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The cost of owning our house after a year

Many people are wondering how much is our house costing us. But, it was difficult to answer that question before we lived inside for a while.

After one year spent in our house, I want to summarize all the fees we have paid. I am only going to compare what changed. For instance, we still pay about the same electricity as before, so this does not change. But heating is different, and we have to pay for water, for instance.

Hopefully, this will be useful for people wondering how much it costs to live in an owned house.

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December 2021 – Usual end of year month

2021 really flew by. I cannot believe it is already over! Overall, this was a weird year, with COVID and then the birth of my son. It did not look like any other year.

Nevertheless, December 2021 still felt a little like a usual end-of-year month. We had the (mostly) usual celebrations and the usual end-of-year bills.

Overall, it was a good month for us. So, let’s see the details of what happened in December 2021.

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12 Simple Ways to Save Money Each Month in Switzerland

Living in Switzerland is expensive. There is no point denying that. However, it is not as expensive as many people think. There are many ways to save money each month on your budget in Switzerland.

People pay too much each month for most of their bills in Switzerland. It is because many people do not know they can pay less. Many people simply assume that they need to pay this amount and never try to optimize their budget.

Some households are also content with saving a tiny portion of their salary and not trying to save more. Finally, some people are simply falling into the trap of lifestyle inflation (very easy in Switzerland!). As long as their salary increases, they do not care too much about how their expenses increases!

But I believe people should always try to spend less when they can. When you can get the same quality for half the price, I do not see why you should pay more!

So in this article, we will look at 12 ways you can save money each month. The idea is to focus on recurring expenses to have savings for the long term.

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What’s the Time Value of Money?

In the personal finance community, many people use the concept of Time Value of Money (TVM) to think about money. This concept helps you think about the value of money if it were invested.

I think it is an interesting concept worth talking about. However, we should be careful about using this concept because it leads some people to think too much about their expenses and understanding.

So, let’s see what the time value of money is and what we can do with it.

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7 Tips to save money with your newborn in 2022

We recently became the parents of a cute son. Before he was born and in the first few months of his life, we had to purchase and prepare many things. We tried to avoid spending too much while still buying everything we needed for him.

Overall, we did a good job at keeping these expenses reasonable. And we also learned some things later on.

Overall, there are many things you can do to spend less for your newborn while not changing anything to his quality of life. In this article, I share our tips on how to save money with your newborn.

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November 2021 – Not so frugal

I cannot believe it is already December. These last few months are flying by us very quickly. It is crazy how a child can change everything.

We are still slowly adapting to life with our son. He is growing nicely and changing very quickly. It was an interesting month to follow his growth.

Financially, we bought quite a few unusual things but did not go overboard either. So, we managed to save a sizeable portion of our income again.

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Retire Early: The Simple Guide – I wrote a book

Retire Early The Simple Guide is now available as an ebook and hardcover! I wrote this book with Thomas Walke, another blogger in Switzerland.

Our book is about guiding the reader to their financial independence and possibly to their early retirement. Retire Early The Simple Guide is a general book applicable to most countries, but we primarily think about European countries.

This article discusses Retire Early: The Simple Guide in detail and how we wrote that book.

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How to invest for your children in 2022?

Even before my son was born, I knew I was going to invest for my children. It is a great idea to invest for your children, and it makes a lot more sense than to let money rests on a bank account with very low interest rates.

However, until recently, I never worried about how to achieve that. Once my son was born, it was time to research the best way to invest for my children! And I found a great way to do so.

In this article, I will share how you can invest for your children and what I am going to do for mine.

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Fourth year of blogging – Summary

The Poor Swiss blog just turned four years old last month. Funny enough, I forgot about this birthday this year. It is why this article pops up in November instead of the usual October.

The fourth year of blogging has had very mixed results. I have continued to write regularly, updated many articles, and translated many others. I believe the content is in a good place. Unfortunately, my efforts did not pay off in terms of traffic since traffic is lower now than it was a year ago.

This article is a retrospective of this fourth year of blogging, and I share the numbers about this blog, what went well, and what did not go well.

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