Financial advice - 32y/o, married

Share your story
1

Hi all

I am new to the community. 32 years old, from zurich (Bülach). I am married and own my own flat.

I started fairly new with my investing journey and still learn day by day.

I am looking for advice on how to invest my savings and my further income (or lets say our further), as we both work full time right now until we have kids.

Our investings are as follow:

  • 3a Pillar with VIAC and Frankly (VIAC Global 100 and Frankly 45 moderate). Biggest money is on frankly.
  • SELMA Roboadvisor - started around 3 months ago, currently only 3k invested, increasing by 500 monthly
  • Estateguru - some P2P real estate credits, only playing around a bit, currently 2k invested
  • Swissquote - opened this account like 1 month ago and bought some VT ETF and some single stocks. Currently around 1.3k invested. But as i’m reading through the posts, i guess a different broker like DEGIRO or IB would be better for me?

As you can see, i don’t have a specific strategy right now and looking for advice on how i could change things up.

GOALS
We dont have a specific goal in mind… FIRE would be nice, but we are far away… just looking for advice grow more money :slight_smile:

Thanks!

2 Likes
3

Swissquote is good if you consider voting rights a valuable part of individual swiss stocks, since you can get your name on the shareholder registry without hassle. Others will be able to explain the advantages of Interactive Brokers and Degiro better than I do. Other than fees, I’d look at the products they offer and the tax implications of each one.

1 Like
4

u r poor

focus on increasing your earnings first of all, not optimizing your investment portfolio. It takes money to make money, even the best investment strategy in the world won’t do you any good if you have nothing in your pocket

Re brokers, yes, Interactive Brokers is the way to go.

1 Like
5

They haven’t said how much they earn and how much debt they have. They did mention they own their primary residence.

6

They count their investment assets in low thousands. For me that’s basically a rounding error, less than a month’s income

They did mention they own their primary residence.

Likely heavily mortgaged

1 Like
7

You’re a bit too enthusiastic IMO :wink: slow down.

Everyone has to start somewhere, with their first 1000 or whatever, but 6k spread over 3 providers. Much too much “diversification” for that amount. Reach 40-60k at one, then maybe think of starting at a second.

For example:
1.3k at Sq.
Minimum custody fees are 60 p.a. + VAT (i.e. 5% at the mo).
Trading fees (assuming you bought 4 positions x Fr 350) cost you 2.5%, will cost another 2.5% when you sell.
Exchanging CHF to USD another 1%.
That’s more than any profit you can realistically expect (if things go well!) going to the fees!

2 Likes
9

I think it’s too little, coming from 2 full time incomes.

Otherwise @ddosh - Welcome and good luck building your wealth!
And keep it simple at the start (VT-like wherever you feel most comfortable), as others have said; until you learn more if you are interested in certain areas.
(I would close Selma and P2P gamble, but that’s only me - unless you want to keep it as “play money”)

10

Hey all

Thanks so far for the replies!

We earn roughly around 190-200k/year/brutto.
The mortgage of the flat is around 700k.

  • VIAC/Franky - we dont have a specific stategy why we have VIAC on 100 Global (97% Stocks) and Frankly at 45% stocks. I might increase frankly as well to the “full risk” profil.

  • SELMA - I really like the idea behind it, although the fees are a little higher… but as said, i started out around 2-3 months ago and started with selma.

  • Which then led me to swissquote. But as the fees on swissquote are quit high, and i think it will take time to get to around 100k investment, i thing DEGIRO would be my go to. But again as i’m fairly new, i would need to know which ETF would be best to invest in, so i could as example invest more here than on SELMA, or stop SELMA completely…

  • Estateguru: I will keep the money there but will not invest any further in it…

So if i am correct, my best strategy would be to open an account with DEGIRO, invest in ETF (something like VT?) and keep adding money to it monthly. Stop Selma, Stop Estateguru and close the account with SwissQuote?

Cheers!

EDIT: We could obviously invest a lot more than 500.- / month… but in the past, we were living (sorry, don’t know the english term) auf hohem Fuss… so we spent a lot on holiday, cars, cloths, eating outside etc…

13

Thanks!

I read however that VT is not available on DEGIRO, only on IB… so if i would want to start out with investing my savings in VT, i would be better of with IB…?

15

Yes i’m a bit confused now :slight_smile: also read that you might aren’t able to buy VT in the near future on IB…

So i’m still “clueless” on which broker i should choose, and what ETF (like VT) i should invest in…

16

Honestly at this point, it doesn’t matter too much, pick the broker you’re comfortable with. You can always revisit in a few years when you’re gained more experience. (Though as other say, still double check that it makes sense in terms of return vs. fees, sometimes it’s better to wait if the fees will eat all your returns).

2 Likes
17

hi!

Yes, i am currently with Swissquote, but i guess/think the fee’s to buy US VT is way too high (exchange rate, buying fee’s…)?

EDIT: or would the “Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF Distributing” be a good alternate if i want to stay with SQ?

EDIT2: or buy the “Vanguard FTSE All-World UCITS ETF Distributing” on DEGIRO in Euro, as i assume it is significant cheaper on DEGIRO than on SQ?

18

The first step in my opinion should be to make a budget and start tracking expenses. Only when I realized that we had a pretty crazy 100k CHF expenses in 2019 I started looking for saving opportunities. Well 2020 won’t be much better tho…

19

Selma is way too expensive at 0.68% per year.

20

Everyone already told you - Interactive Brokers

You won’t buy your VT on degiro

I’d close all other investment accounts to simplify things, seeing as you have next to nothing on them anyway

That’s not certain and you can buy it now

1 Like
21

200k gross income means 150k cash on hand. Me + my gf spend 90k per year and that gives a decent living standard. So you could potentially invest 60k per year. Invest in VT or VWRL.

2 Likes
22

That’s w/o kids right? I think we spend too much on groceries, MrRIP recently mentioned 700 CHF for a family of 3 and I’m at more than double of that…

23

@Bojack if you dont mind, could you provide a breakdown of this 90 kchf expenditure?

Is this 90 kchf only pure expenses or does it also include investments into ETFs, Pillar 2 additional contributions, Pillar 3A investments, other investments, etc.?

24

Yes, there is a lot of potential with our income :slight_smile:

I already made a budget for us 2 so we can track expanses, and checked every insurance we have and made some optimizations (as well with mobile/internet etc.) so this should be on track.

Thanks all for the infos. I think i will do the follow steps:

  • Open an account with IB
  • Invest in VT (monthly)
  • See where it takes us

Honestly i really think i was overwhelmed with all the information and complicated things. I guess i will still use SELMA and Estateguru, as there is a small amount of money invested. How about SwissQuote? Should I take out the money (sell the stocks) and close it? The fee’s if i would just leave it as it is would be 60.- year?

If i only focus on increasing the VT portfolio, i have enough time to learn and read new things.

Cheers

2 Likes
25

Correct. I don’t how these people manage to keep their costs so low, what they buy and eat. Recently I’ve been a couple of times in Lidl. I spend 120 CHF and what I buy allows me to feed myself and my gf for 5 days. Buying more makes no sense since the meat would go bad anyway. So if we only buy in Lidl and not anywhere else, we’re looking at 720 CHF per month, but no kid here. I guess it’s possible but you would have to be really strict and buy in bulk. I just buy what I like.

2 Likes