New Mustachian late to FIRE Journey!

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Hi Community,

I’m 38 years old, moved to CH before pandemic in 2020. My partner and me both work in IT and earn around~230K/yr together. Our major monthly costs are around 60% of what we earn and savings are around 35-40% on an average.

I’m quite new to this investment journey that I started around 3 years back. Before this I never considered investing at all and had the impression that it involved a lot of risk, so all of my savings were lying around in my bank accounts. Now, I regret that I started this journey too late and hoping that it is still not too late for my retirement planning.

I started investing heavily in equities from last year and invested almost 150k (VT(30%), VOO(30%), CHSPI(10%), stocks(30%) through IBKR from 2 accounts me & my partner. I know I’m exposed too much in US market and I would like to diversify into other markets but don’t have a clear view on how to invest in European ETFs or if it is good also to invest in developing/emerging markets as well.

As of today, I don’t have a clear goal of being retired at what age with what amount of sum but that is something I will be planning along the way of this journey.

Now that most of my investments are into equities and I’m using IBKR for my major investments though I did register my account to Swissquote but never used it. For simplicity & economic reasons, I kept only one platform for my major investments. Now, I worry about the platform that I’m using from diversification perspective, if it is wise to keep only single platform for all my investment. I’ve few questions about the investment platforms and would like to have opinions from fellow mustachians:

  • IBKR is totally online, is it safe to keep a big amount of investment in there ?
  • Is there any strategy around setting the limit on investment sum on a single platform and once the limit is reached, should we think about moving to some other platform ?
  • Do you think we should diversify our investments on different platforms instead of sticking to one platform ?
  • Are there any good investment platforms for long-term investment in CH?

And I look forward to share and consumer other mustachians opinions and expertise :slight_smile:

Thanks,

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Then why not sell everything except chspi and VT and dump it all into VT?

With a small home bias and just market cap weighted world market you cannot go wrong.
You are not taking bets and just let the market ride for you. It‘s simple, effective and makes you stop asking what could be the best going forward.

On IBKR: you are not gonna beat it fee wise. And any other platform will cost you.

I‘d not even think about a second one below 500K. That‘s also the SIPC security threshhold,

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Welcome and all the best

I use both IBKR & Swissquote. Mainly for diversification of brokerage purposes. And also I somehow wanted a Swiss broker too where I can knock on their doors if I really had to.

All this is very personal and maybe doesn’t apply for everyone. For me investing is not only about optimisation of costs , it’s also about optimisation of personal peace of mind. Just try to find balance.

I diversify everything -: Brokerages, Fund houses, ETF domiciles, Banks :slight_smile:

I also started with IBKR only but then later added SQ to my mix. I buy UCITS ETFs on SQ though.

——/

It’s good that you are thinking about international diversification. I recommend you to watch the videos from Ben felix about this

But remember you are already using VT which has exposure to all countries. So if you don’t have specific focus on Europe or CH or Emerging, then you can just use VT or any other world ETF.

However if you want specific exposure to regions, JUSTETF is a good website to sort through major ETFs. Some of my favourite ones are following. But there are many to choose from.

  • EIMI for Emerging markets
  • VEUR for Europe
  • FLXI for India
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Thanks for a descriptive and precise response :slight_smile:

I’m glad that I’m on right track on diversifying the assets, brokerages & Banks. Diversifying fund houses, what kind of risks do we see at fund house levels for ETF investments ?

Also, is there any thread/link that describes about various fees & taxes to manage the ETFs on Swissquote platform ?

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Actually fund house diversification is not really that important in my view because underlying instruments are majorly the same.

It’s just that I don’t feel like seeing vanguard everywhere in my portfolio :slight_smile: that’s all. In addition they are not really cheapest in UCITS range. See here

For detailed review of Swissquote, read this

ETF leaders -: this link might be best to check our various ETFs available on Swissquote. Somehow the link doesn’t work when you click it but it you click products and then ETF and then ETF leaders , it would work. Kind of strange

Best to use ETFs available under „ETF leaders“ as they are available at flat fee of 9 CHF while others are more expensive to trade. I normally use only SSAC or SPDR ACWI on Swissquote to keep life simple.

P.S -: since SQ is obviously much more expensive versus IB. I tend to keep number of trades minimum.