July 2024 – A hot month with taxes

July 2024

Overall, July 2024 was a pleasant month. Although for me, it was too hot. At least, we had some reasonably cold nights (at least on the first half). But I would still have preferred a colder month.

We had a good balance this month of time for us and time for friends and family. We even went looking for beavers in Fribourg and were lucky enough to find one. My son is really fond of beavers, so that was a nice experience.

Mrs. The Poor Swiss went on a short holiday in Amsterdam, with 2 of her friends. And during that time, I also took a hotel for one-day with my son and we did many activities. The three of us were happy about the experience.

Unfortunately, the sleep of our son suffered this month. We are back to at least one wake-up every night. This may be related to the heat, but we have never understood his sleep, so this is not about to change.

This month, I had insoles made for my feet. Unfortunately, this has not really made any difference to my back pain. I will probably keep wearing them a while longer to see if this changes anything, but I am not very hopeful anymore.

Financially, it was an expensive month. This is mostly due to the very high taxes we had to pay for last year. Moreover, we also did many activities this month, resulting in a savings rate of 0%. I was expecting this savings rate, but it still is not fun.

Expenses

Here are the details of our expenses in July 2024:

In total, we spent 30897 CHF. This is unfortunately our highest expense month ever. We also had one (hopefully the last) bill for the blog (before the LLC). Without taxes and blog, we spent 6003 CHF. This is not great, but also not the end of the world.

We knew we were going to pay a high amount of taxes this month since we had not paid enough last year. However, having to pay 23K CHF in a single month of taxes is not a great feeling. We do not expect this to happen next year, since our taxable income should be lower this year than in 2023.

Other than taxes, a few things are special. We invited my parents and grandmothers, separately, for lunches at restaurants. That alone makes 30% of our food budget.

As mentioned before, both me and Mrs. The Poor Swiss went on short vacations. This added some new expenses both for Personal and Food budget.

Finally, I had to pay many bills for my back. I had to pay for the insoles of this moth. But I also had to pay for the doctor appointments and for the physiotherapy.  In total, this exceeds 1000 CHF. If my back healed, I would not care, but since it is not, I am quite unhappy about these expenses.

Overall, I am not too happy about these expenses.

2024 Goals

Here is the status of our goals by the end of July 2024:

Our goals took a big hit this month.

The large expenses this month increased our average spending past that of last year. So, we are not very likely to spend less this month. And the 0% savings rate reduced our average savings significantly. Finally, our income was standard this month, which also lowered our average income.

As I mentioned last month, we have canceled some of our complementary health insurance. As a result, we will save about 30 CHF per month starting next year. I do not think I can optimize a further bill this year.

My two health goals are doing well. I only missed on workout this month and I kept up the same pace as before. In August, I plan to consolidate my workout further to improve it. I walked significantly less this month than last. With the heat, we did less walking outside, and I got many interruptions during the day, which meant less walking on the treadmill.

Finally, our energy consumption is not doing well. As I thought, I could not take it anymore, and we added a mobile A/C in our room. I am not happy about it, but seeing the difference it makes in sleep quality, it is worth it.

Overall, we did not make much progress towards our goals this month.

FI Ratio

Here is the progress of our FI Ratio as of July 2024:

Obviously, our FI ratio went down a lot this month. This month eliminated all our progress since February.

As expected, our FI ratio took a big hit this month. First, we spent more than we earned, lowering our net worth. Then, the net worth itself also went down because of the stock market. And finally, since we spent more than last year on the same month, our average spending increased, moving our target farther.

Even though we went down significantly this month, I am not particularly worried. The tax payments for this year have gone up, so we should be closer to the real numbers next year. And we should have a lower taxable income next year, so we may even get back something.

That being said, we are starting to pay a huge amount in taxes. This is really the main expense in our budget. And there is not much we can do about it except for some second pillar contributions. We will think again about what to do to reduce them further.

So, overall, the drop in FI ratio was expected, but the scale of the drop was higher than expected.

The Blog and e-book and calculator

I am pleased to announce that I finalized the e-book I was referring to for the last few months. This e-book is a guide that will take you through from building your own portfolio to investing in the ETFs with Interactive Brokers.

You can get additional information on the books page: Invest Your Money in the Stock Market. Currently, the e-book is only available in English.

I hope this will be useful for people that need more than simply blog posts. Any feedback is welcome on the e-book.

I also wrote a new calculator: The Broker Comparator. This gives you the fees you are going to pay with a given broker for a given portfolio value and monthly investment. I have also considered the dividends lost for brokers without US ETFs. Please let me know what you think if you try it out.

Interestingly, the forum was a bit more active this month. I was glad to see some new members and new conversations. It is still not very active, but it is good to see some progress.

As for the blog itself, not much happened. I simply kept up with the usual weekly routine.

Next Month – August 2024

In August, we have a few things planned. We will celebrate the national day in our village. And we will have a small vacation, in Germany, near Basel.

Financially, August should be back to normal. I do not foresee any large expenses, except for the small vacation, but it should not be nearly as huge as tax bills.

What about you? How was July 2024?

Recommended reading

• More articles about Updates
• The Poor Swiss blog
• December 2022 – Glad it is over
• June 2018 – Insurance month!