The Poor Swiss

Guide to Taxes in Switzerland – Reduce your taxes!

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 19, 2019May 29, 2019Leave a comment

Taxes in Switzerland are quite complicated due to the multiple states. Each state has its own rules and even its own software to fill your taxes. Nevertheless, it is very important to know how the taxes work in order to be able to fill your tax declaration.

I want to go over the details of how the Swiss Taxes work. We are going to talk about the multiple levels of taxes in Switzerland, how is your income taxed and how is your wealth taxed. We are also going to see the things you can deduct from your income when you fill your tax declaration and how you can pay your taxes.

Of course, we cannot talk about taxes without talking about optimizing taxes. That is probably the only reason people want to learn about taxes! In this post, I am going to share all I know about optimizing taxes in Switzerland!

Stay tuned to learn all about the taxes system of Switzerland and how to reduce your taxes!

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11 Best Personal Finance Metrics You Need To Track

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 17, 2019May 29, 2019Leave a comment

Personal Finance Metrics are very important! They will allow you to track your progress to success in your personal finances. Metrics have the advantage that they are easy to compare and that you can work on improving them one after another.

This is especially true if you are on a journey towards Financial Independence. You will need to track and improve many metrics in order to become Financially Independent. Just tracking a metric is meaningless, you need to make sure this metric improves over time. Or at the very least, you need to make sure, this metric does not get worse.

In this post, I will list The 11 Most Important Personal Finance Metrics you can find. If you track these 11 metrics and you work on improving all of them, you will be well ahead of the majority of people who probably do not track more than one or two of these personal finance metrics.

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Distributing Funds vs Accumulating Funds: Which is better?

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 14, 2019May 31, 20193 Comments

It can be difficult to choose between Distributing Funds and Accumulating Funds when you need to choose two funds. And the problem is also the same when you need to compare two Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). At first, it was not clear for me which one was better when I started designing my portfolio. Now, I always prefer Distributing ETFs.

Most shares pay a dividend to its shareholders. If you hold shares of a company paying a dividend, you will receive cash dividends several times each year. Since a fund is holding many shares, every fund will receive dividends. Once a fund receives a dividend, it will have to give it back to the real shareholders: you!

There are two ways for a fund to give back the dividends back to the investors. First, it can give back the money directly to the shareholders. This is a Distributing Fund, also called an Income Fund. Or, it can reinvest directly the dividends into the funds, hence increasing its value. This is an Accumulating Fund or a Growth Fund.

Whether you talk about funds or Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) is exactly the same in this context. A Distributing ETF is simply a Distributing Fund traded on the stock market.

In this post, we are going to go over the differences between Distributing Funds and Accumulating Funds.

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The 5 Most Used Stock Market Order Types for Investing

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 12, 2019May 29, 2019Leave a comment

If you are using a broker, you probably have seen that there are many types of stock market order types that you can for investing. Are you overwhelmed when you see all these options? Do not worry, most of them you will never need.

Personally, I have only used three different stock market order types in my investing life. Active Traders may use many stock market order types. But passive investors are not going to need more than a handful of them. In this post, I am going to go over the five most-used stock market order types that are available in most brokers.

All of these Stock Market Orders are available in Interactive Brokers (IB), my current stock market broker. But most of them should be available in most serious brokers.

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9 Tips to Protect Your Online Personal Finances in 2019

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 10, 2019May 29, 2019Leave a comment

In these days, most of your personal finances are probably done online. You probably have access to your bank through an online banking platform. Also, you are likely to access your broker through your browser or through your phone. If someone is getting access to your online personal finances, he can do a lot of harm! You need to protect yourself!

It is very important to protect your Online Personal Finances! There are many things you can do to avoid getting hacked. Many people have very poor online security because they think it cannot happen to them. But it can happen to anybody! And some people do not care because they only think of their Facebook user for instance. You may not care about your Facebook account. But you need to be extremely careful about your Online Personal Finances!

Contrary to what a lot of people believe, anybody can be a target for hackers. You want to avoid being an easy target. Most hackers will stop early because they want to focus on easy targets. You are unlikely to be a target of a team of hackers ready to do everything to get to your online accounts.

Now, I am not a security expert. But I am a computer scientist and I have had several courses about security. I want to share with you some simple tips that could greatly improve the security of your personal finances!

Here are 9 Tips to Secure Your Online Personal Finances! If you follow them all, your online personal finances will be much more secure!

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N26 Digital Bank – Save on Foreign Currency Fees

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 7, 2019June 10, 201912 Comments

Everybody will agree with me that paying 1.5% of fees, or more, on each transaction abroad really sucks! That is not something you want to think about when you are on vacation or shopping online in other countries. Thanks to N26, this should never be necessary anymore!

N26 is a digital bank offering transfers in other currencies for free! Not only that, but the entire bank account is actually free! And they are a bank! Your money is insured according to European laws. You can even withdraw money for free several times a month! That sounds great, right?

In this post, I am going to cover everything you need to know about N26. And since I have already talked about Revolut on this blog, I will compare both services which are similar but not totally equivalent!

Stay tuned to find out how to save money on foreign exchange fees!

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5 Frugal Tips from Swiss Finance Bloggers

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 5, 2019June 10, 20195 Comments

Everybody likes frugal tips. These tips help you save more money every month. I wanted to share some of my frugal tips in this article. But I realized it would be even better if I collected some of the best tips from other Swiss Personal Finance Bloggers as well. When you live in the most expensive country in the world, you need frugal tips!

These tips can help you save more money. There are many things you can do. We have already covered some of these things on this blog. But today’s tips are not only coming from me! They are coming from some of the best Swiss Personal Finance Bloggers!

Stay tuned if you want to learn how Swiss Personal Finance Bloggers are saving money in this expensive country!

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May 2019 – Finally a cheaper month!

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 3, 2019June 6, 20194 Comments

May 2019 was not a very special month. Which is good as long as I am concerned. But after the previous months that were a bit too expensive to my taste, May was finally a cheaper month!

We managed to save more than 50% of our income during the month. This is really great! We managed to keep our expenses below 4000 CHF which is awesome for us. Generally, our expenses are much higher than that!

On the other hand, the stock market went down this month. Our net worth still increased a bit, but as much as such a good month would normally increase it.

In this post, I am going to share all the details about May 2019. The goal of our monthly incomes is to be as transparent as possible. I feel like we owe that to our readers. Moreover, it also makes us more accountable for our personal finances.

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Transferwise vs Revolut: Which Is Best For You?

Mr. The Poor SwissMay 30, 2019June 12, 201910 Comments

TransferWise and Revolut offer services that are quite similar. They are both proposing cheap money transfer in many different currencies. I now have both cards. But, I am mostly using my Revolut card. So, many of my readers asked me why I was mostly using my Revolut card where I could have only used my TransferWise card. Today, I am going to answer the question: Which is better between TransferWise and Revolut?

When I started using Revolut, there was no way to top it up for free from my bank account since they did not have a Swiss bank account. Therefore, I was using a TransferWise card as an intermediary between my bank account and my Revolut account. Now, Revolut has a Swiss IBAN and I do not have to use my TransferWise card anymore. Let’s see why I am using Revolut more than TransferWise.

Both companies will help you save money on foreign currency exchanges. However, they are still different in their fees and their offers. In fact, they both have some pros and cons. And that is exactly what we are going to go over in this post.

For this comparison, I am only going to go over the personal accounts, not the business accounts. Both TransferWise and Revolut offer accounts for businesses. But this is out of scope for this article.

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Neon Bank: Free Swiss Digital Bank

Mr. The Poor SwissMay 28, 2019May 28, 20192 Comments

Neon is one of the newest Swiss Digital Banks! It offers an entirely free bank account. Having a free bank is very important if you want to save money for managing your money. Swiss Banks are becoming more and more expensive. It is great to see some free alternatives!

Neon is a digital bank. It has no offices. You can manage your money entirely from your phone. With your bank account, you will receive a Mastercard that you can use for your payments. And you can use the mobile application to pay your bills and transfer money to other bank accounts.

One of the great things with Neon, compared to other digital alternatives is that your funds are insured! If it goes bankrupt, you are insured up to 100’000 CHF! You have the same security as if you had a class bank account.

We are going to see exactly what is Neon! Should you use it? How does it compare to other Swiss banks? And what about Revolut?

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