Max Out Pillar 3a or Put All Savings Into ETFs?

Investing / Others
24

You can overweight Berkshire Hathaway :laughing:.

I was seriously considering this, but didn’t like their ESG profile.

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26

Most people earn that from employment/work and dividend income will be a substantially smaller part of that (for most). For purposes of optimising tax on dividend/investments, it can therefore be argued that we should rather look at the marginal tax rate. Which even in Zug is more than >20%.

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27

Based on my experience with Pillar 3A benefits calculation - I would have thought that the 30% braket (in the canton of Zurich) starts somewhere in the range of 120k. 35% may be a bit higher but I doubt it was much. As San Francisco stated, we care about Marginal tax rate but not total tax rate.

28

At CHF 105’500 the ~30% tax bracket starts in the city of Zurich for unmarried people. So if you have a 113k+ taxable income (before 3a), the marginal tax rate for the 3a deduction is at least 30% in Zurich. The corresponding gross income would be higher, of course. And the tax rate is lower in some of the other towns in ZH.

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30

You can generally deduct about 3% of Berufsauslagen and roughly 6-8k for canteen, transport and the like. Then there is the AHv and Pension Fund deduction too - lets take this as 10% together.

Unless you contribute to your pension fund
 a 105k taxable income (post 3a) equates to a Contract + Bonus figure of 130 to 132k. This is certainly high but not unrealistic. Another 10k more (so 140 to 145) probably puts you in the 35% bracket.

Yes, a flat allows to deduct renovation cost hut in reality, this is to a big extent a cost and not a tax optimization as such - this as your house‘s value generally doesnt increase by your renovation amount. You spend this to retain the houses value. That was probably less visible in the prior RE bull run but trust me, renovation cost was even there a losers game as your house would have just like that increased.

Plus remember - these are just City & State Taxes; Federal Taxes are on top of this.

31

No, the ~30% bracket starting at CHF 105’500 already includes federal taxes. 11.9% city, 9.9% canton and 8.8% federal.

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