Free bank account in a cantonal bank that could be fully managed online

Here the confirmation that canton Jura is covering

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You can never be sure, unless you store it in a safe at home. If there’s suddenly a crash and everyone wants to withdraw his money, you can have as much state guarantee as you want. Also you’ll probably have way worse problems not related to money if this ever happens


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Fully agree. Gauss taught us this sometime ago.
Yet, what I am trying to do, since I cannot zero the risk, is to minimize it.
I am eventually too much crazy, but that’s my idea


Two debit cards indeed, but the Mastercard ones. They have the 16-digits number which allow you to shop online, book cars and hotels. I have used them since a long time now, without problem. Only thing is that sometimes, the guaranteed amount is deducted from your account during the reservation time. Not really a credit card.

Thanks for the clarification.
Indeed the Jura cantonal bank offer is more and more appealing to me.
Very weird that no one in this forum apotted out and made it public this before.

What’s about the customer service? Are they available or, like the big banks, you call and they out you waiting of ten minutes minimum?

For me personally it’s a higher risk to hold so much cash in the first place.

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Here the link that confirms that the Fribourg cantonal is covered by the canton too.

Nonetheless, compared to the Jura one, the offer seems to be inferior: the fee package is composed of 1 private account, 1 saving account and 1 card from the BCF that it is not a metro nor a MasterCard nor a visa, so it is only usable in their bank basically and cannot be acting as a normal credit/debit card.

Any other suggestion from the folk?

I have checked almost all cantons and Fribourg and Jura are the only 2 proposing free packages. Some otherwms are offering too, but only with some collateral conditions (hypoteke by them, minimum amount of money, minimum traffic of payment, age, 
)

Which is the first place you are referring to?

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I’m sorry I don’t understand your question.

I just wanted to say, for me it is riskier to hold a lot of cash that is not invested than having most of it invested and only hold a small % in cash (for me it’s actually less than 20k, as I started using margin loans to cover high bills such as taxes and just repay them with my monthly savings).

Is it not a bit dnageous to use loans to pay basic expenses and invest your money at risk?
I am not fully risk averse, but this would be too much for my risk appeal :frowning:

I’d say it’s personal (both in what we define as risk and in our need, ability and willingness to face it). What I’d say we absolutely need are accessible liquid assets to cover our potential expenses. Those can be cash or they can be invested.

If they are invested, then we are facing the risk of needing them when they have lost value and use more of our theoretical longer term wealth than would otherwise have been necessary. If we keep them in cash and end up not needing them, then we are facing the risk of having lowered our longer term wealth comparatively with the alternative of having those assets invested.

Balancing that, to me, means assessing in which timeframe I want to be able to reach my target (can I take the risk to have money sitting in cash?), and what odds I am willing to take to miss it, either reaching it at a later point in time than I would have liked, or not reaching it at all (can I afford to get caught with my pants down when my invested assets loose value?).

Missing on the potential upward gains constitutes a bigger risk for me, in my personal assessment, than facing an uncoverable expense with the means currently at my disposal, so I’m very low on cash. The opposite assessment that I have reached enough stability in my life to not want to risk loosing my current footing on a piling of bad luck (which does happen in life) and, as such, keeping a bigger part of my assets in quickly available cash would also be perfectly acceptable in my opinion if it matched my assessment of my situation.

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The free card included in the package from the BCF let you withdraw cash for free at any ATM from any cantonal bank in the country. But it is true, you cannot pay with it.

I don’t know if you can go to your local cantonal bank and ask them to deposit money to another cantonal bank for free. Maybe the only true limitation with cantonal banks


If you want to park money only and do some transfer with eBanking, BCF provide more than what you want.

That depends on your ability and willigness to take risks.

Offtopic:
Currently the margin rates for CHF are 1.5%, that means that I pay around CHF 300 per year for a CHF 20’000 loan (which is roughly the amount of my tax bill). It takes me around 4-5 months to pay back the loan, so in the end I paid less than CHF 100 this year and the dividends alone from having this CHF 20’000 invested more than covered the interest I paid.
As I only take margin loans up to around 10% of the invested assets, the risk for getting a margin call is extremly low.

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Hello,
Today I have been contacting both Jura and Fribourg cantonal banks and they have both told me that to open an account by them you need at least the first time to go in any of their branches in person.
Later on you can use the system you have been mentioning about going to a third cantonal bank. They mentioned that, as an example you can do this when you have a new passport and you need to change the document you provided them.

Let’s see.if I will have once to go to the Jura.

This creates a bit of a blockage in going directly for this option, yet, I am not stressed in doing it tomorrow


Any comment or correction?

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IIRC BCV could be done entirely online. If you don’t have > 100k the cantonal guarantee won’t make a difference.

Probably not the kind of answers you were expecting but Jura is beautiful this time of the year. If you are planning holidays of any kind in the near term and like fairy-like nature, you could do worse than killing two birds with one stone by spending some time there.

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Could not agree more, but i am not very objective. Go to the Franches-Montagnes for holidays and open your account in Saignelégier ! :slight_smile:

Also if you plan to go only to open your acocunt, Delémont is one hour train from Bern.

To continue with an offtopic: have anyone thought about Canton Jura as a place for FIRE? Taxes are high, but if your taxable income is low and other expenses are low, might be worth checking.

Not a bad idea. Let’s see if I can organize an hike in the region. In autumn Jura should be pretty nice.

On the banking topic, it is ist a pity that they are not following Vaud example. It seems that they do not necessarily want more customers, yet prefer to have “better” ones. Having people to go in person my help for a first selection. I see their point

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BCV is not perfect neither. I once asked for a very basic service and the lady on the phone told me that the service can only be provided in person at a counter.

I don’t live very far from Vaud, but I also cannot take day off to deal with things other banks can do remotely


For me, the cantonal banks work well, but it is better not to live too far away because all the processes are not yet digitalized and a visit is sometimes still necessary


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