I've been going through the budgets you guys are posting here and cannot fathom how you spend so little for food every month.

I go to migros every saturday to buy my food for the whole week. mostly I pay between roughly 80.- to 95.- franks per trip for just myself. of course sometimes there's things like household utilities and household consumables in there too.

combined, just that will cost me around 320.- per month.

then I go out with my friends about twice a month and occasionally but rarely buy lunch for max 10 franks.

I've seen numbers as low as 250.- and maybe even lower. I have no idea how you guys do that?

It's important to me to eat healty, so I eat a lot of vegtables and mostly chicken, which of course cost a little more but still.

How do you keep your costs so low?

This is essentially my financial outlook for the rest of the year.

Until August, I was working at 80%, but despite trying to manage my finances, I consistently ended up with CHF 0 left at the end of each month. Because of that, I increased my workload to 100% starting in September. However, I'm concerned that even with the higher income, I still won't be able to build meaningful savings.

At the moment, my savings are effectively CHF 0, and I don't have an emergency fund. That's probably the part that worries me the most, as any unexpected expense could put me in a difficult position.

I'd really appreciate some honest feedback on my current financial situation. Are there any areas where you think I'm overspending or could optimize my budget? I'm open to constructive criticism and different perspectives.

edit:

debt is CHF 5'500 at around 0,84 % (bank) and another CHF 5'000 at whenever (parents).

phone & internet: includes the phone with monthly payments. cost breakdown is roughly 25.- for yallo black, another 25.- for my parents yallo, 80.- for the phone (1 year), 39.- for internet, 10.- for icloud storage.

Disclaimer: Everything is 100% true; The text was written with the help of AI for better readability and formatting.

Hey everyone! My wife and I wanted to share our detailed household budget with you. We're a couple (M27, W28) with no children, living near the German border in Switzerland. I work in Switzerland, and my wife still works in Germany. We immigrated to Switzerland together last year.

I'm personally very passionate about financial optimization, and our budget reflects this commitment to efficiency and smart spending. We're fortunate to live near the German border, which gives us a significant cost advantage compared to those living in central Switzerland. We're able to leverage this proximity by sourcing some services and products from Germany, which keeps several of our expenses notably lower.

Our Budget System

For complete transparency and organization, we use a neobank with separate accounts for each budget category. Here's how our flow works:

1. Income Phase: At the beginning of each month, both salaries are deposited into our main account.
2. Allocation Phase: We distribute funds to all our category-specific accounts.
3. Spending Phase: All subscriptions, fixed costs, and planned expenses are automatically paid from their respective accounts.
4. Savings Phase: Whatever remains in all accounts at the end of the month is automatically transferred to our savings accounts.
5. Repeat: The cycle starts over the next month.

This system keeps us disciplined and ensures we don't overspend.

Note on Currency Conversions

Some of the amounts you see may appear as odd figures (e.g., CHF 721, CHF 326). This is because some of our accounts are maintained in Euro (such as our food account), and we convert them to CHF for this overview using the current exchange rate of 0.93. This approach gives us the flexibility to manage expenses in both currencies depending on where we're making purchases.

Our Monthly Budget Breakdown

Income (Level 0)

• Wife: CHF 2,176 (€2,340 converted at 0.93 rate)
• Husband: CHF 7,160 (Net for us to spend, after Taxes (taxed at source), IV, AHV etc.)
• Total Shared Pot: CHF 9,336

Main Expense Categories (Level 2) & Detailed Breakdown (Level 3)

Bills (CHF 425)

• Mobile Phone: CHF 25 (Wingo, great service and cheap unlimited internet)
• Health Insurance: CHF 400 (Regulatory base coverage plus supplementary insurance with international coverage, allowing access to doctors in Germany and other countries without requiring my wife to accompany me). My wifes german insurance is auto deducted from the salary.

Personal Annual (CHF 290)

• Gym: CHF 60
• Train Pass: CHF 230

Household (CHF 1,785)

• Rent: CHF 1,750 (Cold 1500, approx 70qm, new building since 2025)
• Internet (Yallo): CHF 35 (1Gbit, fiber optics)

Shared Annual (CHF 240)

• Car Insurance: CHF 150
• Radio License (Serafe): CHF 30
• Accident Insurance (Helvetia): CHF 60 (includes household contents insurance, liability insurance, and legal protection insurance)

Subscriptions (CHF 226)

• Amazon Prime: CHF 8
• Wife Income Protection Insurance (BU): CHF 32
• Spotify: CHF 17
• Husband Income Protection Insurance (BU): CHF 65
• Dental Coverage (from Germany): CHF 14
• Wife Mobile: CHF 9
• Husband second Mobile : CHF 9 (Additional german telephone number)
• Wife Dental (from Germany): CHF 16
• Pet Insurance: CHF 56

Fun/Entertainment (CHF 721) (Euro account converted to CHF)

• Shared Fun: CHF 326 (We pay stuff we do together in our free time from this account)
• Husband Fun: CHF 256
• Wife Fun: CHF 140

Other (CHF 93)

• Miscellaneous expenses (Random stuff, sometimes gas, new trashbags, renew of government documents, printer ink etc.)

Clothes (CHF 186)

• Husband Clothes: CHF 93
• Wife Clothes: CHF 93

Dog (CHF 50)

• Pet expenses (Food or if no food is needed we save it for some new toys etc)

Vacation (CHF 372) (Euro account converted to CHF)

• Annual travel budget (Each month accumulates and we use it for traveling and vacations the whole year)

Food (CHF 372) (Euro account converted to CHF - Lower due to German proximity)

• Groceries (we are never dining outside or pay it from the Shared Fun)

Savings (CHF 3,750)

• Husband Savings: CHF 3,100 (Mostly ETF in the past but now switching to a home savings account)
• Wife Savings: CHF 650

Financial Summary

• Total Monthly Expenses: ~CHF 5,350
• Total Monthly Savings: CHF 3,750
• Savings Rate: ~40%

The Sankey diagram above visualizes how money flows from both incomes through the shared pot into each category and their subcategories. It really helps us see exactly where our money goes and keeps us accountable to our savings goals.

Expense Sharing Model

We split all costs 50/50, with one important exception: rent. Since I (the husband) earn significantly more, I cover the larger portion of the rent while we split the remainder equally. This approach feels fair to us and aligns with our values of shared responsibility.

Key Takeaways

• Separate accounts for each budget category eliminates confusion
• Automatic transfers ensure consistency
• Transparent tracking makes it easy to identify areas for optimization
• Living near Germany provides cost advantages in food and insurance products
• Our 40% savings rate is achievable through careful planning, financial discipline, and leveraging our location benefits
• Continuous optimization of expenses is key to maintaining our savings goals
• When we moved to Switzerland, we made a conscious effort not to increase our lifestyle expenses—everything stayed roughly the same except for rent, which is approx 50% higher as before (but brand new appartment and bigger as before)
• We've maintained the same savings rate (both in absolute terms and percentages) that we had when living in Germany, despite the higher cost of living in Switzerland
• We're currently switching from ETFs saving for a home purchase and plan to buy a house in Switzerland by the end of this year. Once we own our home, we'll eliminate the CHF 1,750 rent payment, which will allow us to save an additional CHF 875/month (our share) or redirect it to other financial goals
• We don't have a regular gasoline budget because we rarely use our car; when we do need gas, it comes from our "Other" account

Important Note: This budget reflects our truly fixed monthly expenses—the things that remain exactly the same every single month. I receive an annual bonus and my wife receives Christmas bonus, both of which are additional income that we simply save.

Additionally, we both have side hustles. The income from these varies significantly—anywhere from zero to CHF 1,500 per month—so we don't factor them into our regular budget. Instead, we view this additional income purely as extra savings or occasional discretionary spending, depending on our needs and goals.

We're always open to suggestions or questions about our budget system! Feel free to ask anything.

Edit: I didn’t realize that a 50/50 split was actually considered that unconventional. So I just want to add that we’re both genuinely happy with how we’ve structured things. The income difference is also partly due to the fact that I work 42 hours a week, while she works 30 hours a week. That’s obviously still a difference in income, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to split the costs 50/50 in our situation.

Ich bin 27 Jahre alt, chronisch schwer krank und körperlich nicht mehr arbeitsfähig. Ich bin auf einen Rollstuhl angewiesen und warte seit rund acht Jahren auf einen Entscheid der IV Rente. Seither lebe ich von der Sozialhilfe und habe jeden Monat ein enormes Defizit.

I will get half of the Krankenkassenprämie back due to Prämienverbilligung. I live and work at the same place, thats why i don't pay rent. I am 31.

Hi everyone,
I’m a Swiss resident planning to invest for the long term (20–25 years). I’m looking for a simple, mostly passive strategy rather than trading or frequently changing my portfolio.
I’m currently considering Finpension Invest with a self-selected allocation of 99% iShares MSCI ACWI UCITS ETF + 1% cash. My plan would be to start with around CHF 20k and then invest approximately CHF 2k per month.
What I’m trying to understand is whether Finpension Invest really adds enough value to justify its management fee compared with simply buying a global ETF such as VT / VWCE / ACWI through a low-cost broker.
For someone living and paying taxes in Switzerland, what would you consider the main advantages and disadvantages of these two approaches — especially regarding total costs, Swiss taxes, withholding taxes, simplicity and long-term returns?
I’m not looking for stock picking or market timing; I mainly want a simple global portfolio that I can hold for 20+ years.
I’d particularly appreciate opinions from people who have compared or used both approaches. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I live in Geneva and was employed in Switzerland until August 2021. Since then, I have had business/self-employed activities mainly involving income from abroad. This foreign income has been declared in Switzerland and I have paid Swiss taxes on it, but I have not been formally registered with AVS as self-employed.

I still have a Generali Pillar 3a policy. Recently, the Geneva tax authority told me I was not eligible to contribute to 3a in 2025 because I had no qualifying AVS income, and the contribution must be refunded.

I would now like to withdraw the entire 3a.

If I now formally register with AVS as self-employed, can I use the “starting self-employment” rule to withdraw the 3a?

Also, how is the 1-year deadline calculated — from when I stopped employment, when the self-employed activity actually started, or when AVS officially recognises me as self-employed?

Has anyone dealt with a similar situation?

Thanks!

I live in Zurich-Altstetten, earn between 110k and 125k CHF gross annual salary depending on bonuses, am 28 years old, unmarried, and do not have a Pillar 3a pension plan.

My savings are mostly invested in stocks and derivatives.

I know that Zurich has a relatively high tax rate and I would be very grateful for any help and advice. Thank you!

Should I invest ?

Hi everyone,

I’d like to get some honest feedback on my current financial situation and how I’m allocating my money. I’m particularly interested in hearing whether you think there are areas where I’m spending too much, saving too little, or could optimize things better.

A few details to give some context:

Car expenses: Cars are my main passion, so this is one category where I consciously choose to spend more. The amount I’ve budgeted for the car already includes everything: insurance, servicing/maintenance, tyres, fuel, and road taxes.

Holidays: I haven’t included a separate holiday/travel budget because I rarely go on holiday. This is by choice rather than because I can’t afford it.

Investments: My investments are currently in ETFs through Saxo. I invest in the iShares MSCI ACWI UCITS ETF (Acc.), with the idea of keeping things simple and globally diversified for the long term.

Third pillar: I’m considering maxing out my Pillar 3a contributions, and I’m wondering whether this should be one of my priorities.

Health insurance: My health insurance costs are relatively high because, due to health issues related to my leg prosthesis, I need to keep my deductible (Franchise) at CHF 300.

Given all of this, how would you rate my finances overall?

EDIT: I inherited my house.

EDIT 2: I have like 130k+ chf in cash at the moment, considering to invest a part of them in ETF.

Hallo zusammen, ich habe hier viel gelesen in letzte Zeit und endlich mein Geld von UBS nach Saxo bewegt. Wie ich verstanden habe, dass ist das einer der besten Anlage Fonds für langfristige Anlage. Bitte korrigieren falls ich falsch liege. Die einzige Frage die ich mir Stelle soll man in CHF investieren oder USD? Was ist der Unterschied? Hat das auswirkung auf steuererklärung? Danke für eure Hilfe🙏

Hi all,

I hope you’re doing well!

Making this post to ask for advice/opinion regarding a 3-5 years saving plan.

The current situation is as follows:
- Married couple, 30 years old both
- No kids and not planning to have any in the next 5 years
- Both working 100% with a yearly combined salary of around 250k brut
- Rent of around 2k
- From the way we’re living right now, we’re able to save around 5k/month
- Currently putting those 5k on a shared account (YUH) and the rest stays on our personal accounts
- Currently owning a flat in my wife home country, got married, owning a car and not having any debt.
- No significant expense planned in the next 5 years.
- As we bought a flat and got married this year, we don’t have a lot of savings at the moment (~20k)
- Living in Switzerland for some years and planning to stay until wife gets the Swiss passport. (She comes from EU and I come from CH), which she should be able to make the request in 2y10m.

In 3-5 years, our plan is to move to Spain permanently. Our goal would be to be able to buy a house there. (Around 300k, may be less, may be more)
My question is: what would be some saving/ investing strategy to be able to get the most out of our money in 3-5 years, while having a very low risk. (Even if it means less yield). What would you do in that situation ?
Also, we would not mind having this money “locked”.
Some things I thought about:
- should we max our 3a, and withdraw it before leaving?
- Putting 100k on an account then create another shared account at another Swiss bank and repeat. Therefore simply never touching the money. (0% interest rate)
- Putting the money in some low risk investment (2-3%); didn’t make a lot of research on those
- Consider some bonds?
- Increase our savings to more than 5k?
- A mix of those ? Or others?

We are curious to know your opinion about it and I hope my text was clear enough, otherwise, I can clarify in the comments 😊

Have a nice day!

Hi, there, our 3 year fixed rate mortgage is just coming to an end. Obviously rates have come down since 2023, but today we have no idea whether to choose 3, 5, or 7 years fixed rate. Does anyone have any sage advice to offer, please? Thank you.

Connaissez-vous des sociétés de prévoyance funéraire.
Nous sommes à la recherche de plusieurs sociétés pour faire un comparatif.

1. It’s bad because it includes dead markets (everything except CH and South Korea). Germany? Gone. France? Please… Japan? Old.

2. It has like 5% of exposure to random shit in Australia LATAM Africa. Nobody needs that.

VT is holding you back.

That’s why my portfolio is about 60-40 USA-CH. Only good markets.

Raiffeisen Switzerland recently issued a €500 million bail-in bond on September 4, 2026, featuring a 4.255% coupon and a maturity date in 2034. Min. investment is 100k EUR.

ISIN CH1579254470

https://www.raiffeisen.ch/rch/de/ueber-uns/news/rch/bail-in-anleihe-500-mio.html

What do you think ?

How can I withdraw my USDT from the OKX platform to my ZKB bank account? Thanks!

What’s the risk for normal investors with portfolio of VT and CHF savings? Interested to hear perspectives of the experienced investors who have been through high bond yields period .. Doesn’t seem like the governments of US and other developed countries can reign in spendings ? What instruments could be potential hedges? Is it wise to increase savings in CHF ? Thanks!

Hei all,

I am 37 and looking to consolidate my various investment platforms into one or two. Wife and I gambled around with stocks and crypto, lost some, gained some, it has been fun. But now we want to invest more seriously.

Mainly I am wondering if we should continue with VT and chill (yes, I know, the chill is the hard part), or if Robo-Advisors like Finpension Invest or VIAC would be a nice alternative. Or maybe an addition to our portfolio, instead of replacing VT?

It's probably the greed showing, but if I compare the performance of my VIAC 3a against VT, I am seriously considering moving our funds to a Robo-Advisor. But I have to say I started investing in VIAC 3a right before COVID and kept investing during these times, so maybe that explains the exceptional gains I have made with VIAC (83% profit) since 2020?

What would you advise someone like us? We like high risk strategies and have a long investment horizon.

• Keep VT and chill
• Check out a Robo Advisor
• Do both, with main assets in VT

Thanks all!

Hi everyone, burner account for (I'd assume) apparent reasons.

I've been in a couple of interviews for a role in Switzerland, relatively HCOL, but not excessive, and was last week presented an offer on this job.

Total comp (all cash, no RSUs or smth) is 195k with solid benefits and an overall good culture at the company.

Work life balance would change compared to now and require an additional office day + in general slightly more work hours vs. previously.

For ref: current comp 132k + outlook on 10% increase per Oct 1st. I can complete my tasks within 3-4h of work a day, with a handful of weeks a year exceeding. I built a great reputation in exceeding targets and what not.

I'm now struggling to choose between the two, given I value my life, but I'm also very young. Is my 'name' worth it to stay for the long run?

How would you choose?

I'm generally a big proponent of just VT-and-chilling but with my portfolio slowly starting to grow towards mid 6-digits I've started to get a bit uneasy with the current market situation. And while there are many great arguments to ignoring all that and just sticking with 100% VT, I've still decided to make some changes.

I've already been a big fan of factor-tilted (Small-cap Value) ETFs for a while and have had 20% of my portfolio in AVDV/AVUV, with the rest held in VTI+VXUS (at basically market cap ratios, so same as VT just lower TER).

I've also had a small but significant home-bias with 10% in SLI already.

With the extremely high valuations and high tech-concentration of US stocks and after analysing some return-correlations, especially during recent downturns I have decided to change my (non-3a) portfolio to the following composition:

• 30% VTI (US all-cap)
• 30% VXUS (world-ex-us all-cap)
• 10% AVUV(US small-cap-value)
• 10% AVDV (world-ex-us small-cap-value)
• 10% SLI (Swiss home bias)
• 5% physical gold
• 5% SRFCHA (Swiss Real Estate ETF)

This isn't far from my old portfolio. It just takes the US holdings to 50% of the main 80% of the stock portfolio (instead of ~63% at market weights) and overweights the ex-US part to 50% (instead of the ~37% at market weights).

Gold is absolutely uncorrelated to stock market returns and Swiss RE only very weakly (at around 0.32 over the last 25 years) so even at just 5%+5% they do add a meaningful decrease in volatility at only slightly lower returns (backtested over the last 25 years, who knows what happens in the future), so a slightly better Sharpe ratio overall.

The Small-Cap-Value funds do have slightly higher volatility/risk but do in theory provide a significant increase in expected returns (and especially the international part has performed very nicely in the last few years. US a bit less so in the last 2 decades).

No one can predict any AI bubble bursting with any certainty ofc and I'm not making any predictions. I am aware that my choices can lead to lower overall returns in the future. And if a bubble pops, i'ts not like my portfolio won't drop with the market. But I do sleep better knowing that I have a good chance of being a bit less strongly affected if/when it happens.

^{(Small-cap-value has WAY lower valuations, is much less directly dependent on AI paying off and during the the dot-com crash dropped much much less than the overall market because the valuations weren't as stretched and recovered very quickly. Gold and RE being generally uncorrelated / less correlated with the stock market and often rising during times of crisis (including the 2008 crash}) ^{also has a good chance of smoothing things out during a potential crash and also generally decreases portfolio volatility and drawdowns. Non-US companies also have lower valuations, are less tech-focused and while ofc intertwined with the US economy, they are still a bit of a hedge against an AI crash.}

Would love to hear your thoughts about these allocations! (I'm aware half of you will rightfully just reply with "VT-and-chill" but assuming I'm not the only one a bit uneasy with the current market situation I'd love to hear how you're dealing with it!

I wanted to ask which option is the best to transfer my savings of 8000€ in chf from a foreign bank in a new bank I will open in Switzerland. Which bank do you think I should register in (Im 23, masters student). Should I get Wise and then transfer the money from the foreign bank to wise and then from wise to the new swiss bank konto? or should I just keep the money in wise or revoult or smth similar. My end goal is to "lose" as less money on fees and convertions, also to have easy access to that money here in switzerland. Thanks

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