Germany's exit tax ("Wegzugsteuer") covers everyone who either owns more than 1% in a business (foreign businesses included), or more than 500k€ cost basis in a mutual fund, e.g. ETFs. Accordingly, the people most often covered by the exit tax are small business owners, investors or people with substantial savings in ETFs.

As part of moving to Thailand, I had to deal with this myself. The topic is very intransparent and full of tax advisors which are, let's just say, not very incentivised to share their knowledge openly on their websites. But they're very happy to bill you many hours for explaining stuff to you.

I'm trying to change that by creating more transparency and publishing all my exit tax learnings here for free.

In my post All You Need to Know on Germany's Exit Tax, I explain what the German exit tax is, how it's calculated and which solutions are commonly chosen to mitigate its impact - with some solutions, you even end up paying no exit tax.

For the less common case of being hit not by the exit tax on company shares but instead on the exit tax of holding more than 500k€ cost basis in an ETF, I wrote up my post on the Exit Tax on ETFs.

Here's a list of all German exit tax solutions I've found during my research. I also compare the solutions more in-depth in my post Notes and Hacks on Germany's Exit Tax.

Simple solutions
The simple solutions are characterized by only needing minimal involvement from tax advisors - sure, you probably need a tax advisor to file your taxes and do your company valuations (if you end up paying the exit tax), but in contrast to the more complex solutions further below you don't need to pay a five-figure sum for getting an elaborate structure set up by an expensive advisor.

So, in other words, if you're a small business owner and not extremely rich, you'll probably want to choose one of these solutions:

More complex solutions
The more complex solutions generally involve a tax advisor or lawyer on a more elaborate basis - you'll likely need their help when setting up these structures, and there's also the risk of having to communicate this more extensively to the tax office when they come asking questions. In short, these solutions likely require you to allocate at least a five-figure budget in Euros to get them done.

The main interesting scenario is if you choose to found a Sole Proprietorship Instead of a GmbH, which I wrote about here. In that case, there's a real chance you can wind down your business in Germany prior to leaving, which would result in no exit tax.

Some consultants also propose that founding a Cooperative and moving your shares into it would be viable, but I haven't found any data points to support this. Therefore I assume that this solution doesn't work, and that the consultants selling it are unfortunately not very trustworthy.