Hi everyone! I have been given notice of termination and two possible ‘exit routes’: severance package or extended coaching period during which I continue to be paid as normal. My question is how does RAV treat one off severance packages? I am getting conflicting opinions on this one. Some say I will be able to claim unemployment from the first day after notice period, while others suggest that RAV will consider the severance as non loss of income, thereby delay payment of benefits. Anyone know or have personal experience on this topic? Thanks in advance!
Sorry to hear what you go through. The Unemployment Insurance covers 70-80% of your salary. If you already receive amounts that compensate this (like a severance package), they reduce the payout accordingly. What does this mean?
You must register as if you didn’t receive a package. They give you the same treatment and penalties if you don‘t apply enough. But before they pay anything, they count it against your severance.
What to do? If you think you find a job during your termination notice period: take the severance. If you think it might be tight and you would end up unemployed: take the extended garden leave. But the risk is if you still find a job, you lose your severance benefit - unless you can convince them to start late.
IF you can negotiate the package: ask your employer if they pay the severance package into your pension und? That is the best way out if you are not sure whether you would become unemployed.
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From Q&A by union, iirc it depend on the amount of the severance (but the limit was fairly high maybe 100k+?)
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Thanks for the feedback - I also heard something very similar. I find it amazing that there is no clear-cut answer on this. I also asked for legal advice from my insurance and they were not 100% sure either. I guess the only way to find out is to ask RAV
Thank you for your reply! And that’s a good tip…! My decision whether to take extended gardening or package boils down to this point so it’s quite important to know. Talking to people who know others that have had similar experience, some say that RAV will not bother if the package received is below a threshold (they mentionded ~100k but not a hard figure). In any case, I don’t have another job lined up and i think it’s a challenging job market, so I would rather go with extended gardening leave if things are as you described (and I can’t get severance into pension…). Thanks again
the Problem is that whether RAV will let you keep your severance or not; i understand that is to a certain extent depending on the canton and potentially even the RAV agent. I hear stories in both directions; and it probably as well depends on your circumstances. If you were older and with dependents, they would probably let you keep it but if you were younger it may become more challenging.
What I would probably do, if pension was no option. Ask them if you can decide on severance or extension in a month or two (before the end of the notice), in the meantime do some hard core job search and then re-assess based on your feel of employability. Don’t loose faith, its a painfull process but once you got through it, it can be relieving that you passed this once. Had to run through such process about 10 years ago. Please feel free to ping me privately if you feel like.
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RAV will ask (you as well as your employer) when your last active working day was. This is I suspect their way of rooting out cases of people ‘hiding’ their severance through extended notice periods.
The Swiss system is interesting in that RAV / ALK is entirely not interested in learning about your savings, equity in house, etc. In many other countries they’d want to know about that and ensure you’d “eat” that up first as well. RAV / ALK just wants to know your severance.
A couple of thoughts on this
- RAV (to a certain limit) will do a calculation comparing your severance vs. your prior 12 months comp/ben and based on this will determine how many months they’ll NOT pay you unemployment benefits (thought being youc an afford it yourself for a while based on your severance)
- I realized this too late but one way around this could be by working with your employer to shift severance to bonus
- Another way could be to have yourself be terminated with notice period but no severance and then agree that the employer pays your ‘severance’ as an interim consulting fee for a period of time… once that runs out, you go to RAV and there’s no severance for them to consider
That last idea (which I’ve not put to the test) actually also triggers a different thought. Let’s say you get a big fat severance and then go to RAV - they’ll want you to eat part of it up before they give you benefits. Wouldn’t it be nice if you’d get a job shortly after your notice period and then get let go after a while. The prior severance (if outside of 12 months period) is no longer relevant for RAV as it’s just part of your assets. I wonder if there’s a legal way to set this up without upsetting RAV and without making it terribly expensive.
I get a feel this will devolve into a moral discussion again. 
Not sure you’ll get advice on how best to “trick RAV”.
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Taking a stance: nor should you IMO give advice, if you’re in the category of basically financially independent, as some people here giving advice seem to be.