It can work ok if you're a single person with no children. However, you'll potentially have to pay a lot more tax if you're married where your spouse earns more or less than you. There several other reasons where legally you'll have to complete a tax return (e.g foreign income).
German taxes are really horrible, in general. They expect you to pay in advance for expected untaxed income (based on the previous year's return). Working out the taxes on the income from some ETF is a nightmare, unless your platform does it for you. Unless you really understand the system and can file your own taxes, then low-wage freelance work just doesn't make sense as the cost of doing the taxes can be higher than your income. This means people are trapped into not working.
The fun part about advances is that in the first year they don't have data to set your advances so you have to back pay the taxes for the first year in full after filing the first year's taxes in the second year in addition to now having to pay the advances on that year so even if you saved all the money you expected to have to pay in taxes during the first year you also need to have saved up enough to pay the advances but the more money you made (allowing you to set more money aside), the higher the advances will be.
You can negotiate to have your advances reduced but the government really doesn't like it when businesses (including freelancers and solo entrepreneurs) have a high difference between their advances and the actual taxes. This also goes for declaring your VAT (which depending on how much you make you'll have to do monthly or quarterly as an advance and then alongside your income tax) and while in that case you basically set the advance yourself you'll get in trouble if it doesn't match your actual VAT (difference between charged and paid).
You can file your own taxes and if you're a regular employee there are tons of non-commercial orgs you can go to that will assist you in doing that but if you're a "business" (even if it's just you and you haven't incorporated) they'll often not help you.
BTW the reason you can just forego filing your own taxes as an employee if you just want to be taxed on your wages (and don't have anything else to declare, e.g. interest on savings) is that your employer already had to do the taxes on your wages and benefits for you. So it's not like the government just does them themselves, it's just done by payroll instead of you.
This was semi-true until this year (if you didn't care about the often massive deductions you would have just for living somewhere other than your office desk, and only for as long as the tax office would not demand you to file taxes, which they could do for any reason, and often).
Now, with the 300 Euros of fuel relief, every employee will have to file taxes on said 300 Euros.
According to official statistics [0] the Golf is still selling more than twice as many units per month and the ID3 is selling 50% more than the Model 3. The Model 3 is more comparable to the BMW i3 numbers wise.
That are the numbers of October. Tesla doesn't sell many cars in Europe in October, as they are always produced at the quarter start, then shipped and sold towards the quarter end. This also means, that the September numbers, where the Model 3 did almost beat the Golf, are inflated. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
So, even if the Model 3 isn't quite beating the Golf yet, it is coming closer. This will even be more the case, once Tesla produced in Europe, as there are no import taxes on the vehicle and the prices lower.
According to that table, VW had 9 models among the top 50 whereas Tesla only had 1 (the Model 3), and all but one of VW's 9 most popular models outsold the Model 3 so far this year (January to October). The Golf alone sold over 3x as many units as the Model 3.
So while Tesla is quickly gaining market share, VW is still selling 10x as many cars in Germany.
No one doubts that VW is producing a higher car count then Tesla. Currently about 10x. But the point is, the Golf used to be the most popular car in Germany, so if Tesla, even shortly, can approach that number, it is a huge milestone. Especially, as the second Tesla model for the mass market, the Model Y, just entered the German market and promises to sell even better than the Model 3.
> are very afraid of the implosion of their market share as those others are saturating the market with EVs. That's not a future thing; it's already happening.
I think a lot of businesses "borrow" the inventory from the supplier and only pay them once the inventory is sold. It's not the same as a marketplace, per-se but considering you pay apple, download from apple servers, after apple does "QA" and follows apple rules, i'd say its pretty similar to a store that sources select products and provides the checkout infrastructure and distribution logistics.
Especially in that region, I would take this vote rather as an indicator of the lack of alternatives. Amazon is so large that they could simply scrap that location without being that bothered, yet the workers do not have that freedom. The choice is between taking what you can get even if it is tied to bad working conditions or having nothing at all.
It's a shame that the third way to spend the money is totally forgotten now apparently. Yes you can re-invest, give back to shareholders, but why not increase wages?
