Between us, I would not trust one single word from the customer support of Saxo, IBKR, Degiro or Swissquote. They can tell you the most unhinged shit to close a ticket - with a straight face.
I’m lucky to have some professional knowledge about the IRS and the financial services industry - enough to spot when someone is reading from a hallucinating AI; but I had to advise my relatives against calling them, because, just wow.
Anyway, we are planning for a situation that could happen in many years of ever-evolving laws and regulations. We should leave a clean house in any case.
They have to run yearly due diligence checks, requiring signature of both spouses. Sooner or later, they will know that one spouse is deceased and will have to audit any post-mortem actions, except if the surviving spouse conceals it by committing fraud. One way or another, it’s a serious crime. Not worth it.
Even if it sounds trivial or fun at the beginning, it ends up being very sad.
(1) Interests of spouse excluded from gross estate. Notwithstanding subsection (a), in the case of any qualified joint interest, the value included in the gross estate with respect to such interest by reason of this section is one-half of the value of such qualified joint interest.
Seems to me married couples are split 50/50 in the normal, more intuitive way also by the IRS.
Oh yes you’re right, I read it through my personal lens. My partner and I aren’t married but hold joint accounts (on this side of the pond though, we’re not that brave ).
Sure, I also believe there’s non negligable amount of boomers with US blue chips holding with traditional swiss brokers, which should give a lot of data points (ETFs are more popular for younger generations)
Or maybe the best is a broker with a country like Germany (or France?) with a modern treaty with US with zero filing requirements for resident (more likely to not even have a process).
Edit: tho those won’t have US ETFs, only single stock.
Absolutely. Thankfully, we have no capital gain tax in this country, and we can trade at near-zero fees. It’s possible to get rid of US ISINs in minutes, without negative impact.
Imagine those elsewhere in Europe when they understand all this, while having their hands tied for many years
But many of them innocently start their investment journey in internet forums where any random dude would tell them to buy VT on IBKR with absolute confidence.
If that can help restore balance, the effect re-evaluating my use of IBKR had on me was NOT actually valuing peace of mind and, instead, going around all sorts of hassles and re-evaluations of my strategy to end up at a point I really don’t like but can’t find an actual better one (my current conclusion is that without IBKR or a similarly efficient broker nor US regulated derivatives, only stocks can efficiently be leveraged and due to their volatility, only a very small amount of leverage can be maintained outside of bigger drops - I’m not maintaining constant leverage but calibrating it to be at its max at what I expect the maximal drop to potentially be).
I’m sure the universe is balancing it out and providing peace of mind and XALL and chill at a non-US broker mindset to several people as a result.
I own it, though. I’m just disappointed that European brokers are just so bad at handling actual leverage (or I am bad at finding how to make them).
I’m following this conversation since a long time and would like to tank you all for the useful thoughts, I didn’t have much to add before.
Yesterday I sold VT and bought VWCE at XETRA because of the small spread, I don’t see many doing the same so might be not the smartest idea and I’ll keep using IBKR
After 3 years of investments, so I started quite recently, I figured out that DA-1 is not giving me back anything because of my tax situation, and that the risk of my family having to deal with foreign authorities so deeply to get their inheritance is not worthy the difference in expenses.
This said, I don’t understand why all personal finance blogs are not mentioning this details clearly, instead of claiming that VT+DA1 is the best for swiss investors and that’s it. The more I research the more I see people figuring this out by themselves.
It actually used to be fairly uncommon with most people not even agreeing about the exemption limit. Took a while for people to agree that given the exemption, the risk was fairly low.
(And I think the paperwork is manageable for my personal case, no complex property, below the limited without listing deductions so only need to list gross assets, I think the French paperwork will be more painful (as well as the French dual taxation))
There might also be some biases, bigtech employees have been pretty visible on FIRE forums and for them it won’t make any difference since they’re already exposed with RSUs.
(Btw it also means if you truly want to avoid estate tax implications, also you won’t be able to do stock picking on US market, no TSLA or BRK.B).
Because most people simply repeat what they heard somewhere
Very few bother to understand the full process or details.
I personally think that everything is okay as long as investors know about details . But I notice lot of people these days don’t believe in deeper research
Maybe you are referring to Dunnig-Kruger effect? You need to build expertise in order to realise how ignorant you are. Until that point, the less you know, the more confident you are, which explains the spectacular overconfidence of men in their twenties.
If you don’t know and feel overwhelmed, it’s also okay to pay for professional help like the one below. After all, many delegate very basic Swiss tax filings.
in 2026, the scrutiny on cross-border money movement is higher than ever. An error or a missing “certified” translation of a foreign will won’t just result in a rejection; it can trigger a multi-month “black hole” of administrative delay. Most international families find that the cost of an attorney is far less than the cost of having assets frozen for an extra year due to a DIY filing error.
…or to just UCITS and chill, because there is no such thing as VT and chill if you have (or will have) heirs.
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).
and I’ll keep using IBKR