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Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

paolino.me

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Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#531

Post by petesergeant »

kuschku wrote: post #424
petesergeant wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A company that starts with nothing wouldn't be a GmbH (limited liability company), it would be a GoH (company without liability), and there's a good reason why those don't exist... What's the good reason? In the UK I can started a Ltd with £1 of share capital, about £100 of fees, and filling out a form online. I will be shielded from personal liability if it goes tits up unless I've broken the law, knowingly traded…

> In the UK I can started a Ltd with £1 of share capital, about £100 of fees, and filling out a form online. I will be shielded from personal liability if it goes tits up unless I've broken the law, knowingly traded insolvent, or otherwise been an idiot That's what Germany calls an "UG". Which is what OP actually ends up doing.

UG forces you to retain profit to hit a capitalisation target. An Ltd is a real company, and my £1 company has an identical legal status to one with hundreds of millions of pounds of assets.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#532

Post by buzer »

doikor wrote: post #318
WarmWash wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are jealous of the US system where you can create an LLC in one hour for $200, and by the next day be doing business with all your personal assets isolated.

A lot of places in Europe are around the same. In Finland forming a non listed stock company is 240€ in fees without any requirement for capital/assets. I think Estonia is even cheaper.

Worth noting is that there was 2500 € capital requirement until 1st of July 2019 and it was reduced to 0 €.

Public limited liability company (Oyj) still has 80 000€ capital requirement.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#533

Post by Sebb767 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #502
Aurornis wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Running a corporation or LLC without sufficient capitalization can be grounds for piercing the liability shield in a lawsuit. Which is exactly how it should be handled, IMO: Deal with the abuse situations directly. Forcing new companies to capitalize with an arbitrary amount of money at time of founding penalizes small players who want to start a company. It's also not a hurdle at all for large players who want to…

Is the gmbh pierce proof? Because then I like the situation where if you start with $25,000 under no circumstance can they get past the liability shield.

Usually, yes. There are a few exceptions, such as serious misconduct, tax fraud and not declaring insolvency when necessary. But as long as you're following the law, you're fine.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#534

Post by tchalla »

9dev wrote: post #367
keiferski wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a false dichotomy. Consumer return policies, customer service, etc. tend to be much better in the US than in the EU. I would characterize it rather that the US is pro-business and pro-consumer, but somewhat anti-average worker.

Is that so? In Germany for example, you have a legal right to return anything you purchased via a remote means of communication - so e.g., the internet, or a phone call - free of charge, within two weeks, and it must be simple to do so; if a vendor tries to obfuscate how to cancel a purchase contract, you can simply write them an email.

What happens after 2 weeks?

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#535

Post by lazyasciiart »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #516
artemonster wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and just read these awful comments defending this nonsense and shifting the blame. so much arrogance its nauseating

Germans will say they're not very patriotic, but really the way German patriotism manifests is a resistance to outside criticism paired with a stubborn insistence that things ought not change.

I haven’t seen it manifest any differently elsewhere?

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#536

Post by lazyasciiart »

ianm218 wrote: post #499
notanormalnerd wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Someone wanted to turn a winery into a eco-tourism boutique hotel with a winery tour and experience. Because a agricultural business and a hotel business are two different things, and Spain has, rightfully so, their thumb on the spread of tourism, because it affects local communities negatively. Otherwise investors could just come in, buy a random agriculture business and then turn it into luxury hotels/lodging. >…

Rules exist for a reason, it shouldn't take 4 years to get an answer on how to proceed in one direction or another. In NYC for example you often need to hire a "permit expediter" just to get a yes/ no/ maybe answer on your apartment renovation within a year. These bureaucracies are often literally impenetrable without professional help.

I’m guessing they did receive an answer earlier than four years, but they wanted it to be Yes.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#537

Post by markvdb »

zurfer wrote: post #23

We outsourced it for 2.5k (extra) and it was still painful, took almost 2 months and worst of all wasted so much time and focus. The worst was sitting at the notary, and getting read out loud by her what we were about to sign (also paying for that). If you think about starting a company, spend some time to think through what it would mean for you to be a Delaware C Corp or an Estoinian one. It will increase your chan…

> If you think about starting a company, spend some time to think through what it would mean for you to be a Delaware C Corp or an Estoinian one. It will increase your chances of success as you can focus on what matters.

Moving to Estonia or - even bigger hurdles- the US is not without its distractions either....

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#538

Post by Zak »

nekusar wrote: post #505
Zak wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the impression the situations where that actually happens are at least arguably serious misconduct, and usually targeted at someone with significant assets. A construction company that pockets ten million dollars and doesn't build anything probably can't shield its owner this way, but a single-developer software consultancy that pockets ten thousand dollars and delivers buggy code can.

Thats cause the software and computing industry early on, disclaimed all liability. "Computers are hard, yo!". It devalues the profession. And I thought no liability was bad enough... But no. Now its LLMs and " for entertainment purposes only". I take it management and leadership also read that, and don't give one fuck.

The ability to build reliable software has existed for a long time. Commercial airlines make heavy use of it, and serious failures are vanishingly rare.

The problem is building software to those standards of reliability is expensive and slow. Consumer software never justifies it. Business software rarely does. If you want me to accept liability for the consequences of bugs in code I write, I'm giving you a schedule five times as long and a price twenty times as high.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#539

Post by lazyasciiart »

DANmode wrote: post #188
tene80i wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You phrase this as if it’s absurd. Why should it be possible to offshore your future capital gains without paying an exit tax? You live in a country with a tax system that assumes people pay into it.

[flagged]

If that’s what they wanted to do, they would have to realize those gains. The state is doing the opposite of preventing this.

Re: Founding a company in Germany: €9600, 152 days and I still can't send an invoice

#540

Post by throwaway-blaze »

bloppe wrote: post #390
_fat_santa wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US system is built to support entrepreneurship while the EU system broadly is to support the consumer and employee. The US will never be able to match the EU's consumer and employee protections and the EU will never be able to match the US's ease of doing business, because to have one you have to fundamentally give in on the other. Depending on who you ask, one system is wildly better than the other, but at the e…

In a healthy market economy, entrepreneurs are meant to support the consumer, and they do so partly by competing with one another for talent, which requires supporting the employee. We could argue ad nauseam about the health of the US's market economy, but ultimately is has resulted in unignorably higher wages than in Europe, even at the lower end of the economic ladder. This probably also has a lot to do with it's m…

I would posit that many EU citizens are still living with the idea of their historic economic outperformance even though it has not been true for many years.
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