The Poor Swiss - Diary of my journey into Personal finance

TCS Travel Mastercard Gold credit card – 1% cashback!

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 15, 2018June 17, 2018Frugality, Spending, Tips4 Comments

A few weeks ago, I compared the credit cards in Switzerland. I came to the conclusion that for me, the best credit card would be to use Cumulus Mastercard. Since then, I ordered the card, but I haven’t received it yet. I’m also waiting on Revolut to finally get a Swiss IBAN so that I can top it up for free.

However, there is a card I haven’t considered in my first comparison. The Touring Club Suisse (TCS) is offering two credit cards for its members. The first one is the TCS Member MasterCard. This is not really interesting since it does not have any cashback, but it’s free. What is more interesting is the TCS Travel MasterCard Gold. This card will cost you 100 CHF per year, although it’s free on its first year. But they will give you 1% cashback. In this post, I’m going to look at this card in details.

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Investing – 2. Cash, Bonds and Stocks

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 13, 2018June 13, 2018Broker, Investment2 Comments

This post is part 1 of 2 in the series Investing – All about investing.

In the first post of the Investing series, I covered the basics of investing. This should have given you a few important rules you should follow before you invest. However, we didn’t cover into details how to invest. In this post, I’m going to cover the main financial instruments that you can use to invest: Cash, Bonds and Stocks.

We are going to see the advantages and disadvantages of each of these instruments. By the end of this post, you should have a better understanding of them. And you can always ask questions for more information 🙂

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Why I will never recommend Bluehost again!

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 11, 2018June 10, 2018Spending, The blog, Tips6 Comments

As you may have seen, my blogs was pretty much not working between last Thursday and Saturday. I had many issues with Bluehost and it took them an unreasonable amount of time to fix the issue. I already had issues before and this last one was a really bad outage. So, I decided I will never trust them again. Since I don’t trust them as hosting provider, I’m not going to recommend them anymore.

I’ve only started using Bluehost a few months ago. But I have had several issues in these months. And these last issues with the website being down for more than a day. They are really doing a bad job… I plan to migrate to another hosting provider soon. In this post, you’ll find the story behind this!

I’m going to start with a question: How many Bluehost support guys do you need to fix a SSL certificate ? You’ll find the answer below 😉

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My new job at Pied Piper – Opportunity and benefits

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 8, 2018June 6, 2018FIRE, Goals, Investment6 Comments

At the beginning of this month I started my new job. For the sake of anonymity, let’s say I’m working for Pied Piper. I hope there are some Silicon Valley fans in my readers 😉 Since I’m just starting working at this company, I don’t want to disclose it on this blog. And since I’m still anonymous, I’m going to try to stay like this.

This is going to be a shorter post than usual. In this post, I’ll describe all financial aspects of my new job. I’m really happy about my new job. Working at Pied Piper is an incredible opportunity.

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Our first DIY project: A 65$ wood book shelf

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 6, 2018June 3, 2018DIY, Frugality4 Comments

For a while now, I wanted to buy a Do-It-Yourself (DIY) furniture myself. I wanted to do it principally for fun. And also, I wanted to save money on buying new furniture. Since we needed a new bookshelf for our living room, we decided to build a book shelf ourselves.

We did it with my wife. None of us is an expert and it’s our first DIY furniture. I’m reasonably handy. I watched a lot of DIY videos on Youtube and it taught me a lot. But that’s all the experience I have. If you have advice for us, don’t hesitate to let us know 🙂 In the end, we still managed to build something quite nice for our experience 🙂

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Investing – 1. The Basics

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 4, 2018June 13, 2018Broker, FIRE, Frugality, InvestmentLeave a comment

This post is part 1 of 2 in the series Investing – All about investing.

This is the first post I’m going to write about Investing. I’m going to try to cover as much as possible on the different forms of investing. In this first post of the series, we are going to see what is investing in the broad sense.

I don’t yet know how many posts will be in this series. I will try to cover the basics, the stocks, the funds, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) and so on 🙂 Hopefully, it will be interesting for some of you and it will motivation some people to motivate.

I’m no financial advisor. I’m not nearly an expert investor. This post is just what I know about investing from my experience and from research.

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May 2018 – Wedding and 100K net worth milestone

Mr. The Poor SwissJune 1, 2018June 18, 2018Investment, Monthly, Spending, The blog5 Comments

A lot of things happened in May 2018! The most important event of this month is of course that we got married! We had a nice and simple wedding with close family and friends.

And as you’ll see, I reached the 100K CHF milestone in my net worth!

Even considering the wedding expenses, this month has some good savings rate. This is mostly due to the extensive gifts we received. This month is the month with my largest income yet. We should have been able to turn it down. Let’s hope we can keep expenses to a low next month.

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What is the best credit card in Switzerland ?

Mr. The Poor SwissMay 28, 2018June 19, 2018Frugality, Spending, Tips9 Comments

This month I had to use my credit card a lot. We paid for our honeymoon in full in advance. I also had to advance money to my company for a trip that they will reimburse later. Also, we purchased many things online. Finally, we pay all our groceries with credit card. To make sure I could pay for our wedding lunch, I even had to increase my limit to 5000 CHF.

Once I realized how much I was using this credit card, I started to wonder if my card was the best available for me. Also, I read a lot of stories of people getting a lot of flights and hotels for free using credit cards. I wanted to know if this was possible for me too. Let’s explore the different options that are available in Switzerland.

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We got married! Wedding in Switzerland

Mr. The Poor SwissMay 25, 2018May 24, 2018Frugality, Spending15 Comments

We got married! Last friday (18.05.2018) Mr and Mrs the Poor Swiss got married! Find out about our wedding in Switzerland.

This post is mostly an occasion for me to share the good news 😉 And some photos! I will also share information about how weddings in Switzerland.

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My 7 biggest budgeting mistakes – How I fixed them

Mr. The Poor SwissMay 23, 2018May 23, 2018Budget, Frugality, Spending, Tips4 Comments

Over the years, I’ve made many budgeting mistakes. In this post, I’ll try to list a few of the big mistakes I’ve made. I’m talking here about mistakes in the way I did my budget. And also spending mistakes. Some of the mistakes are not a big deal but some of the others made me spend too much. Overall, I would be better off if I had known this a few years ago.

Find out how I fixed my budgeting mistakes. I’ve learned a lot from my budgeting mistakes and I hope you can learn a lot from them too! The idea is of course to avoid them now that you of them 😉

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