One day in Washington D.C. – Frugal and Awesome

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories Frugality, TravelLeave a comment on One day in Washington D.C. – Frugal and Awesome

This month, I spent 10 days in the United States for my company. Since it was not far, me and one colleague decided to go visit Washington D.C. while we had the chance.  We only went there for a day but we already were able to see quite a lot of things.

Washington D.C. is the capital of the United States. It is just between the states of Maryland and Virginia. It is interesting to know that they in no real state. In fact, Washington D.C. is in the district of Columbia (hence the D.C.). And its inhabitants do not get a vote in Congress. It is not a huge city, having less than one million people. But it contains many very iconic buildings such as the Capitol, the White House or the Lincoln Memorial. It is really a nice place to visit.

The day was quite cloudy during our visit. Unfortunately, some of my pictures are not very clear as a result. But we did not get any rain and the trip was very good. And very frugal. I managed to not spend anything in D.C. :)

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5 Ways to invest in real estate

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories ETF, Investment, Real Estate, TipsLeave a comment on 5 Ways to invest in real estate

You may not know it, but there are many ways to invest in real estate. Each of these ways have advantages and disadvantages. If you want to invest in real estate, it’s important to know about these ways before doing a choice and investing in one of them. Or investing in several of them.

For now, I’m not really invested in the real estate market. I just have a small position though my World ETF that has some real estate funds. But I may invest more in the future. For now, I need more stocks, but once I’ve got enough, I may shift a bit of my portfolio into real estate.

Let’s now see the different ways to invest in real estate. There are quite diverse. Each person wanting to invest in real estate should find a way that is adapted.

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How do we get around ?

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories Budget, FIRE, Frugality, TravelLeave a comment on How do we get around ?

One thing I didn’t cover yet on this blog is how do we get around. You may be surprised to hear that we mostly use a car. If you follow several personal finance blogs, you may have heard that cars are almost evil. Most people will actually advocate you to ride a bike or take public transportation.

However, I don’t think cars are evil. I don’t really like driving, but I like the freedom that the car give me. Moreover, where I live, it’s almost mandatory to own a car. We use it to get around almost everywhere.

In this post, we are going to see how we get around with our car and how we are traveling abroad. I’m also going to detail the cost related to my car. I’m not going to advocate you to have a car. The choice is for every one to do. I can totally understand people who don’t want to drive. If you live in a city for example, it’s not as useful. But cars are not evil! You can become financially independent with a car ;)

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Think and Grow Rich – Book Review

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories Books, Self-ImprovementLeave a comment on Think and Grow Rich – Book Review

It’s been a while since I’ve done a book review on that blog. In fact, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a personal finance or investing book. But two weeks ago I saw that Think and Grow Rich, from Napoleon Hill, was at only 0.58$ on Amazon for Kindle. You can read my tips about finding cheap Kindle ebooks. I often saw it mentioned in best of lists on several blogs. So I thought it was a good bargain. So I bought it and read it and here is my review :)

This book is about self-improvement and personal development. It’s a very old book. It was written in 1937 by Napoleon Hill. It was written after the great depression. It’s based on the secret recipe for success by Andrew Carnegie. All this book is based on explaining this secret recipe through a series of steps.

As you will discover, Think and Grow Rich is a very special book. It’s different form most of the books I usually read. It can teach you a lot of things, but you may have to figure out many things yourself.

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7 reasons why I blog

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories Blogging, Frugality, Side HustleLeave a comment on 7 reasons why I blog

Some people wonder why bloggers blog. You may want to know the reasons why I blog? There are many reasons why I started this blog. I’ve started this blog as a simple way to keep track of my progress in improving my budget. This helped me stay motivated a lot.

Over time, I took more and more pleasure in writing posts. So I increased the scope of the blog. I’ve writing many more articles on this blog than I would have thought. In this post, I’m going to give you the main reasons behind my blogging. I’m not going to tell you to start a blog. Contrary to most bloggers, I don’t think blogging is for every body. But there are many reasons why it’s interesting to blog! Continue reading “7 reasons why I blog”

Dividends – Nice passive income

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories ETF, Investment7 Comments on Dividends – Nice passive income
This post is part 10 in the series Investing – All about investing.

In our Investing series, there is something we didn’t yet cover in details: dividends. A lot of companies in the stock market are paying dividends to their stock holders. That means that if you own a share of Coca-Cola, you’ll receive some cash four times a year, every quarter.

This is a nice way of accumulating cash since it does not require you to do anything. It’s fully passive income. You still need to buy the shares of course. But once it’s done, you’ll get the money. There are many important things to know about these dividends and we are going to cover them in this post. If like me you are investing the entire market, you’ll get some dividends automatically :)

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How to get Swiss Marriage Visa for a Chinese

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories Switzerland, Tips, TravelLeave a comment on How to get Swiss Marriage Visa for a Chinese

Before Mrs The Poor Swiss could join me in Switzerland, we had to go through the procedure to get her a visa. Since we knew that we wanted to get married in Switzerland, we used a visa for marriage. This kind of visa allowed her to come to Switzerland and to get married to me :)

The steps are not really intuitive and take a lot of time (and money). For us, it was a bit overwhelming. In this post, we are going to cover all the steps that we had to do. From the application in China to the reception of the residency permit in Switzerland. This should help any Chinese that wants to get married in Switzerland to get a Visa for this!

Before you do any procedure, there is one thing you need to decide together. The wife can take the name of the husband after the marriage. This is optional. This can surprising since people don’t change name after marriage in China. Even if the wife is from China, she can decide to change her name after the marriage. However, her name in China will not change. And you’ll also need to decide which name will the children take. In our case, Mrs. The Poor Swiss decided to take my name after the marriage and our future children will take the same name as well. This is an important decision of course for the couple.

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Ricardo increases its fees for selling online

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories Frugality, News, Side Hustle, SwitzerlandLeave a comment on Ricardo increases its fees for selling online

I’m selling a lot of things online. For this, the main site I’m using is Ricardo. This is an auction website. You set a start price and an optional instant price and people can bid on your item. The highest bidder will win after a set time for the auction. I’ve found out Ricardo to work quite well for my needs. I’ve made several hundreds of Swiss francs on this website.

However, Ricardo is not free. You pay some fees to sell your things online. Even though I would prefer using a free service, I found out that my things sell better on Ricardo than on free alternatives. Yesterday, Ricardo just announced that they updated their fees. The new fee model will be active from September 13th. In this post, I’m going to describe the changes and exactly what this means for you if you want to sell things online on Ricardo. We are going to look at when you are actually saving money compared to before and when you are losing money.

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August 2018 – Wedding and honeymoon

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories FIRE, Goals, Monthly, Side Hustle, Spending3 Comments on August 2018 – Wedding and honeymoon

From a personal point of view, August 2018 was a great month. We had our wedding ceremony with friends and family. Also, we went on honeymoon in Egypt. We really had a great time. We rested, swam, snorkeled and had a lot of fun. This was an awesome honeymoon :)

However, from a finance point of view, August 2018 was not a very good month. We spent a lot for our wedding and I had to take days off without pay. This means a very small savings rate. Fortunately, there was some extra income from the wedding and from the army. This helped us not being in negative this month. But at least, there was some savings ;)

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7 Reasons to want to be financially independent

Author Mr. The Poor SwissPosted on Categories FIRE, Frugality2 Comments on 7 Reasons to want to be financially independent

A lot of this blog is about my path to financial independence (FI). But why would I want to be financially independent ? There are many reasons for wanting to be financially independent.

In this post, I’m going to list the main reasons I want to be financially independent. The reasons may not be the same for everybody. Some reasons will talk to you more than others. It’s fine. Not everybody has the same motivations in trying to reach FI. And not even everybody wants to reach FI ;)

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