Blog

  • Vodka collection

    I have started – strangely enough – to collect Wodka. A colleague of mine collects Gin, however my collection is nowhere near as exciting, complete or passionately assembled as his.

    However, if you want to make my other half cry and add to the collection, here’s a list on what I’m missing. This list is nowhere near complete, but should give a little insight:

    – Alpha Noble

    – Belvedere

    – Danzka

    – Xellent

    – Idol

    – Kauffman

    – Pure Green Organic Vodka

    – Russian Standard

    – Skyy

  • Taxes HowTo – Christian style

    It’s about time: our local “Finanzamt” which is the town’s legal entity to collect your income taxes in Germany, in my case Hamburg-Hansa (which will hopefully not change due to the move), has again reminded me that my income taxes were due in May and that I should consider handing them in till September, 14th, or else…. (I love those “or else” letters).

    So, I’m at the moment preparing my income taxes which is a bit difficult due to “Christian Louis Veranstaltungstechnik und Medienproduktion”, my own company that I founded 11 years ago. I don’t do anything anymore that is considered to be even partly self-employed, but since the legal entity still exists, it is part of my income taxes.

    The problem is however that – also due to historic reasons – this company’s legal address is still in Leverkusen, my birth town. I never bothered to change this, since – as already mentioned – I don’t actively do anything with it anyways.

    So, instead of handing in all my paperwork at ONE tax office, I have to first of all file my company’s taxes in Leverkusen (which is normally done quite quickly, just write a bunch of zeroes in some forms) and after that I have to take the outcome (0 EUR income out of my company) and file my personal income taxes in Hamburg.

    Quick HowTo, so that I remember how to do this next year:

    0. Hand in “Umsatzsteuererklärung”

    1. Grab an “Anlage G” to claim your company’s profit and hand it in together with the so-called “Mantelbogen”: Erklärung zur gesonderten Feststellung von Grundlagen für die Einkommensbesteuerung, Vordruck ESt 1 B

    2. Send to Leverkusen tax office, wait for results

    3. File Einkommensteuererklärung Vordruck Est 1 A + additional sheets like KAP with the Hamburg tax office

    Especially writing down the names hopefully helps me remembering all of this in 2011. If you are curious how such a German tax form looks like, you’ll find plenty of them here: https://www.formulare-bfinv.de/ffw/content.do

    For my other “normal” income taxes, I use t@x 2010 by the way; unfortunately this crazy “you own a company in a different town” stuff can’t be managed with this properly.

  • Twitter OAuth – does it work?

    I use twitter quite reguarly and of course, I also twitter when I write a new blog entry.

    However, twitter has recently changed their API and this forces me to upgrade the twitter integration + test it.

    So, this rather boring blog post is just a proof of concept that twitter integration works (again).

    So: pass along, there is nothing to see here 😉