1000000CHF's Journal

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198

Yes, it’s without the social contributions. In total government takes about 1k CHF from my salary. Maybe a bit less, I need to check this.

That’s true. I was quite lucky. My first apartment costed me only 1.4k a month. My current one is 1.8k a month. It’s not a easy to find this kind of deal though. Most of my friends pay 2-2.5k for the apartment. Newer ones are for 3k. Basically prices comparable to Zurich.

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Well written story.
Even as a Swiss it is difficult to find new friends if you move to a new place. In my job I need to move every few years to a different country. Quiet a few of my Swiss (!) colleagues told me, the hardest part is to go back to Switzerland and find new friends again.
In my opinon the easiest way is through work or to join a club(Verein) with your favrouite activity. Which ever this might be. I like football and boardgames, so I usually stick to that. But there are so many possibilities. I am sure you find something suitable for your wife. Google is your friend. Otherwise there is a list on the citys website: https://www.stadtzug.ch/vereinsliste
An other possibility is through your kid. As example your wife could go to MuKi-Turnen (mother kid gymnastics). It exists basically in every town/village in Switzerland.

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Also my experience. Moved to a different canton 7 months ago and haven’t made new friends yet.

Everybody is just very distant.

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Thank you. We might try Verein. We already heard that it’s popular way of socializing here, but never tried it. With family and work, it’s hard to find time. But maybe we could find something for families, so that all of us can take part.

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FYI: Many municipalities have a list of all locally registered Vereine. That makes searching much easier!

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Dear @1000000CHF

Could you please let me know the exact KBA ETF that you buyed at Interactive Brokers? I also have VT and im quied interested in diversifying a little bit more and buy some China? :slight_smile:

Thanks men!

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I used to own CNYA but it didn’t really bring anything into my portfolio. I now overweight Chinese Tech and Healthcare with EMQQ and KURE.

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There are 2 options for KBA now:

US Domiciled

Ticker KBA
Primary Exchange NYSE
CUSIP 500767405
ISIN US5007674055
Net Assets $521,709,610
Total Annual Fund Operating Expense (Gross) 0.80%
Total Annual Fund Operating Expense (Net) 0.60%*
Inception Date 3/4/2014
Distribution Frequency Annual

Ireland Domiciled UCITS

Ticker KBA
Listings ISE, LSE
SEDOL BJ9JTF8
ISIN IE00BJLFK515
Net Assets $94,055,102
Total Annual Fund Operating Expense 0.40%
Inception Date 26/06/2019
Distribution Frequency Accumulating

you may also look at CNYA, ASHR or just go All China with CN, KALL, etc…

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Hi, yes, I bought the one listed in US in USD. In previous posts you can check out my portfolio numbers.

Cheers!

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Any updates? @1000000CHF ? :slightly_smiling_face:

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Well I didn’t do any updates because I struggled a lot during last few years with keeping myself mentally sane. Career burnout, pandemic and war depressed me a bit and screwed my frugality habits (I started buying more stuff to make myself happy, which of course never works - in fact the opposite is true, I should start selling all that trash in my house).

Nevertheless, there are few good news in my life and the stash is still accumulating, so I’ll make a small update soon.

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Mental sanity trumps (almost) all. Take care.

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Take care of you, only if you are at 100% you can actually support others as they deserve it. Therefore, your mental and physical sanity should be your main focus. I know from own experience that it’s not always easy to walk the talk. Hang in you are not alone

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Ok, after 3 years, I can make a small update on my FIRE journey.

Net worth: 400k CHF

Portfolio (more or less):

  • Stocks (VT+KBA+AVUV+AVDV): 255k
  • 2nd Pillar: 80k
  • 3rd Pillar - VIAC (Global 100): 50k
  • Gold (physical): 5k
  • Bitcoin: 5k
  • Cash: 5k

Savings rate: 40% (more or less, I don’t track it exactly anymore, but it’s getting worse and worse over time, and I’m thinking about starting budgeting again).

Family:

  • Obviously objective number 1. The big news here is that my second son was born a year ago and we are not sleeping again (6 wakeups per night are pretty standard in our family). My first son is 6-year-old and for a year he’s been attending a German-speaking kindergarten - after attending for 4 years English-speaking krippe, it was quite smooth for him to move to a public kindergarten and pick up Swiss German. I was more terrified than him - he was a late speaker and his language skills developed quite slowly for the first couple of years, but that changed about 2 years ago and he caught up with speaking a lot. Our speech therapist at school says that she thinks he won’t have any issues with German at school. He’s now speaking 4 languages - Polish (our main focus at home), English (1 hour a week extra class), Swiss German and German (at kindergarten). It remains still one of the biggest sources of stress and fear for me, but less and less so, as we see as he progresses and improves.
  • In general - home education of my older son and looking after my younger son has become my main activity outside of work. I tend to focus on three topics: language (reading, writing, speaking), maths (numbers, operations, shapes), and general knowledge (everything I can get his attention on - from atoms through space to human evolution). I started making notes for myself to structure my own general knowledge on various topics so that I could be more effective at passing it to my sons. My general idea is that “the only real education is self-education” (Isaac Asimov), so I try to teach them in playful and entertaining ways, and I don’t force them to do anything.
  • Currently we’re living on one income, as my wife quit her previous (unsatisfying) job, she’s currently looking after our kids full-time, while I returned to work 100%. On the plus side here, I got a decent salary rise in recent years (even though, or maybe because, the client of my employer, one of the big Swiss banks, recently went bankrupt).

Work:

  • I continue work on Kubernetes clusters, but I also started developing applications in Python (Kubernetes operators and Flask web apps). I’m pretty happy with it. I have an excellent work-life balance and I’m very happy with my work. I probably could have earned a bit more in another job, but then I’d not have so good work-life balance so I’m sticking to my current job.
  • On the minus side, since the client of my employer is bankrupt, we don’t know what will happen to the company. We have some other projects going on but the situation is completely unpredictable.

Growth:

  • The big achievement is that in theory, I could go back to Poland and FIRE on a decent income (with stocks on the 4% rule or buying apartments for rental). However, since our son is going to start school this year, we decided to stay here and continue his education in Switzerland. This means that we keep FIRE on hold until our kids grow up - 20 years? We will most likely half-FIRE by switching to 50% work-load (my wife was already doing this) in a few years, but we will probably never give up work totally. Our philosophy is that FIRE funds give us flexibility and financial security but we rather focus on being happier with work - rather than trying to be happy without work.
  • I recently struggled with my mental health - after the COVID-19 pandemic (which elevated my anxiety levels to the roof), I got obsessed about believing that the Ukraine-Russia war was a first step to the Poland-Russia war. I wasn’t aware that something was wrong until I learned that due to stress I got prostate inflammation - due to stress my muscles contracted and pressed prostate. To recover it and relax my muscles, I got anti-depressants from my doctor which had huge negative side effects for me - I was for weeks constantly tired, sleepy, unmotivated, and totally exhausted. After a month or so, the side-effects become not so strong and I can now function normally - although my energy levels are generally lower. In two months I’ll have another prostate check-up - we will see how effective the treatment is.
  • Due to mental health issues, I put on hold any hobby projects and interests that I was working on in previous years. First things first.

SUM UP: With my unhealthy imperfect perfectionism - habits, diet, sports, health, learning, etc - I decided to relax and focus instead on my family goals. I managed to drop my weight recently and I try to stick to healthy levels. I bought a weight vest for my walks (+20kg), but I need to refocus again on my diet (too many sweets) and on my budgeting/investing (save more and invest more regularly). Otherwise, I don’t bash myself anymore on my shortcomings and I’m staying positive and optimistic about the future. That’s big improvement.

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Health is essential. There’s no point in having CHF 10,000,000, leaving your job and retiring if your health doesn’t allow you to enjoy it. There are far too many stories of retired people (aged between 58 and 65) who can’t enjoy their retirement because of too many health-related problems or because they die prematurely because of their health.

I hope you enjoy your family more and get back into good shape so you can enjoy even more your family, friends and yourself for a long time to come :wink: Good luck to you!

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Don’t read the news for a week or two…

Having said that, I’ve also learnt that it’s a typical warfare technique. See what happens with China-Taiwan. China want to stress taiwanese as much as possible, even if they (china) do know that they can’t do much about it.

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Where do you get the English classes from? I’m interested in putting my boys 4 & 8 also into some early English classes. We do some English at home and got plenty of books from some of our expat friends.

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Indeed it is, but balancing it with other responsibilities and desires isn’t easy. Modern life stretches our time, will and energy beyond human capabilities (at least for most humans). That’s why it’s so easy to fall into depression, anxiety, exhaustion or other health and well-being issues. And that’s why mental issues are on the rise in the Western world. I guess it’s important to remind ourselves what is priority here and that ultimately less is more.

Thank you a lot!

Yes, I cut down the news when I learnt that it screwed my health. It still didn’t fix my issues but it definitely helped.

Yes, it has a name: PSYOPS (Psychological Operations).

When my son moved from private to public kindergarten, we asked his English teacher from the private kindergarten if she’d like to be his babysitter twice a week and she agreed. Later she moved to her home country, so we found a new babysitter - our English-native-speaking neighbours have a teenage daughter who agreed to be our new babysitter. She doesn’t have the professional experience of the previous one, but on the plus side, she’s three times cheaper.

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Balancing parenting and work and everything else is a challenge. The nice thing is that once everything is going in the right direction and you have a good chunk of equities like you have, you have already made a lot of progress. Even if you stopped saving you would still have a life changing fund by the time you want to retire.

I’m in a similar situation to you in that I have two kids and they are very much my priority. It’s awesome that you can help your kids out with languages and school. It’s also nice to have time to do stuff with the kids and have fun. I would definitely keep prioritising the work life balance above pretty much everything including FI.

Mental health is a tough thing to manage alongside all the other demands. I think that it’s important not to beat yourself up. It really doesn’t matter if you’re smashing records on strava or whatever. Supporting a family and being around for the kids is already enough. I’ve recently gotten into meditation. That might be something to explore if you want to get a bit more calm and contemplation in your life.

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Thank you @Rinch , that’s a piece of really great life advice, I appreciate that a lot!