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Comment by qwefggggqwe | Hacker News Reader

I will move out of Germany at the end of year. The country has insanely high taxes for singles. Also a court may ask you to pay life long support, paying 3/7 of the difference of your incomes, to your ex wife even if you don't have any children. Bureaucracy is one of the highest in the entire world and every process takes a lot of time. Many authorities will not even accept anything but paper letters for communication. May be some day I will write about all the drawbacks of living in Germany, but that book will be bigger than the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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I get your grievances about Germany, but alimony/child support laws can turn out much worse than that in many parts of the anglosphere. Bad bureaucracy is also hardly unique to Germany.

The tax thing I do get. Especially if you are not a migrant it can be a tough ask to give away 40-50% of your money, a lot of which goes directly or indirectly to pensioners who probably hate your guts. Though again, while this is particularly bad in Germany, it's hardly unique in that regard.

What other drawbacks are there and where will you go to? Alimony is going to be a thing in most Western countries.

The weird low-tech bureaucracy (which culturally extends well into the business world and is related to things like high physical currency usage) is to me one of the worst parts of Germany. IMO the taxes are not bad because you get a lot of benefits from government spending living there, it’s the low wages that are the real problem.

The usage of physical currency in Germany has dropped over the last three years.

During the pandemic, paying by debit card was encouraged, and this has stuck around.

I have used cash in a single instance in the last month (at a restaurant where the card reader was out of order).

However, it turns out that most people still prefer cash, so I might be living in a bubble, see https://www.bundesbank.de/en/press/press-releases/payment-be...

Living there has some advantages too, no?

No, everything is bad. That's why I'm about to migrate to the next country where I will eventually realize that everything is bad but it's now 10 years later.

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