Expat long term investment options?

Investing / Portfolios
1

Hello all,

Nice to be part of the new community. Apologies for the novice questions – hopefully your answers can aid others with the same questions.

I’m currently investigating best options available to me, since taking the initial dive into FI. My wife and I have been living in Switzerland for the past year, both earning healthy sums, and wanting to make the absolute most of the situation. The longer we stay, the more we feel this will turn out to be a long term move, but not 100% certain. With that in mind, could anyone suggest what some of the better options available to us are?

I’m aiming for the 3 fund portfolio, so is it to our advantage to use the typical VTSMX, VGTSX and VBMFX through a broker such as Interactive Brokers? Are there clear recommendations for Swiss/UK residents for a 3 fund portfolio that I have missed?

Thanks!

2

Hey Drebbin,
MP pointed out on his blog a few nice possibilities, namely Interactive brokers. check it out! It is not specific Swiss/UK.

3

Hey Drebbin,

Interactive Brokers UK/US (IB) will charge you 15 USD to transfer money to these mutual funds.

Unless you invest very large lump sums at once, you may be better off looking at their ETF counterpart (VTI, VXUS, BND) which trade like stocks (check the pros/cons of each investment medium first).

Other US brokers accepting international customers may let you invest commission free in these ETFs and/or mutual funds but probably do not offer FOREX like IB does (to convert CHF to USD/EUR/GBP for example).

Also a wire transfer to IB from postfinance costs up to 10 CHF (it varies with other banks I heard), so other brokers may be cheaper depending how often, what type of sum you invest.

1 Like
4

ETFs trade on U.S exchange have a 30% tax on dividends.

In most cases, the cheapest swiss brokers for ETFs are Swissquote and CornerTrader.

5

15% with the US IRS “W-8EN” non US resident form filled in with your broker.
These remaining 15% may be used as Tax Credit with the DA-1 form (never done it personally, I will try next year).

2 Likes
6

If you are not an US citizen paying tax a Tax Credit is useless right ?
15% with the US IRS “W-8EN” non US resident form filled in with your broker -> I need to check if Swissquote offer that.

7

There’s now a swiss IBAN that you can use for free transfers to IB from PostFinance. There are more details in another thread.

1 Like