Hello Everyone,
my first post.
This is my situation:
When can I consider myself FI?
Should I buyback 2nd pillar?
Any other tip?
Thanks everyone 
If you like to keep working for a few years more, buying into 2nd pillar would be a good way to shelter excess funds from taxes (don’t dip into your allocation)
Other than that… free enough
if you can buy a property in cash in the area where you like to live, thats a good gauge of being close to FI. Keep going…
Today? 60k expenses are 3.4% of your liquid assets and we’re even ignoring retirement accounts.
Hi @gas031 you seem in a great situation. All my suggestions are details:
Do you need that much cash? You could potentially get a higher return if you invest some of this money.
Investing in US ETFs would be more tax efficient. But this would involve changing your broker to Saxo or Interactive Brokers.
Viac or finpension have slightly lower costs for their 3a products.
First: check your 2nd pillar conditions. What is the interest they have paid in the past few years? In general, the closer you get to retirement, the higher the benefits of 2nd pillar buyback. In general it is considered that you have a higher return if you invest the money instead of 2nd pillar buyback. The tax effect of a buyback is mostly one time (reduction of income tax), so doing buyback too early reduces the effect of the lower income tax.
As mentioned by @KK1 Any thoughts of buying a property? In your situation this might make sense if you are not planning on moving around.
Hi gaijin,
thank you very much for your inputs!
You are right, I could probably lower the cash.
I was leveraging the 0% fees on buying these ETF. I will look into the tax benefits of US ETFs.
Neon I am at 0.39%, VIAC would be 0.46% (global 100) and finpension would be 0.39%. Am I missing something?
No idea where I will end up living, so keeping my options open.
You’re right, it’s quite the same. Assuming you are happy with the strategy approach and don’t want to select individual funds, the one advantage of finpension are their tax-optimized funds. See their explanation about Pas de retenue à la source.
CoastFIRE?
While I wouldn’t have chosen neon, the simplicity of the setup and asset allocation given the net worth is impressive.
Congrats, and cheap. Everything else looks overkill and expensive, if not in money, in energy and time.
You’re in a good spot.
If I were in your shoes I’d tweak as follows
Congrats you are already FI!
Considering your salary and your costs. Why do you have cash at all ? I mean you only need around 50% of your monthly salary, should be cash buffer enough. And you could still use a IBKR 1,5% loan just in case.
When are you planning on retiring? Given high taxes (income AND wealth taxes) in Geneva, I’d look to buying back pillar 2. estimate when you will retire, divide the amount you can buy back by the number of years and start building up the pension fund.
Technically you are basically there already. FI accoridng to your expenses. A 3.5% withdrawal rate would mean 1.7 M invested for 60K
2M at 3% 60/0.03 = 2M
Only during acccumulation, later the income is not enough anymore (not enough taxes paid for average tax rate to hit 15%) to get back full DA1. Would need more dividends for that.
US funds for US stocks will basically always be best though (special case for synthetic US ucits funds)
Agree. Plus if he’d lose his job he would get RAV well in excess of his stated expenses.
Shift most of that cash into investments incl via pillar 2 buyback.
We don’t know OP situation/target allocation.
I’m not sure recommending 100% equity for the liquid part to everyone is necessary. Having a buffer isn’t bad (maybe they’d want to take a sabbatical, or help some relative, or just sleep better with some cash not invested, or it’s part of their allocation that they can rebalance with).
Yes, we can only comment based in what we know.
Alternative: use that cash balance to write cash secured puts on stocks you’d love to own (at a discount, of course). I’m very happy with that approach for my cash balance.
Well the 70k in cash have more impact than any second or third pillar tax optimizations he could do. It’s like letting ~ 5k on the road every year
I kinda disagree, equity investment has a cost as well (psychological, volatility, etc).
I don’t think it’s healthy for financial message boards to have a default stance that everyone should be 100% equity all the time.
Some people love risk (tho I’d say most haven’t went through real equity volatility experience), not everyone do.
I would say the analogy would rather be about letting a lottery ticket on the road, which has odds of “winning” -14k to 28k over the year with a balance skewed toward a mean of 5k over a large amount of attempts.
Not all money is long term money. Some people can’t take a -20% drop in a random year or a -50% drop over several years for the prospect of expected long term returns averaging 5%.
agreed, and it’s no default advice. But someone with 2 Mio wealth and no kids can take the “risk”.
@Wolverine I would buy as many tickets as I can. If I have enough bankroll for 25 attempts