Hi there,
in case you’ve missed it in the Meetups section: There will be a meetup in Berne on July, 22nd.
I can relate to the experiences shared here: Financial topics are usually hard to address in the existing circle of family, friends and colleagues. So I manage by reading, participating in forums and - well - trying to meet some like-minded people in real life.
Cheers!
J.
Hi Dear Mustachian Fellows,
I was making a lot of thoughts in the last month about this topic, and decided to keep up, and still focus on my FIRE goals, frugal lifestyle, work/life balance, and my general happiness in the life.
I’m living in the suburb area of Zurich and commuting every day to Winterthur to work.
I don’t really have any frugal people around me, neither of my friends, nor my colleagues, but I’m definitely looking forward to meet interesting frugal-minded lovely people on a regular basis. This is a bit frustrating sometimes, and I’m thinking about again and again: "Am I totally weird? Am I the only one in my friends circle with my “weird FIRE plan? Am I doing it right?” etc etc…
And I’m always confident about my whole plan, and just noticed in this year, my plan is absolutely amazing, and it works!
But it is a bit still embarrassing to see the people around, they are totally controlled and driven by consumerism… They don’t really care of the money, environment, life, health. On the other hand I’m so happy to see, that consumerism works, and it is even better for our stock / etf performance on a long run!
I’d be up for a small meetup in Winterthur, if some of you are around. I know a lovely small place, with amazingly beautiful coffee, some tables, and ambient, relaxed atmosphere. Let me know if some of you is interested!
Have a nice day,
Mr.P 
Maybe also as an idea for sure there is a way to create a google map of Mustachians & interesting places for frugalism? Only the city or village is pinned and we use our nick names (because of anonymity reasons). Tried to find out how this might work and if we all could have access, but couldn’t find a solution for that yet.
@Mr.Paprika: I am close to Winterthur (in the pampas a bit south west), so yes I am in.
We could build a small (google or whatever) survey where we would put our canton in (which could get pinned to the main page by the admins perhaps?), and then I am happy to plot the map out of that data. 
That wouldn’t cover the “interesting places” part though.
Let me follow up on this - as a little “Old Year” challenge/project! 
What do you guys think would be a platform you would feel safe putting your Canton (and any other info you think would be relevant/interesting to look at; like age for example - open to suggestions)?
If Google Forms are not good for you, please reply - otherwise I will set up a short survey and share here.
Great idea! It would be cool to bump this idea up for the whole forum.
First of all would be important to define all the fields which to track. I’ve made some thoughts about the questions:
That’s it. I think, with those informations we could create an anonymized Swiss Mustachians map. The question is, how many of us would fill this poll…
I’ve created THE POLL
Feel free to fill.
Cheers
Mr.P
Great, thanks for setting it up! You were quick.
If the forum mgmt could pin it to the front page for a few days/weeks, that would possibly raise the response rate.
Once you start getting more inputs, feel free to share the raw data with me and I can attack it with some viz. 
Edit: Similar feedback like rolandinho - perhaps that last question could be reformulated (or even obsolete), as I think all of us are “on the path”, since we are already on this forum.
Filled it out.
PS this question i wasn’t sure about - do u mean already FIRE’d or on the path to / having intention to / saving-investing for FI / RE?
Hi Together,
good point! I’ve corrected the last question.
Are you already on your FIRE path?
If the forum mgmt could pin it to the front page for a few days/weeks, that would possibly raise the response rate.
This would be so great! @_MP & @Julianek what do you think? Could we improve our community with such a poll, and create an anonymized overview? It would be interesting for networking as well to see, in which areas could we come together more regularly.
Best,
Mr.P 
I have pinned the topic for the next two weeks
All the new readers in this topic: I’ve created a POLL to fill out. This helps all of us to get a better picture anonymized about the forum and it’s members. We will come back next year with the results.
Please help us to fill the poll, and get the expected results between 100-200 answered polls.
@Julianek: thanks for your help!
Cheers!
Thanks for putting this together!
Two suggestions for improvements:
We have 46 asnwers so far. We want to bump up the answers near or over to 100.
Thank you all, who already filled the poll 
Dear all!
As promised, here a first glance of our community - we have 63 filled in currently.
I tried to identify the most straightforward way - to both build and share, so I chose Google Data Studio.
Happy to hear your feedback!
Edit: Thanks @Mobius, I did some data cleansing, but missed those few FR-DE entries.
If you guys notice any more discrepancies, shoot!
And continue filling in the poll if you haven’t already!
Cheers and happy holidays!
D
Thanks @dbu! It would be nice to consolidate duplicates in the bottom treemap to get a more accurate sense of the relative canton weight.
To get back to the friends topic: since frugalism/FI has emerged as one of my most favored topics, I test it with practically everyone I have a longer conversation with. Some deplore their own situation, but could never imagine changing their habit. The topic “let’s imagine you’ve won the lottery” never fails to get the juices flowing. Another topic I raised with my colleagues at work is the geo arbitrage theme: “the nest egg is what it is, let’s check how long we can live where!” Miraculously, two of them appeared to have very interesting ideas of their own, building and selling own business or pumping up savings with consultant’s salary nd buying real estate. Sometimes I might be making people think by action, e.g. when I decide not to join a particularly pricey event with my wealthy friend by stating “budget overrun” as a reason for not turning up. With non-FI girlfriend I repeatedly use the bang-for-buck argument, and she mostly accepts or does her own thing. Yes, we need to be aware that we are a strange breed, but also can rely on our common trait of being curious, which will help us find other topics to discuss with “normal” people.
BTW. I think the poll posts deserve a thread of its own. We should fork these two.