 of 1001 posts
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#642Earlier quoted context omitted.
>They can open an Einzelunternehmen (sole proprietorship) instead. Sole proprietorship doesn't have liability protection. That's not a small thing. >You shouldn't (and cannot) go all the way to the complexities of a GmbH (LLC) if your company is that tiny. "[Thing] is too complex, don't bother with it" is not an argument against making [thing] less complex. It's actually just a restatement of the problem! Other count…
You can create a UG (haftungsbeschränkt) with all the lability protection of a GmbH with 1€ capital.
Yes, but you need to keep one third of the profit in the company until you reach the €25k, then you convert to GmbH.
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#643Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#644And I thought France had it bad… There are a lot of hoops to jump through when owning a company in France, but the creation is the "easy" part. And we got rid of the minimum capital many years ago. A good accountant will even guide you through all of it (but it will be expensive).
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#645Earlier 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…
> It was impossible for my wife to provide an up-to-date (less than six months old) translated copy of her Chinese birth certificate I find this hilarious. It's the same in France, you need an up to date "original" of your birth certificate. But why? It's just saying you (full names) were born in XXX on a specific date. There's nothing about it that could change, really. In the country I'm from, your parents get one…
I actually looked into this, apparently its popular across western Europe (not just Germany) and a relic of historical times when the states didn't have centralized birth and death registries. I believe the limited validity and Apostille requirement is a medieval method to combat fraud.
As a new world Australian, the fact this remains in force is completely insane. In Australia the authorities can trivially query the birth and deaths register to verify the validity of certificates.
In Germanys defense, centralized registries were used by the Nazi regime to facilitate the Holocaust.
Anyway Biometric passports/ids pretty much completely supersede this use-case and can be as equally decentralized.
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#646Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.
Uhm, no - when did you try travelling last? I just crossed the border to Germany from Poland(both ways) and there is nothing there. And before that I drove over in January and there was a huge queue because of "checkpoints to combat illegal immigration" and that checkpoint was just a bunch of border guards standing there looking at cars passing by, they weren't checking passports or much of anything really, it's all…
I did get checked a few times while heading from the Balkans back to Germany. There are also random checks in buses and trains.
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#647Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theoretically, yes. Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.
Uhm, no - when did you try travelling last? I just crossed the border to Germany from Poland(both ways) and there is nothing there. And before that I drove over in January and there was a huge queue because of "checkpoints to combat illegal immigration" and that checkpoint was just a bunch of border guards standing there looking at cars passing by, they weren't checking passports or much of anything really, it's all…
About five days ago, Szczecin → Berlin, stopped, had my documents meticulously examined and asked some typical questions I haven't been asked for a decade ("What's your proof of residence", etc).
I look like a typical WASP programmer in his forties, so no selection bias or something.
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#648I 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…
Get married in Denmark: This not a joke, but my friends did it (German woman, Indian husband). It Germany it would have taken two weeks. In Denmark you get it done in an hour (minus the booking of the time at the civil registry).
These are the cases which Germany wants to avoid: "Scheinehe", where people get paid to marry and give the other person an "Aufenthalts- und Arbeitserlaubnis" -> allowed to stay and work in Germany.
There is quite a business around this.
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#649I 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…
For what it's worth, while it does not often come up in a positive light on this forum (and others), Hungary has almost all processes digitalized. Passport renewal is an exception, but after a quick in-person appointment, you get your passport shipped to you in less than a week (usually), even to a foreign country.
You have your taxes prepared for you automatically, you just need to click a button to accept the draft. That said social services is pretty bad, especially for elderly care, but to no fault of IT services. They even have a free, state-provided VPN if you want to watch TV programmes back home, from abroad.
Re: How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain
#650Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uhm, no - when did you try travelling last? I just crossed the border to Germany from Poland(both ways) and there is nothing there. And before that I drove over in January and there was a huge queue because of "checkpoints to combat illegal immigration" and that checkpoint was just a bunch of border guards standing there looking at cars passing by, they weren't checking passports or much of anything really, it's all…
About five days ago, Szczecin → Berlin, stopped, had my documents meticulously examined and asked some typical questions I haven't been asked for a decade ("What's your proof of residence", etc). I look like a typical WASP programmer in his forties, so no selection bias or something.
I guess it's just random stops or some checkpoints are more stringent than others.