June 2023 – Travel and new lows in sleep
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June 2023 was very eventful for us. I went to the US for a few days for work. We are back to not sleeping because my son did not cope well with my absence.
On top of that, we finally planned for some summer holidays. It seems that the July holidays are the most expensive holidays to plan.
Financially, it was an expensive month, but we still managed to save slightly less than 15% of our income.
June 2023
June was a very eventful month. At the beginning of the month, I returned to the US for five days to visit my employer’s HQ. This is something I did not do since 2019. It was good to meet people in person from the US office. And I could advance many projects with that.
Unfortunately, my son did not like this. And since my return, he is once again sleeping very poorly. So, we are almost back to square one with sleep. It took us a week to make him sleep alone again, and we still had multiple wakeups each night. And even now, it gets increasingly difficult to put him to sleep after several weeks.
So, adding jetlag to not sleeping when coming back, I am back at very low energy levels.
We also had many friends and family events during the weekends. I keep hoping that next month will be less, but I still have not found a way to achieve that. July is going to be crazy as well.
Financially, it was an expensive month for several reasons, but the biggest tickets were the vacations (details later on). We still managed to save less than 15% of our income. This is our worst saving rate of the year, but it makes sense since we are paying for the holidays.
Summer Holiday
We finally settled on the destination for our holiday vacation: Santorini. We had difficulty finding something that would fit us both, with changing needs and wants.
And since Mrs. The Poor Swiss is working, we must go during official Swiss holidays. This means going either in July or August. And these times are expensive and popular.
Ultimately, the flight and the hotels were much more expensive than anticipated. We ended up paying about 2500 CHF for five nights for three persons (my son is traveling almost free). This is by far the most expensive trip we have taken so far.
We can afford this kind of expense. But that does not make it reasonable. Over 500 CHF per night is too expensive for two adults and one infant for a holiday. It seems to me that prices have gone up significantly in the last two years.
Expenses
Here are the details of our expenses in June 2023:
| Category | Total | Status | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| Insurances | 1093 | Above average | Health insurance and household insurance |
| Transportation | 216 | Above average | More parking and public transportation than usual |
| Communications | 124 | Above average | Reload my prepaid, internet, and phone. |
| Blog | 2166 | Well above average | Fees for the LLC, AVS bill, and various renewals |
| Personal | 6022 | Well above average | Holidays, many health bills, and many small bills |
| Food | 582 | Average | Low groceries, but more eating out than usual |
| Housing | 676 | Above average | Mortgage, heating, and power |
| Taxes | 3577 | Below average | Only commune and canton taxes |
In total, we spent 14380 CHF. Without taxes and the blog, it accounts for 8636 CHF. This makes it a very expensive month, much more than average. This is well higher than our target. Even without the July vacation, this accounts for 6176 CHF.
Most of our categories are above average, but all categories are fine except for the personal category. Indeed, we had many bills that were not monthly, such as the household insurance or the power bill. This skews some of the months.
On the other hand, the Personal category is entirely out of control this month. Even when ignoring the July vacation, we bought too many things this month. This is not sustainable.
We are developing bad habits of buying too many things. Of course, not everything we buy is unnecessary. For instance, we bought a rain collector to save water for our garden. But in many cases, we should think longer before buying new things.
2023 Goals
Here is the status of our goals by the end of June 2023
Overall, the progress on our goals is quite mixed this month.
Our financial goals are doing well, but the significant expenses of this month destroyed our monthly expenses goal. I already knew this goal would be challenging, but now it seems impossible for us. I am wondering whether travel should be excluded.
I was hoping to be done with creating the LLC this month. But unfortunately, Migros Bank was much slower than expected to create the bank account (more on that later).
On the health side, my workout goals are still behind schedule. I could not do as many as I wanted this month. I also hoped my daily steps would be significantly higher this month, but it did not happen. Interestingly, I discovered that I miss some days in my health app. I will try to sync once a week with my watch instead of once a month.
So, next month, we must be careful about our expenses and health goals.
FI Ratio
Here is the progress on our FI Ratio as of June 2023 :
This month, we went from 16.5% to 16.9%. It is not a huge increase, but it still moves in the proper direction.
Our net worth has increased significantly, mostly thanks to the stock market. However, our expenses are very bad this month, increasing our average expenses.
We are in the right direction with our net worth but need to stabilize our expenses. The gap between a life of 100’000 CHF yearly expenses and our current life is increasing monthly.
The Blog
The main task done on this blog was creating the LLC for the blog. Unfortunately, this took longer than I expected.
The LLC itself was created and is now publicly registered. However, getting the bank account was much slower than I anticipated. I created a business bank account with Migros Bank because of their low fees (my review of Migros Bank private accounts).
However, Migros Bank’s processes are highly antiquated. Every process is done by plain old mail. And I had to sign and fill out many forms to create a simple business bank account. Ultimately, creating the bank account took much longer than creating the LLC. This is an absurd state of things.
So, we could not start working with the new company this month. The bank account was only created a few days before the end of the month, and we still have no e-banking access. Hopefully, everything will be set up next month.
Aside from this, I updated a few older articles, but I have not had time to finish that effort.
Next Month – July 2023
In July 2023, we have plenty of summer events planned with our family and friends. At the end of the month, we will go on vacation to Greece. We will then have an extra week of vacation. This should be an expensive month, but less so than June (unless we have to pay extra taxes).
Next month, we should hopefully be done with working with the LLC. This means we will start operating on the new company.
What about you? How was June 2023 for you?
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Great transparent post. We all feel the same with holiday prices.
Just curious: “Communications, Reload my prepaid”.
What kind of mobile phone plan are you using? Did you optimize that?
Thanks!
Hi Dieter,
I believe it’s well optimized. I am using Coop Mobile Prepaid and on average I am paying between 5 and 10 CHF per month. On the last few months, it went a little up because I had to do many more calls, but it should go down again.
“It seems to me that prices have gone up significantly in the last two years.”
Yes they did! I did a back of the envelope calculation for Italy and prices for hotels and restaurants increased by ~20% / year over the last 2 years.
Welcome to high inflation Europe :’-(
Hi
Thanks for sharing! 20% just for hotels and restaurants is quite high in 2 years indeed.
And it seems flights are even worse.
We also had to up our monthly shared contribution to food and utilities. We felt like our food spending went up a lot lately, while we didn’t really change our consumption that much. But food is something we don’t really want to cut (yet) so we spend more, I guess …
Yes, food is difficult to cut when you have good habits already. We also saw an increase in food but it’s difficult to quantify since our son is also eating more and the number of children my wife takes care of varies.
Sleep issues for your child.. Can you thrown more light on this aspect?
What steps have you take for your son? Sleep train? My son has multiple wakings at night and needs one parent to sit with him till he sleeps off. About 10-15 mins.
I am also going through the same with my 22 month old son and looking for pointers.
Hi
Our main issue is that he did not do a full sleep until he was 15 months old. After that, it started getting better until I went to the US and then it went bad again with 5-6 wakings a night. Now, we are back at 1 on average.
The second issue is that it’s very difficult to put him to sleep. 10-15 minutes is already a good result for us.
I don’t think we have much pointers. It started improving when we started to let him cry for a bit longer. Now we sometimes wait 1-2 minutes and he falls asleep again. And after that, he does not wake up much. But putting him to sleep is still bad.
Just curious, what does the LLC do for your blog?
Also this year we are also blowing our budget with trips to intercontinental familys as flights have definitely been more expensive than before.
Hi Hermy,
The LLC does a few things:
* It separates all our accounts which simplifies accounting
* It separates responsibility
* It should help us delay some income and as a result, taxes but we are not yet entirely sure it’s worth it given the fees
Yeah, international flights went crazy (and worse in quality as well).
Once again I love your honesty! Vacation prices have defintely gone up! I am lucky to be able to travel outside school holidays and usually choose my trip based on where I can find a cheap flight. I love the Balkans and it’s fairly cheap there too :)
Are the balkans safe for travel? I have always been weary of these places for security.
Traveling outside school is definitely a luxury I regret not having aymore.
I find it that travelling within the EU is pretty safe basically almost everywhere. As for outside the EU, I didn’t find it very nice and/or safe for my taste.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I should reconsider several of the countries I have dismissed!
Firstly, Balkans include Slovenia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece etc. Secondly, I defintely wouldn’t say anything outside the EU is unsafe 😂 I found the Balkans (I’ve been to all countries there except Serbia) to be safe as a solo female and took public transport mostly. The only “bad” encounter was in Sofia, Bulgaria with a taxi driver who wanted to rip me off when I arrived late at night at the airport. But you get greedy taxi drivers anywhere. I’ve honestly felt less safe walking around late at night in Berlin, Brussels and Paris and have had guys try to follow me. And once had a guy try to rob me near my home in Bern and another friend had an attempted robbery in Fribourg. So I always say Switzerland can be just as dangerous… And I’m way more alert and aware of my surroundings.
Thanks for sharing!
I never had issues in Switzerland, but it’s definitely the case that there are some dangerous areas. And bad things can happen anywhere.
But I have seen some places in the US where I would not walk at night and never in Switzerland. On the other hand, I am rarely out at night :)
generally yes, however the obvious scams and bad taxi drivers are to be had everywhere. i would definitly suggest serbia in winter and montenegro in summer, but as always do the research before going to avoid tourist traps.
Thanks for sharing! We will consider that in the future.