How about demographic survey?

I don’t understand what taxes mean in “Yearly Salary (personal, incl. bonus, excl. taxes)”. Which taxes ? the 1st and 2nd pillars ?

And does the “net worth” include the house ? the 3rd pillar ?

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I’d say that 1st pillar should be counted as tax (on top of regular federal/cantonal/municipal taxes), while 2nd and 3rd pillars count towards your net worth. House is obviously counted towards your net worth (the part of it that which you own and not the bank).

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28 Answers so far (I do not think there will be many more). Not quite as much as I expected but I guess we can still squeeze some information out of it. What I see so far, job wise, seems to match MMM pretty well.

I will start to do some analysis and show of some results here (unless @_MP wants exclusive rights) however with that small a sample size the data has to be treated with a mountain of salt.

@chestwood96 thanks for the update!
Feel free to share and exchange about the data here on the forum. I will pack-up a blogpost afterwards.

Also, I currently translate all the blogposts in French, so I might ask the Romandie readers to fill the survey — and maybe we get more replies then.

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@_MP So should I wait with the analysis a little until the romands filled the form?

Should the survey be translated? (I can not help a lot with that as my french is terrible)

Jais ne sais pas je suis un pomme de terre

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@chestwood96 go ahead with english first. I won’t have time to translate and ping Romand people.
Maybe I do a second round later on.

Well here I go I guess (still just 30 Answers), here are some crude graphs

Age distribution
I guess there is some pattern here (do people get more responsible when they turn 30?)
Age distribution

Gender distribution
I expected this to be mostly male but I still did not expect by that much.
Gender distribution

Origin
Only 2 answers grew up outside Europe but most of them did not grow up in Switzerland
Origin country

Canton
More than half of the Answers came from Zürich or the adjacent cantons (may be interesting for future meetup)
Canton

Maritial Status
I guess FI is easier in a relationship
Maritial Status

Children
No idea what to do with this info
Children

Living situation
There seem to be more people living with Spouse/Concubinage than there are people in some form of relationship, wired.
Living

Job
Who would have expected that?
Job

Full time equivalent
Well that is boring
FTE

Salary
Nice
Salary

Household income
Slightly messier
HousholdIncome

Fillers part of household income
How much of the Household income is from the filler
FillerPart

Net-worth
There seems to be a hole in the middle
networth

Savingsrate
Almost all are above the government recommended 15% XD
savingsrate

Monthly expenses
I rounded them up to the next 1000 so it groups a little nicer
expenses

Target retirement age
Wooo goals
tra

Distance from desired retirement age
Rounded to the next 5Year block
Most pepole are looking at <15years
chart

There is a lot more I could do with this data but I will leave it at that for now

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I can understand 150k, but who and how the hell is earning 200k-300k here? And there are two families earning about half million a year? Oh man, I’m envious. :smile:

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Well it was a survey so there is always the possibility of someone just bullshitting it and I have note enough samples to filter the outliers out.

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You mean half a million a year, right? There is at least one forum user from Zurich publishing their monthly numbers who is reportedly earning in the 200-250k range per year (bonuses and stock options included), so it seems to add up (although the only answer around there is in the 250-300k).

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I did the grouping “upper exclusive” so 250k lands in 250-300k and not in 200-250k

Mostly stock options. Big corporations can be really generous with them, it’s crazy, and the bull market helps too. It’s not even a particular senior position. More senior folks (but not even director level) dig north of 400k where i work. Double earners at same company so double the salary.

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Well that explains the exact 50/50 split in income. This seemed kind of unusual to me. Thanks for sharing that information. You will be FI in no time, assuming you skip the yacht club XD.

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Dude, you gotta tell me where you work. I have to send my CV there right now. :smiley:

Sure, feel free to browse through the vacancies or just send a CV to recruiters anyway - versatile SWEs and machine learning experts are in constant demand even if not explicitly advertised on the site

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could be interesting to plot some correlation with “age expected to retire”.

Like children vs target age
Household Income vs target age
Homeowners vs target age
Renting vs target age

we imagine there is a correlation (more kids, later retirement), but maybe is not true

I already did the distance to target Age which gave me the impression most people just put that about 10 years in the future (or placed it there a couple of years back).

I am pretty sure I have no renting/homeowner data so I can not do this (that would have been interesting tho, why did you not post that during the brainstorming?)

Sadly there is not nearly enough data for really meaningful correlations but I might try the Children and Income ones later today.

I knew google payed well but I did not think that well, I personally would have guessed you were in private banking or something. Well there is no way I qualify but still interesting XD.

@Grog
Average target retirement age vs Children
No Children : 45.8
1+ Children : 48.4

Very little data, so take with a truckload of salt.

It really depends on the company and the industry sector. Moreover, a lot of big companies prefer to hire contractors instead of company employees to improve earnings by employee ratio.

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Short summary: people the filled the survey believe in passive investing (and do it at regular intervals: unit cost averaging / dollar-cost averaging ???), are mostly in their 30s, Male, making Swiss salaries, working in software and saving quite a bit more than the norm, and trying to not waste a lot of money on Swiss stuff (internet/tv/simcards, insurance, transport, super-market, etc).
Maybe it’s just people that answered the survey that are mostly like that…but these answers are very similar indeed.

Things to be careful about: confirmation bias. In case you want some more confirmation bias read John Kay “The Long and the Short of it: A Guide to Finance and Investment for Normally Intelligent People Who Aren’t in the Industry”…

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