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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

#791

Post by avar »

rjzzleep wrote: post #69
pintxo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, there is competition. You are free to choose whichever notary you want. But pricing is legally regulated, so you will pay the same price everywhere.

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…

    > During Covid Germany was the
    > only country of its neighbors
    > that did not do remote attestations.
Same in the Netherlands.

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

#792

Post by lispm »

dpeckett wrote: post #686
lispm wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has laws and traditions around marriage. If one doesn't respect German laws, best to go to a country which works differently and stay there.

That's the beauty of it, people will leave, and it won't be the people desperate enough to commit marriage fraud. Anyway none of this is about respecting German law.

> people will leave

sure, why not? People leave for various reasons. People are free to go.

> Anyway none of this is about respecting German law.

Law and traditions. Marriage is a serious decision with lots of implications. It's not the bureaucracy (alone), which slows the process down.

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

#793

Post by bacteria »

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…

Hey nicbou, a fantastic website thanks for your efforts. While reading your Bank article I noticed a potentially outdated information concerning ING as I am also an expat and was able open a bank account there.

"ING: You need German permanent residence or citizenship to open an account. Some students could open an account with a residence permit. Their customer support speaks English."

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

#794

Post by avar »

mk89 wrote: post #132
ricc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Accepting cards” is not the same as “accepting credit cards” though… A lot of them only accept girocards and not credit cards…

I don't have enough experience to speak about CC in Germany, but I don't see why a Rewe or ... boh, Aldi, Mcdonalds, etc should prevent that. I am a bit surprised, to be honest.

Because there's a significant a transaction fee if you're paying by credit card, with cash or debit card there's no transaction fee.

The bigger mystery is why stores in some other countries are happy to have a payment method chosen by the customer eat into their profit.

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

#795

Post by epaga »

blueflow wrote: post #525
Loveaway wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Orderly, rational people. Hard working, rich country, despite no natural wealth. No cutting corners, one of the reasons bureaucracy is so horrid. You are expected to have your shit together, still people are as lenient as they can be. Things work, you can trust people. Low crime, clean streets. Good sense of morality. Country is capable of much more, still holds itself back a lot, preference in humbleness. Things are…

> clean streets Living here, i disagree. Just on my way to the train station i saw at least 10 cigarette butts on the ground. And its like that across the whole city.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not - but in case you're not - seeing "10 cigarette butts" - instead of, say, piles of trash, dung, old broken down cars, and/or drug paraphernalia - seems pretty clean to me, as cities come.

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

#796

Post by pc86 »

hobs wrote: post #775
AmericanChopper wrote: post #772

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because most countries don't have that sort of document (including the US) They don’t? I thought this was a pretty standard sort of document to get…

It is, the GP is wrong, its called a Statement Of No Marriage, many states can provide this.

I can't speak to whether that would qualify in Germany, but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to establish residency in some state for the explicit purposes of getting one of these if you were committed to this for some sort of scam or something.

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

#798

Post by nforgerit »

limaoscarjuliet wrote: post #710

Missed the point on communicating with the Tax Govt people by snail mail - you want it that way. Working with them over phone or email will inevitably lead to you being hit with fines and other nasty scenarios. Always get a lawyer to represent you when the Tax folks start an audit. Never tell them anything over the phone or email. Always ask for a letter and provide explanations via letter. Do record all communicatio…

I absolutely agree. I learned the hard way that they cannot be trysted and will use the different communication channels to their own advantage. Still kind of shocks me as a German who usually went with “they do weird things but you can generally trust the state”.

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

#799

Post by Swizec »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #741
SeanLuke wrote: post #735

For those of you griping about German bureaucracy I urge you to come to Italy to learn just how good you have it. My wife is Italian and wanted to get married in her small home town. In order for her to get married to an American in her home town required paperwork that bordered on the Kafkaesque. We had to show up at the Italian embassy in Washington DC (fortunately we live there!) with proof and witnesses that I wa…

> then even though I wrote the vows myself in Italian, just because I am American we had to have it translated by someone else back into English, by hand, just so I understood the vows I had myself written. We then had to contract someone to read the vows out loud in English at the ceremony so I understood my own words. I badly want to learn the historical reason for this insistence that non-Italian-speaking foreigne…

> I badly want to learn the historical reason for this insistence that non-Italian-speaking foreigners must understand the contract they're entering into. They wouldn't put up these hoops to jump through unless someone's gotten badly burned in the past, right?

Turn the situation around. Rich Italian imports wife from poor country, … easy to imagine how that can lead to all sorts of bad situations. It’s one of the ways human trafficking for prostitution happens.

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

#800

Post by fl7305 »

jFriedensreich wrote: post #271
globalise83 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not, my next question would be: what kind of process do you need to go through to sell a company in Germany? :)

afaik there is no formalized process to sell for winding down a company in germany as in sweden, though some attorneys offer a service to connect with some clients that want to start a company and try to do a swap, which is legally a grey area. I did that also once but it was a nightmare in a differnt way and took not much less time and energy. I am sure you can be lucky there if the timing is right and the people ta…

In Sweden you can sell your company either to used as a "shelf company", meaning the buyer will later resell it, or you can sell it with the promise that it will be dissolved/liquidated and not resold.

It seems much more popular to sell it to be dissolved since there are some risks involved with someone else using it in the future.

So I can understand if it is not very popular in Germany either to sell a company to be re-used.

What surprises me is that it seems to be a good sized market in Germany for someone to provide a service where they buy your company and later dissolve it, but the service doesn't exist (?)

The formal process in Germany seems simple enough. Just sign a sales contract at a public notary, the buyer replaces the CEO, and you're done.

Since this doesn't really seem to exist (?), I assume the potential liabilities for the buyer are so great that the service price would be much too high?

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