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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

#821

Post by fl7305 »

artdigital wrote: post #289
jFriedensreich wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its one to 2 years of pain. my gmbh shut down also cost 15 000 and ultimately led to me leaving the country.

I shut down my personal UG (small gmbh) and it was very painless. If you can prove that there are is no outstanding assets or debt, for example when you’re the only owner and did your books (Bilanz) correct, you can file for “deletion” (sofortige Löschung) of the corp, and not go through the liquidation process. It involves setting your balance sheets to 0 (careful here, if it goes under 0 you are bankrupt and have t…

Thanks. Is the reason there is no 12 month notice period that there no longer are any assets for potential creditors?

It seems it would be very hard to set the balance sheets to exactly 0? What about prepaid taxes etc?

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

#822

Post by lifestyleguru »

Tainnor wrote: post #749
lifestyleguru wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> So tired of this apologetics, modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents. The modern US was founded by slave owners, Spain was a dictatorship for longer than most of Germany, Poland was sliding into illiberal democracy until very recently, most of Latin America seems one recession away from a coup or revolution, ... there is a lot of continuity between liberal democracies and…

Post WWII era was the most impactful for the current state of affairs. The recent situation in Poland was nowhere close in terms of graveness in comparison with the other examples, no slavery of genocide was even marginally likely, not even hyperinflation.

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

#823

Post by hollerith »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #437
microtonal wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>modern German bureaucracy has been built exactly by former Nazis and Stasi agents.

How frustrating for London and Washington to fight and win a war against the Nazis, then occupy (the Western half of) Germany for 7 years, imposing a new government on the country -- all to no effect.

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

#824

Post by GrumpySloth »

dash2 wrote: post #816
GrumpySloth wrote: post #784

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The popularisation of the concept of Central Europe stems from some people being ashamed of being from Eastern Europe and feeling inferior to Western Europe. Eastern Europe is defined by the Iron Curtain whose effects are still visible today, while Central Europe is a category created purely by selecting a region on the map without regard for political or cultural factors, just to push Eastern Europe further East and…

Mitteleuropa is an old concept, much older than the Iron Curtain. For example, the old boundaries of the Austro-Hungarian empire catch quite a lot of it. I've been told that places like Slovenia are pretty different from places like Serbia, and similarly for western vs. eastern Ukraine.

In the case of Poland though only a tiny fraction of it was captured by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The largest portion was captured by Russia. Second largest by German Empire. I have great-grandparents from each of those.

Moreover prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain the term Central Europe wasn’t used much. After that though some people like Milan Kundera started popularising it much more out of sense of inferiority.

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

#826

Post by Propelloni »

ben_w wrote: post #803
constantcrying wrote: post #769

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html >For example, someone I used to know in the UK said much the same about his taxes paying for schools, just because he personally didn't have kids. This isn't what I said. If I pay half of my wages to the state I would expect them to manage to staff government offices. Maybe besides defense, basic administration has to be the most imp…

> The data is published in English as well. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Home/_node.html Dankeschön. If I'm reading this right (I may not be, see previous comment: I am not an economist), half of the revenue is spend on social security: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Finance/... This is weirdly out of date, I don't know why the link was to a URL from 2013 whose content is about 2017, but it says fo…

Das ist eine Übersetzung des Oscar Wilde Zitats.

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

#827

Post by apflkx »

fps_doug wrote: post #460
chironjit wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll one up you and say that it's so broken, there are lots of people that basically live on ranges of exceptions. In my case, I was told I was not eligible for the visa I needed but when I spoke to a migration consultant who knew the process, they managed to get it done. I was pretty shocked as this wink, wink, nod, nod style system is not something I expected from this country.

This sounds like all of you are living in Berlin, which is known as "failed state" to the rest of Germany. ;-) It varies form city to city, I live in one that I'd say is an exception on the positive side: Most clerks in the various offices are actually helpful and even giving you hints. I had to renew my passport in January and got an appointment the next day. I got the appointment online(!) in Germany(!!). Passport…

Unfortunately, this is not just a problem limited to Berlin :-( [1][2]

It's been an absolute mess trying to secure my wife's settlement permit ("Niederlassungserlaubnis"). She has a german Master's degree, works in a government-funded research facility, and has been in the system since December 2022. We've now been ghosted for 14 months, only to be told to make an appointment to provide additional documents (which were not on the 'required documents' list they initially handed to us). After checking the appointment booking website to no avail, I came up with a python script that sends a notification to our phones when a new appointment pops up. It took 40 days of scraping until a new free appointment was available, only to be allowed to provide paper documents in person.

Adding to that, every six months, her employer threatens to fire her if she can't prove her legal status in Germany. So she's constantly jumping through hoops to get this temporary paper permit called "Fiktionsbescheinigung" just to keep her job. It's a hassle, costs €13 each time, and involves cycling through multiple unhelpful bureaucrats at the Ausländerbehörde's hotline (they do not answer emails) until finding one that very reluctantly produces this document.

All of this is beyond frustrating.

[1] https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/muenchen-kvr-auslaenderbeh... [2] https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/stuttgart/a...

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

#828

Post by Hrun0 »

zettabomb wrote: post #729
Hrun0 wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bold and utterly wrong statement

Any reason you think so or are you just not paying attention? Far-right sentiment is rising in the US by any metric.

I belong to an ethnic minority in Germany and had real Nazis, not Neo-Nazis, as neighbors growing up. Just because you don't know how racist the average German views are, doesn't mean it isn't so.

- CDU, which is politically the closest to the Republicans, is by far the strongest party now

- AFD, actual Neo-Nazis, are the second strongest party in recent polls

- East Germany is basically a giant No-Go area for PoC, with a couple of exceptions.

https://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/

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

#829

Post by Slartie »

nottorp wrote: post #265
StefanWestfal wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, my mistake and agree. Here, I wanted to refer to the fact that the transfer of ownership could likely be done even without involving a notary or a human in a properly digitalized system.

Side question: why don't i hear horror stories about identity theft from those areas that have those evil bureaucratic notaries authenticating everything?

Actually there's been at least one known case of someone "stealing" an entire building worth about 6 million € in Berlin. Even bureaucracy and notaries didn't prevent it, so there's your potential 100% fraud prevention rate going down the drain...

Link to an article about this case (in German language, unfortunately): https://www.t-online.de/region/berlin/news/id_91147122/berli...

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

#830

Post by markus92 »

com wrote: post #546
CalRobert wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family and I are Irish citizens and while the Netherlands has been good to us, it is surprising to me that when we go to the hospital you have to check in with a specifically Dutch ID. In the name of the person with the appointment. That seems OK since I have a Dutch driver's licence, but my 4 year old daughter does not, and they seemed to have no idea what to do with her. Usually we figure it out but there's not…

Wow. I’ve never had to show ID at Dutch hospitals or clinics. My GP does the referral (!!! great GP!!!) or I turn up at A&E and the (medical) intake has begun. I speak Dutch though, maybe that makes a difference? Edit:spelling and clarification on intake

It's mandatory if you've never been to the hospital/clinic before, it's for insurance purposes. See https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/identificatieplicht...
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