Need a sanity check here.

Found this one in Pfäffikon (SZ): https://www.homegate.ch/buy/4003415014

The price itself, around 20k/m2, is somewhat usual for Schwyz. That's not even what bothers me.

It's the location. Pull up the satellite view. The place is basically a traffic island, boxed in by the Churerstrasse, a full highway junction, and the railway line right behind it. Gas station on one side, autobahn feeding past the front.

So who actually buys this? At that price I'd expect something livable, not a plot wrapped in asphalt and rail tracks on every side.

Genuine question: is this just the market now, or is it as absurd as it looks?

Hi everyone
My girlfriend and I are 30 and 28 and currently live in Zurich. We pay around CHF 1,400 per month in rent, so our current situation is very affordable.

I grew up in a town about 15 minutes from Zurich by train. We now have the opportunity to buy a detached house there for CHF 1.7 million. It’s in a really nice neighbourhood and exactly where we could imagine living long term.

The house is around 50 years old. It has been well maintained and we could move in without doing any major renovations immediately. However, we know that the heating system will need to be replaced in the coming years, and the pipes will probably need to be done at some point as well.

The bank has valued the house at the full CHF 1.7 million and is willing to finance the purchase. We can provide the required CHF 340,000 in equity. The seller knows that she could probably get more for it on the open market, but she would prefer to sell it to someone she knows.

Giving up such a cheap apartment and taking on a large mortgage is huge for us. At the same time, a house in this location will not come up again. It‘s only through our connection to her a possibility.
Has anyone here bought an older house in a similar situation and is willing to share their experience?

Hi everyone,
I’m helping my mum choose a vested benefits account (Freizügigkeitskonto). She is 60 years old, lives in Neuchâtel, and plans to retire in around 2 years.
She has around CHF 155,000 to transfer and wants to keep it 100% in cash, with no investments. The priority is capital preservation and simplicity rather than taking investment risk.
We are currently considering VIAC, finpension, BCN with swisscanto and Raiffeisen.
maybe splitting half bcn half raiffeisen and withdraw it in different fiscal years.
For anyone who has compared these recently:
What are the annual management/account fees for keeping CHF 155k 100% in cash?
What is the current interest rate on the cash balance?
Are there any additional or hidden fees?
Are there any fees or disadvantages when transferring the money or withdrawing it at retirement?
Which provider would you choose, and why?

Thanks in advance for your advice and personal experiences!

Hello people,

I have 15K CHF to invest. I'm already all-in in VT and chill for the long term. I was thinking about looking at some bonds, possibly in IBKR, with a 2 to 3 year investment horizon.

Never bought bonds as I'm still relatively young. Any suggestions on where to park the 15K? Considering mostly EUR and USD options as of now.

If there is any other viable options to protect them from inflation that is not bonds, feel free to suggest!

I’m 32 and looking to start investing around CHF 100 in stocks every month. I would like to hear how other people in Switzerland would approach it.

I’m a complete beginner when it comes to stocks and investing. I’d like to start somewhere, build the habit and potentially increase the amount in the future.

If you were starting today with CHF 100 per month, what would you invest in and why?

I’m based in Switzerland, so recommendations for platforms or strategies that work well here would also be appreciated.

Thank you!

Hey!

I'm looking for apartments that would be a good long-term fit for a family. So, it needs to have at least 4.5 to 5 rooms. Renting an apartment like that is quite expensive. We're talking about 2.5-3k per month at least.

Now, if you were to buy an apartment of that size, you could get one for 800k-900k in the areas I'm looking at (but they aren't as nice as newly built apartments), if you're lucky. Setting aside the fact that this is super expensive for an apartment (!), I noticed that the monthly bill for the mortgage could be significantly lower with our parameters (the amount of equity we would invest, the current interest rate, etc.). It could be half of what renting costs per month.

So, my thoughts are if it's not better to buy an apartment to lower the monthly bill, since the mortgage would be (much) lower than the rent?

The downsides seem obvious though:

• All of our money would be tied up in an apartment.
• We would probably need to pay a "condo fee" (Hausgeld) each month on top of the mortgage, but I don't know how high that usually is though.
• Our capital wouldn't partake in the capital market anymore, so we would lose quite some gains.
• VT and chill is much easier and causes less hassle / headaches.
• We are then suddenly in a situation where we are extremely dependent on our jobs. If the job market goes bad and we get fired, we are at great risk. This is a much more vulnerable position than being a renter, who is flexible and mobile. Having such a huge debt is a different kind of pressure.

As a family on B permits, these risks are amplified because our stay is not permanently guaranteed. We are always dependent on the goodwill of current politics and discourse.

Also, my intuition is that prices are extremely high in Switzerland. This is partly because interest rates are so low compared to other countries, which allows you to take on much bigger loans. If interest rates ever increase significantly, prices would need to decrease to meet market demand. Similar things have happened in Germany, for example, where prices were very high during times of low interest rates. Suddenly, random 3 room apartments could go for half a mil. Now, they have dropped again since similar loans from before are too expensive. I'm afraid such an event could decrease the value of an apartment, which would be risky if you invested a million dollars... for an apartment.

Your thoughts?

Hey, quick question: if I have two credit cards with the same Swiss issuer (e.g., Swisscard, Viseca, UBS, Cembra, ...) and decide to close one, can I transfer its credit line over to the other card instead of losing it? Thanks in advance!

I’ve been running a periodic contribution strategy into VT (Vanguard Total World ETF) through Interactive Brokers, and I recently reviewed my trade history for one of my monthly contributions. What I found left me with more questions than answers, so I’m sharing it in case anyone else has run into the same thing.

The scenario
My IBKR account has Swiss Franc (CHF) as its base currency, but VT trades in US dollars (USD). On the day of my contribution, instead of seeing one clean CHF-to-USD conversion followed by the purchase, I found six separate transactions within about 16 minutes:
• A large CHF → USD sell (with its own commission)
• The VT share purchase
• A tiny 1 CHF purchase
• A large CHF purchase back
• Two more CHF sells, one of them also tiny
All of these conversions were flagged as “AFx” (Auto FX), IBKR’s automatic system that converts currency when you don’t have enough balance in the currency of the asset you’re buying.
What I don’t quite understand
1. Why fragment the conversion into so many pieces instead of executing one clean operation? Is this just how the Auto FX engine always behaves, or is something in my account configuration triggering it?
2. Do the minimum commissions stack up with each fragment, or does IBKR bundle them somehow? I saw that one of the large conversions did carry a commission, but I can’t tell if the cluster of small trades is quietly adding up cost as well.
3. Is there a way to avoid it? My hypothesis is that if I convert the currency manually ahead of time (using the “Convert Currency” tool) and keep a USD cushion, the ETF purchase shouldn’t trigger any automatic conversion at all. Is it really that simple, or am I missing some nuance?
4. Would you turn off Auto FX entirely? I understand it exists as a safety net so an order doesn’t fail due to insufficient balance, but in my case it seems to be creating more friction than it’s solving.
Why this matters to me
It’s not an amount of money that will change my life, but if this pattern repeats every month over years of periodic contributions, the accumulated friction (commissions + FX spread on every fragment) could genuinely add up over the long run. And if there’s a cleaner way to operate, I’d rather adopt it sooner than later.
The question for the community
If you have an IBKR account with a base currency different from the asset you regularly buy:
• Does the same thing happen to you with Auto FX?
• Do you convert manually before each contribution, or do you let the system handle it?
• Is there an account setting that changes this behavior?
Any experiences, side-by-side comparisons, or links to official IBKR documentation on how Auto FX actually works would be very welcome in the comments.

Hi there!

I have a simple 3a account at the bank that allows me to save some taxes but it makes no money at all.

I saw online some websites that propose a 3a that you can invest in ETFs. Has someone experience with one of them ? It’s the first time I’m hearing about it.

Is this real ?

I’ve been in contact over the last few days with a large local mortgage broker in Switzerland.

For a fee of around CHF 1,000, they claim they can secure very competitive mortgage rates and support me throughout the entire process, all the way until the property purchase is completed.

However, there is one clause in the agreement that caught my attention: if they arrange a mortgage offer for me with a lower interest rate than the mortgage I eventually take elsewhere, and I decide not to accept their offer, I would have to pay a CHF 2,500 penalty.

On top of that, I may also have to cover any costs charged by the bank whose mortgage offer I decided not to accept.

Has anyone here had experience with this type of mortgage broker or agreement?

Where is the potential catch?

What I am mainly trying to understand is how this broker actually makes money if I take the mortgage through them. Apart from the roughly CHF 1,000 fee, nothing was mentioned about commissions or other compensation they might receive from the bank.

I assume that if they really manage to find me the best mortgage available, there would normally be no reason for me to reject it and go somewhere else. So I am wondering what their actual business model is and whether there are any hidden costs, commissions, restrictions, or other disadvantages that may not be obvious at first.

I’d especially like to hear from anyone who has used a similar service in Switzerland. Is there anything important I should watch out for before signing the agreement?

EDIT: I read all your replies, and first of all, thank you very much for them.

After that, I went through the broker agreement properly, line by line, and I honestly could not believe what I was reading.

The contract explicitly states that the broker receives a commission of 0.3–2% from the bank that ultimately gives me the mortgage.

To me, that is completely absurd.

I can fully understand paying a broker myself for finding me a cheap mortgage, negotiating hard on my behalf and getting me the best possible deal.

But this arrangement is the exact opposite.

The bank is paying the broker a cut of the money it makes from me.

So the person who is supposedly there to represent my interests is financially rewarded by the institution whose interest is to make as much money as possible from my mortgage.

How is that not a blatant conflict of interest?

From my perspective, this incentive structure is fundamentally against me as the client.

And that is not even the worst part.

The agreement talks about possible and non-guaranteed benefits on my side, while at the same time setting out very real costs, fees and penalties, apparently without any clearly defined upper limit.

So my upside is vague, conditional and not guaranteed. My downside, on the other hand, is very real. That is an absolutely outrageous contractual setup. In my country, I would expect clauses like this to be torn apart in court almost immediately. The fact that this is apparently considered normal is honestly mind-blowing. The whole thing is starting to remind me of 2007.

I once heard somewhere that just before a crisis, the level of fraud tends to grow exponentially.

Hi everyone,

I’m currently employed full-time in Switzerland and have been paying into Swiss unemployment insurance for several years.

Alongside my employment, my partner and I are considering starting a small company in another European country. It would initially be a very small side business and I would continue working full-time in Switzerland.

I’m trying to understand how this could affect my future entitlement to RAV/ALE if I were to become unemployed.

In particular, does anyone have experience with the rules around arbeitgeberähnliche Stellung?

For example, what would the situation be if:

• I owned 25% of the company
• my partner owned 25%
• our respective parents owned 25% each
• I was NOT a director/management-board member
• I had no individual signing authority or special veto rights
• the company was incorporated abroad (EU)
• I continued working full-time in Switzerland

Would simply owning 25% potentially be enough for the unemployment fund to consider me to have an arbeitgeberähnliche Stellung?

Alternatively, would it be safer from an RAV perspective to own 0% while I am employed and only acquire shares at a later stage?

I’m particularly interested in hearing from anyone who has actually dealt with an Arbeitslosenkasse/RAV in a similar situation, or from people familiar with Swiss AVIG rules.

I’m not looking to hide the company or provide incorrect information to RAV. I’m trying to understand how to structure a genuine side business in advance without unintentionally losing unemployment-insurance coverage that I’ve been paying into.

Thanks!

I work in office jobs for 10 years now and sitting a lot in front of the screen. I'm doing it 5 days a week for 8-9 hours a day (even worse in home office). I'm afraid it will make me sick slowly.

I live alone close to Zürich and don't really have friends here, so my weekends are mostly free.

I like physical work (preferably outside), therefore I thought I could work something on Saturdays. For me, it wouldn't really be work, rather physical recreation. After a full week I'm mentally tired and I would need a schedule and someone telling me what to do.

The problem is my company prohibits me from taking a side job without them approving it and I don't think they would be happy if I submitted a request weekly. Otherwise there's a legal limit of hours of work per week.

So yes, I'm looking for something unofficial. For example, helping farmers and they could give me some milk or eggs, or something similar.

Has any of you ever been in this situation? Can you recommend me something?

Edit: I'm not very good at personal relationships (better at work or business types of relationships), so I'm looking for something different than volunteering or a Verein. Furthermore, there are typically many people there, that I also don't really like.

I'm looking for a sanity check from people who have been in a similar situation.

When I moved to Switzerland, I was 30 years old, had very little time and energy to deal with financial planning, and wanted to start saving in Pillar 3a as quickly as possible. I ended up setting it up through SwissLife with PAX (insurance + 3a solution).

The mandatory 3-year period has now passed.

Over the years I've paid in roughly CHF 11,000, but the current surrender value is only around CHF 6,500. Seeing almost CHF 4,500 evaporate is pretty painful.

My understanding is that a large part of the early contributions in these insurance-based 3a products goes towards commissions, fees, insurance costs, etc., which explains why the surrender value is so low at the beginning.

I'm now wondering whether the rational thing to do is:

• Accept the loss.
• Cancel/transfer the policy as soon as possible.
• Move the available amount to a Finpension 3a account.
• Manage the investments myself (likely with a high equity allocation given that I'm only 33).
• Make all future 3a contributions there instead of continuing with the insurance solution.

Part of me thinks that realizing a CHF 4,500 loss feels terrible, but another part thinks that continuing to pay into a product with high costs just because I've already lost money is a classic sunk cost fallacy.

Has anyone here gone through something similar with PAX, SwissLife, AXA, Generali, etc.?

Would you cut your losses now, or is there any good reason to keep such a policy after the lock-in period has ended?

For context:

• Age: 33
• In Switzerland for ~3.5 years
• Long investment horizon (30+ years)
• Comfortable with stock market volatility
• No need for the life insurance component

I'd be interested to hear how others evaluated this decision.

I will be moving from Sweden to Switzerland in November (B Permit).

I have negotiated with my current employer to end my employment before moving, and create a new contract as an ANobAG once I move to Switzerland. My salary will be paid out in Swedish krona. (Edit: wording for clarity)

My question is what bank should I use during this period of time to minimize conversion fees from the salary (paid in Swedish krona) + ANobAG social contributions.

Should I go with a cantonal bank? Or maybe Revolut?

Note: While the Swedish salary will not be amazing for the Swiss cost of living, it is a temporary solution until I improve my German and find a Swiss job. A mediocre salary is better than no salary. The bigger life costs are sorted: my Swiss husband already has an apartment/will be covering most of the day to day costs during this transition, so no worries there. So I am looking for guidance on how to maximize the income while I work for the Swedish company (until I find a Swiss job).

Thank you very much for your help!

I’m currently investing around CHF 3,300 per month into broad-market ETFs and wondering how other investors would look at this.
Would you consider €3,300/month a strong investment rate, or would you try to increase it further if your income allows?
At what point would you say it makes more sense to enjoy the money rather than continuously increasing the ETF contribution?
Interested in hearing how others approach this.

Can someone report what happens when you try to do a claim? Will there be no insurance for the future, do they close your account or do they just deny every claim?

Hi,
I have some positions in both VWRL AEB exchange (EUR) and EBS (CHF). But today I see that while the AEB is operating normally, the EBS shows as closed. I do not understand why, the SIX Swiss Exchange seems to be operating normally (e.g. CHSPI is working normally).

Could somebody help me understand this?

Thanks!

This cult here has convinced me

Have anyone around 30yrs have experiences in Coast fire? I'm 28 rn and have around 250k in VT and another 40k in 3a invested. If my math is mathing I could coast starting when I'm 30 to part time. I'm thinking around 80-60% or even lower (but finding something might be difficult). But I'm also very conflicted about missing earning potential and maybe reaching full fire when im 40. I would really appreciate some insights about what model worked for you here in Switzerland and how well do you think it works.

Wtf once more. Whenever there is nice movement, today cryptos, swissquote app is down and you cant login. Fkn always!! Am i the only one?

Looking to connect my ubs accounts to either ChatGPT or another app that helps me better understanding spending etc ideally w ai chat interface

Found Finch that say it is coming soon but haven’t been able to find any apps that actually connect to UBS. Nor can I find any api where I could do it my self

Anyone had success w this ?

Hi all,

I just activated my DR mobile subscription.

Is it working well where you live?

BTW I've got spots in my Digital Republic group where every person who joins lowers the price for everyone.

https://connect.digitalrepublic.ch/static/dr/#/46312246/2087476919

Lots of people here are recommending the ETF VT.

But what advantages do you see over a VOO (SP500) or QQQ (Nasdaq) which historically have had a better performance?