You're not wrong, but you're missing the best part.
Estonian company does not pay taxes (*). As long as the money stays within the company he's golden. The company can pay for his car, his apartment/office, etc.
It is only when he decides to withdraw the money the problem occurs.
What you're saying applies to most EU countries. Here where I live you have to reside for majority of the year in given residency to pay taxes over there.
Here's the tricky part.
Estonia is part of Schengen Area. Which means you can travel there and back without passport. There's no paper trail of your arrangements. You can easily create a reality in which you reside there for majority of time.
But again, that's not the selling part of Estonian LTD. Which is - it's extremely easygoing and as long as money stays in the company you're not paying taxes.
> You can easily create a reality in which you reside there for majority of time.
Cautios when dealing with German tax officers: They are checking the 183-day-limit very very strictly, includin invoices/bank statements if required, hotel bookings etc. They even apply intelligence colleagues if in doubt for big fishes.
183-days rule is NOT a thing in germany for corporate taxes, and I think it is not in income taxes either. It may be an indicator, but it is not a hard proof. Important is, where you have your social life set up ("Lebensmittelpunkt"). That is, you can reside more than 183 days abroad, but if you have a family, golf club membership, permanent residence, your stock brokerage account etc. still in germany, you still count as a german tax resident. There are no hard laws with X days around it, german law revolves a lot around that "Lebensmittelpunkt" which will be decided on a per-case basis.
So OP has to clarify on both layers: natural person himself, legal entity, and the relation between them. And the result is affected by the questions OP raised?
If you are a shareholder director (“Gesellschaftergeschäftsführer”) you have a contract but are still treated as self employed for most laws. The 183days rule does not apply in that case.
Let say I am a junior SWE in EU. I incorporate in Estonia and issue my employer with an invoice from said company. That company pays for my house, my car, my dental service and whatnot, and what's left I take as a employee salary.
I pay local tax for that salary, but that's only a fraction of what I've billed my employer.
There's also the CFC rule, which means that within the EU, if you control a foreign corporation, your country of tax residence can tax undistributed profits.
Often tax offices don't bother and you might not get caught, but 'not getting caught' is not the same as it being legit.
> that company pays for my house, my car, my dental service and whatnot, and what's left I take as a employee salary ... I pay local tax for that salary
Until you get audited by your local tax authority who rules that all of that is disguised salary, or the Estonian tax authority says that that's technically (taxable) profit being paid to the director.
If you're currently doing this, I suggest throwing yourself at the mercy of your local tax authority with the help of a lawyer and an accountant, as it's possible they'll show some leniency if you go to them first and not add penalty fines in addition to needing to back-pay the tax and late payment fines.
You've got to get up pretty early in the morning to fool The Revenue.
To me it feels disgraceful to live in a country, benefit from the taxes that everyone else pays there, and try to avoid paying the taxes yourself. It is true that the ultra-wealthy do this. What we should do is try to make them pay their due taxes as well, not try to imitate them. That paths leads to an impoverished country where you have to live in a gated community with armed guards.
That would not be possible at in Germany, everything you just listed is considered a "geldwerter Vorteil" and falls under income tax - even if the company gives you a car that you need to do your job, you will have to pay taxes on it.
Pretty much every country has a concept of benefit in kind. Some countries will allow some expenses to be covered (Part of your phone/internet subscription if you work from home, meals vouchers. Some countries codified some WFH arrangements) but you absolutely won't be able to pay for everything tax free.
You'd be far better-off jumping between countries to leverage the 30% ruling/Beckham Law/HSM tax arrangements if you can.
When Adobe suite was de facto standard for designing and coding interfaces (you know, Flash) their own software was so immensely bad that there was enough material for a guy to make fun of them on a daily basis for a good couple of years.
It's a PR ploy. It sounds better than X done in C, mainly because the X has been done countless times in C by now, while "Hello World, but in Rust" still felt sexy three years ago.
It's more about freezers than fridges. Less frequent access and ton more work to get the temps back. I never thought about it but it was such an a-ha moment for me when I recently learned about it that I'm genuinely flabbergasted why it's not more popular.
We have two chest freezers for long-term breast milk storage, and the wife ad I have already discussed replacing our conventional freezer/fridge combo for a standalone fridge and only using the chest freezers once the breast milk is all gone. I'm pretty excited about it. Chest freezers are in the nearby mudroom, and it's not like a fridge, where you are grabbing tons of vegetables, dairy, meat, etc. for a single meal.
If you're using the freezer for a meal, you're probably pulling out frozen fish and nothing else, or a microwaveable meal, or something. You are't pulling out carrots, bok choy, pork, milk, cheese, etc. So put it outside the kitchen. A freezer is for storage. A kitchen is for food preparation. Not the same task.
not OP but something like [<intention>] where intention might be something like anger, curiousness, etc. [long pause], [gasp], [laughter] stuff like that.
> If you're still looking for a name let me suggest "hyper text".
Perhaps "WWW SPA document"? Using markdown with highly-progressive fenced blocks?
Hypertext (one word, coined 1960s) is quite a broad category. Subcategory "WWW" could fit, as TFA seems WWW-ish. A markdown document format, and progressive rendering of tags and code, seems HTML-like. Though with greater progressiveness - code blocks with streamed execution rather than merely compilation. The progressive JSON callbacks, React, integrated client and server code execution, and server-side rendering, seem closer to WWW SPA than to HTML. Though SPA files often seem more "source" than "document". And the multiple-page "App"-ness of SPA doesn't fit well. SPA seems a better fit than "full-stack". Perhaps some name analogous to "isomorphic javascript"...?
What if the braincell-vibe JS libraries turn out pretty much identical to the legacy human JS libraries, aside from being better-commented. That might lead to an existential crisis for some folks.
It is only when he decides to withdraw the money the problem occurs.
What you're saying applies to most EU countries. Here where I live you have to reside for majority of the year in given residency to pay taxes over there.
Here's the tricky part.
Estonia is part of Schengen Area. Which means you can travel there and back without passport. There's no paper trail of your arrangements. You can easily create a reality in which you reside there for majority of time.
But again, that's not the selling part of Estonian LTD. Which is - it's extremely easygoing and as long as money stays in the company you're not paying taxes.
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