Allow me to introduce myself

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Hi everybody

It’s been nearly five months since I made an account here, and I’m already well over a hundred posts, so it is about time I introduce myself.

My introduction to the Mustachian way of life began when my insurance agent called me and told me that with me turning 40 soon, we should really look at my retirement, and if he could set up a meeting with him and his colleague that specializes in that. I agreed.

At said meeting, I was a bit disappointed. Turns out, setting up your retirement is… just investing money now and then withdrawing it during retirement? Oh, and of course they wanted to sell me a 3a solution with a disability insurance. My gut feeling not to follow through with that proved to be right when I started reading up on the matter. I read through multiple books, binge-read various blogs, forums and subreddits, made an account here, analyzed my expenses and put together an overview of my assets. An eye-opening experience.

Then I started optimizing. Credit cards, investments, banking etc.

In here are the details about what I changed

  • Credit card
    I realized I don’t need all these insurances and canceled my current credit card (yearly fees of 108.–, forex transaction fee 1.75%). Now I shop with cashback cards (1% cashback with AMEX, 0.25% with Visa) in Switzerland. For purchases abroad, which were about 4000.– last year (so about 70.– in forex transaction fees), I’m using neon (no forex transaction fee, good exchange rate).

  • Household purchases
    We’re now using a Certo credit card (1% cashback at Coop, Migros, Digitec Galaxus and a few more). Also, I have finally achieved the highest form of Bünzliness and got a Supercard (1% cashback, some limited offers with more cashback).

  • Health insurance
    I looked at what I really needed (already was at the highest deductible) and was able to reduce costs around 300.– for this year and, depending on if I’ll downgrade hospital insurance, up to 1300.– next year.

  • Communication
    I’m already as cheap as I can go with my mobile subscription (Wingo for 25.–/month). I want (probably need) a 1 GBit/s broadband connection and am with Fiber7, wich is a bit expensive. Got a deal to reduce the yearly fee from 777.– to 600.–, but Solnet would be even cheaper with 468.–/year. Init7 regularly successfully sues Swisscom though, which is the main reason I’m still with them, as I take immense pleasure in that.

  • Investments
    I switched my 3a funds from UBS (actively managed, 50% world stocks, TER of 1.56%) over to finpension (MSCI Quality, 0.13% TER, 0.39% custody fee). And I sold my UBS funds (actively managed, Swiss stocks, TER of 1.5%, transaction costs of 1.2%, custody fees of 0.38%) and bought an FTSE All-World ETF with neon (0.15% TER, no transaction costs, no custody fees).

  • Banking
    I had a banking package with UBS that cost me 120.–/year. The included Mastercard used for household purchases has been replaced by the Certo card. I haven’t used my Maestro card in ages so I canceled that. I used LSV with most of my regular payments (credit card, rent etc.) in the past and have switched everything to eBill and standing orders to make those payments independent of any bank account. With everything set up this way, canceling the banking package with UBS was easy. I am now using a free account with neon.

The above changes result in me saving over 1000.–/year. Not included are the better forex rate for purchases abroad, cashback from various sources and better performance (apart from TER) from switching to index funds.

But what is immeasurable, worth much more than those 1000.–/year, are two things:

  • I feel much better now with regard to retirement. It was always this kind of ominous thing that I knew I had to deal with, but never wanted to. Now I know exactly what happens financially when retiring, what my goals are for retirement and what I’ll have to do to get there. This plan will likely change multiple times, but I have the knowledge to adapt it to new circumstances.

  • My mindset has changed. Away from «just put money in a savings account, and I’ll deal with retirement somewhere down the road». Now I’m gradually shifting my savings into ETFs to let my money work for me. Granted, I still need to live through my first big crash and come out the other side unscathed. But I’m optimistic I won’t do too badly.

And I have to thank an insurance agent trying to sell me 3a insurance for that. How absurd.

Last but not least: a huge thank you to all the people on this forum, who share their knowledge and have helped me so much.

Now I need to learn a bit of restraint and not go tell everybody I meet they should start investing TODAY and have they heard of passively managed index funds and compounding.

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I switched my family to Galaxus (CH Unlimited) a while back.

I’m afraid that personally, as an UBS shareholder, I cannot approve, but … probably a good decision for you!
:wink:

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I prefer the Swisscom network because I had better coverage where I lived, hence why I’m with Wingo. But I did think about switching to Galaxus, maybe the differences aren’t really that noticeable anymore.

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I’ll give you that, but the person most susceptible to coverage is my soon 19yr old son. He complains the most about coverage (initially with Swisscom, then with Salt and now with Galaxus/Sunrise).

I bet you cannot guess which April 2024 (Galaxus) data consumption graph belongs to my son’s mobile phone:*

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You can cancel Galaxus on short notice if you want to try it out.** From their help center:

* For simpler accounting please ignore that he didn’t use data this month for 5 days and counting because of travel and him cautiously saving his included monthly 1GB international data limit for Europe/US.
** Not a promoter, just a fan.

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It’s funny how I see some common things

  • cancelled 3a at UBS and moved to Finpension
  • cancelled Gold credit card package and moved to Certo
  • mainly use Revolut in Europe
  • I think UBS should eliminate fees from their basic banking package now that even ZKB is free.

Thanks for sharing. Hope you will be well prepared for the next crash / bull run whatever comes first.

For mobile - it is so annoying that you can never really judge the quality of network without really owning the sim. I also learnt that sometimes service providers put you in second class network depending on which brand you bought the service from even though the actual network might be same.

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Why would they do so if no one of their customer wish to look after another bank? Except from people here, the majority of citizen in this country just know 2-3 banks: UBS, PostFinance, their cantonal bank. Maybe Raiffeisen, but they also know the pain to be with them if you need to change canton (I’m with them and it amazed me how their system work… At least, they have a great app and a great e-banking, reason why I’m with them).

And for @assemblyrequired welcome aboard, this forum is truly helpfull and a great source of knowledge!

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Well, eventually competition catches up. ZKB is free, Swissquote is free, Neon is free. UBS need to act too. Of course they care about not losing business. Why do they offer 1.75% for bringing new money?

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I am with them and also changed canton. No pain. I’m still under the old canton’s Raiffeisen (it’s permitted).

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Around once a year there’s a great offer on QoQa for Sunrise TV + 10 Gbit Internet for around 42.-/month for a lifetime. I took the deal a bit more than a year ago and I’m more than satisfied, only had one downtime, which has been solved by restarting the router.

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I agree, when I changed the Canton, the “new” Raiffeisen offered to move my account from the “old” one, but why would I want to do it? One can be a customer of two different Raiffeisen, with separate state 100k guarantee and with a separate ~3% dividends on the the Membership shares.

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As for my expérience, we could move the account of my girlfriend, but they messes up and she was table to use her account for a week (guess what, it was just before Christmas and they’Ve Said it won’t be a problem with their open day (well it was I guess).

For mine, they couldn’t do it but weren’t able to explain why and they suggest to look with my previous Raiffeisen bank :grimacing: I just told them to closed the previous one and open a new one since I didn’t care about having the same IBAN… So my experience was cheap with them. I also heard the similar experience from other friends and family.

I guess my girlfriend and I weren’t lucky :sweat_smile:

I totally agree with you, but it seems that despite this a lot of people just ignore alternative or doesn’t care about it because they want to stick with a big bank for safety?

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Or simply because for some people it is not possible to have an account at another bank, depending on nationality for example.

Before, there were at least two choices. Now there’s just one :slightly_smiling_face:.

Welcome @assemblyrequired :partying_face:

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When Yallo first introduced Internet via coaxial cable, there was a lifetime offer for 15.95 per month including TV. I was happy to get one, there has never been a better deal in the last 2 years :smile:

Zum Start am Dienstag bietet Yallo «während maximal zwei Tagen eine limitierte Anzahl von «Home Max Cable»-Paketen inklusive 1 Gbit/s-Internet und Yallo TV für dauerhaft CHF 14.95/Mt. statt CHF 79.00/Mt. an» (Watson)

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I have received the votation proposal from my local Raiffeisen, they are proposing to modify the statutes to allow to be a bank member, even if you don’t live or have an activity nearby.
So in the future, people will be able to keep their account with the current Raiffeisen bank when they are moving. In the past, it was quite a grey area.

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Ok, so what’s the deal with Raiffeisen, have I missed something juicy :grin:?

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Hi OP,

I was really surprised reading your post. We were thinking and walking similar paths. Over the past 2 years I have made these same changes…neon, finpension, wingo lol. I was looking at every aspect of my spending and trying to minimize and optimize.

I saw that you have both AMEX and certo. How is that working for you? Personally I like to keep things as simple as possible so basically using the swisscard AMEX (when it’s possible) and then swisscard visa or neon card when AMEX isn’t accepted.

You may want to look into IBKR, you have access to more index funds and someone correct me, lower fees?

One thing I still need to do is close my UBS account. I made the switch to neon and I initially gave myself some time before closing to make sure no incoming or outgoing payments still go through UBS. I am still debating if neon alone is enough, or if I should open an account in a bank with a free package just to have for some comfort, things like not being limited to CHF500/month on TWINT, and being able to withdraw cash easier/without fees.

Just like you, I was telling my family about these changes. Some already did, and some just don’t care or too lazy to check their accounts. Oh well.

I feel like I made a lot of changes, but reading through this forum there are so many threads too advanced for me. Like I just am seeing the tip of the iceberg.

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AMEX
I found it is not accepted in a lot of places. Often you find out it’s not accepted only after the payment terminal throws an error, then I have to ready the other card on my iPhone, sometimes the clerk has to re-enter the amount again etc. At least it’s accepted where I spend most of my money (Coop and Digitec Galaxus). But I thought about decluttering and just using my neon card. I’ll re-evaluate after 1 year.

TWINT
It’s a shame neon doesn’t have a standalone TWINT app, and they said they don’t plan to as they want to use the new instant payment between banks (can’t remember what it’s called). But I don’t really use it that much, and extrapolating after my first 3 months of using prepaid TWINT with its 5k yearly limits, it looks like I will have sent and received about 1-2k after a year, so way under the limits.

Banking
I only cancelled my banking package (monthly fees went from 10.– to 3.–). I still have my private account where I, just like you, am waiting to see if there are any transactions still. I’ll wait another month or so and then close it.
With neon I get 2 cash withdrawals per month for free. I probably haven’t withdrawn money more than twice the entire last year. I use Apple Pay all the time, I don’t carry cash anymore.

IBKR
I tried it. But I don’t understand how it works, it’s so intransparent to me. I even made a post about that here. I don’t plan to add more ETFs in the near future, so neon is still the cheapest (i.e. free) way for me to invest (although not in US-based ETFs). I feel much more comfortable with Swissquote’s interface, and with Postfinance (which uses Swissquote’s interface apparently) it should be quite cheap to invest quartertly in 1 ETF. So that’s probably what I’d switch to if my needs or neon’s offer were to change.

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I don’t really use it much on a regular basis except for parking. But when I do use it, normally when I buy for something from ricardo or fb. Then again, maybe having a cap is a good thing for me.

Oh I didn’t think about this. But for my situation, I should just rip this bandaid soon.

For neon I think it’s fine, but just a reminder that postfinance and swissquote have a high custody fees, CHF18 and CHF20 per quarter (minimum) respectively.

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I had read another explanation from them. It was mainly that TWIN generates charges, particularly for the bank that uses the service, and that neon’s policy is to have the lowest charges, so it couldn’t afford this type of service as they don’t want to charge customer for the usage of this service.

For the record, the name of the payment service is SIC5, which is trivial for the new SIIX payment processor :slightly_smiling_face:.

I think I’ve mentioned this before in another thread, but this type of expense is specifically tax-deductible.

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As far as I understood Twint costs about 1.25% to the vendors. It’s a bit strange because lot of people use Twint for debit cards. Debit cards linked payments fees should be lower.

Having said that, TWINT was formed by the key banks of Switzerland, so most likely they some sort of money back . But Neon is not part of shareholders of Twint.