The rates doing the work
Corporate income tax (VPB): 19% up to €200,000 profit. Box 2 on dividends: 24.5% up to €68,843, after the creditable 15% dividend withholding. Personal income tax on salary: progressive, topping out at 49.5%.
Route one: everything to yourself
All profit as personal income means progressive box 1 rates over the full amount. At €100,000 the average burden comes in the low forties as a percentage, and next year starts at zero again. Simple, and the most expensive of the three.
Route two: salary plus dividend, all consumed
Take a salary of, say, €60,000, and distribute the remaining profit as dividend. The dividend euros have 19% VPB and then 24.5% box 2, about 38.9% combined. The blended total is in the high thirties. A modest saving, plus a payslip that opens mortgage and rental doors.
Route three: live on part, invest the rest
Same €60,000 salary; the roughly €35,000 of after-salary profit stays in the company at 19% VPB and goes into investments. Those euros faced 19% instead of 44%+, so roughly a quarter of each retained euro is capital that route one would have surrendered, compounding from year one. Box 2 waits until you choose to distribute, in a year and bracket you pick.
The factor underneath all three
During a growth phase, a lower customary salary agreed with the tax authority for several years, combined with borrowing up to €500,000 from your own BV (besloten vennootschap, the Dutch private limited company), saves roughly €18,000 to €20,000 a year, it moves euros from the most-taxed route to the least-taxed one while funding the same life. See the playbook, and the bigger versions at €300,000 and €1 million.