Hi Weirded,
Thanks for your question. I will try to expand a little bit about my mindset regarding expenses.
First, as I said, I don´t have kids yet. However we plan to have children in the near future so we are heavily documenting ourselves about how to integrate them in our system without compromising their happiness. But this is still in progress.
I am also lucky to have a wonderful wife who has the same mindset as me regarding expenses and it helps a lot.
Right after children, our priority number one is to retire in Poland in ten years.
When it comes to spending, I try to comply to these two principles :
- Always get great value for the paid price
- Minimize depreciation as much as possible. I have created a topic on that subject here.
With that in mind, let us try to review the most common spendings :
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Biggest one is obviously housing. When I compare the price of buying versus renting for the same surface, this is a no brainer in Switzerland : buying is much more expensive and i don´t think it is a good idea to buy your principal residence, it is better to rent and invest the remaining money. Usually a good rule of thumb is that buying is a good option if the price to buy is equal to 100-150 monthly rents for a similar house/apartment. This is obviously not the case in Switzerland, so let´s rent.
Furthermore I live in Zürich where the housing market is very tight, and you may feel that it is more the apartment which chooses you than the other way around. Nevertheless we were lucky enough to find a 2.5 room apartment in the southern extremity of Zürich (Leimbach) for 1500/month, expenses included. It is a little bit smaller than swiss usual standards (63 square meters) but as we were coming from Paris where apartment are very tiny, this was already a huge surface for us. Plus, we got a nice view through the windows on the Glarner Alps, which is a big plus for the mood
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Transportation : I usually bike, though i am considering a ZVV subscription for winter months. I think when we will have kids the Zvv subscription will become mandatory. When we want to go outside zürich with train, we look for Spar tickets on the SBB website(-50% without the halb tax card). If the train is not an option, then we would rent a car.
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Food: Food is also a category where you cannot minimize depreciation (because, once it is eaten it is gone) so we should look deeply into that. I came to the conclusion that the only reason prices are so high at Coop/Migros is because Swiss people can afford it. Or perhaps they take advantage of the cognitive bias of the fact that higher price = higher perceived value. Prices there have nothing to do with value. So we go to Lidl. Let´s take bananas as an example : how can we justify that bananas (which are obviously not raised in Switzerland) cost almost 3Fr/kg at Coop/Migros whereas only 1.49 at Lidl? And don´t tell me the usual high salary excuse, because cashiers at Lidl already earn 4000CHF per month. From my experience Lidl has good quality, swiss made products when possible. But the packaging is not as nice. Well, when I look for food I don´t want to eat the package so i don´t care. Going to Lidl allowed us to divide by two our food expenses : around 250 fr per person per month. And we eat meat twice a day. We also have some other tricks (like using a slow cooker for making big meal batches), but going to Lidl is the one with the biggest impact.
-Clothes : When I buy clothes I usually look for clothes that will last a long time. So first conclusion is that I am not looking for the current fashion, and second conclusion is that i am willing to pay twice as much if I know that the item will last three time longer. For instance, my pair of winter boots (Crockett & Jones) are worth quite a lot of money (i bought them for around 500 euros) but they did not deteriorate in three years and I am convinced that they will last me ten another years. For the overall picture, When I started working six years ago I also started to assemble a wardrobe of basics : a set of intemporal but good tshirts, shirts, shoes, winter coat, summer jacket, and so on. Every season i would add an item of good quality to my wardrobe, following the same principles of looking for quality at a good price, and looking for stuffs that would last long. it took three years and a half. but now the consequence is that in the last two years i never bought any clothes. The exception being my wedding suit this fall (but i made sure that this suit can also be used for business purposes, so here again i minimize depreciation).
And don`t think that it is not compatible with style : I regularly get compliments from my coworkers about how elegant i am.
-Vacations : well with my wife we are big lovers of hiking. We arrived in Switzerland this year, so we decided that these summer vacations would be hiking in Switzerland. Now it can be expensive if you go to hotels, restaurants and so on. Or you can minimize all of that by renting a RV for several weeks and going in a big road trip with hiking halts, and cooking yourself. We did that when we went to Iceland two years ago and we decided that it would be our standard mode of vacation.
-Social activities : This one is also big, because we live in a city where a beer costs 8 francs, a cocktail more than 20 and a burger in a restaurant 30 francs. Our answer is simple : I almost never go out (well, around once every two months) Instead (because having a social life is important), we have a lot of friends that we invite at our home, and everybody brings something. That way you keep contact and good moments with people, and you learn to cook very good dishes yourself.
-A final thought : As a general rule, in Switzerland as soon as you need someone else to do something for you (most services), it is going to be expensive. So my advice would also be to learn and acquire the skills that you need the most so you don´t have pay people to do it for you. Look at your credit card summary and see where your expenses are going and try to think if you can not internalize these services/skills. For instance, i cut my hair myself. My wife too. A good advantage of this is that you are never bored because you always want to learn something new.
I hope this helps you to understand my mindset regarding expenses