June 2026 – House maintenance and holidays

Baptiste Wicht | Updated: 05 July 2026 |

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In June 2026, we went on a short holiday to Alsace. It was great taking a week off work. Even though we fell during a massive heat wave (again), it was a very nice vacation.

On the less nice side of things, we had quite a few issues with the house this month. This is expected when buying an old house, but we were thinking things would come out little by little, not all at once.

Financially, it was not a bad month given the extra expenses. We managed to save about a third of our income this month.

June 2026

June 2026 was a very hot month. We had a strong heatwave, and even in our village in Switzerland, the temperature reached 35 degrees. Fortunately, our son copes really well with the heat. My wife also does well, but I am handling it rather poorly. We will have some expenses to do around the house to reduce the heat inside, but this will have to wait until next year.

Other than that, we went on a vacation for a week in Alsace. And we had many troubles with the house.

Financially, it was an okay month. We spent more than usual because of the vacations, and we also bought a full pig again. We had several yearly insurance bills this month as well. But we still managed to save about a third of our income, which is quite decent for such a month.

Holidays

We went to Alsace for a week, with an apartment in Colmar.

Just like the last two holidays, we managed to go on holidays during a heatwave. We are not really lucky with timing. In Alsace, we got temperatures up to 38 degrees. We still managed to do everything we wanted to do, and it was quite a nice vacation. But I think we will go much more to the north next year.

Alsace is pretty nice and very close to Switzerland. We visited Colmar and Strasbourg; there are plenty of really nice things to see in both citiies.

Close to these cities, we also visited the Haut-Koenigsbourg castle. This is a very impressive castle on top of a hill. It was really well restored. Funny story: two days after we went, it was closed off due to extreme heat. We also went to the Montagne des Singes and to the Eagle Park (also getting early closure because of heat).

The only thing we could not do was go to the Parc du Petit Prince, but it got closed because of heat.

Overall, we had a very nice holiday, but it would have been better with 10 degrees less. But of course, we have to get used to that.

Maintenance issues

This month, we had quite a few issues in a row with the house.

The first issue was that we realized that the electrical breakers for the garage, my office, and the laundry room were shared. This meant that whenever we were charging the house and doing laundry, the breaker would trip. We got an electrician to split the circuits on the first floor to be able to do these things together.

Quickly after that, we got another issue with the pool. The electrolysis was not working well. It turned out that the electrolysis cell was due for a replacement. After that, electrolysis

We thought we would be good then, but then we got a salty taste in our water. It turned out that there was some rust in the water filter of the water softener. This caused it to not be working well and accumulate salt. We got it serviced, and things worked well again.

Last but not least, we had water leaking in our laundry room. At first, we thought it was coming from the washing machine, but the washing machine was not the issue, only exacerbating the issue. It turned out there was a weird tank under the laundry room where the fat could accumulate. We got it cleaned up, and we are good for a while. But we will fully fix this by bypassing the tank entirely because it causes issues and is not necessary.

I truly hope we are done for a while with these issues.

Expenses

Here are the details of our expenses in June 2026:

Category	Total	Status	Details
Insurances	1569	Expected	Health insurance plus household insurance
Transportation	0	Expected
Personal	3456	Higher than expected	Holidays, dentist, new fans
Food	1621	Expected	Usual groceries and an entire pork
Housing	3027	Higher than expected	Mortgage, power, building insurance, maintenance
Taxes	2630	Expected	Only cantonal taxes

In total, we spent 12305 CHF. Without taxes, this amounts to 9675 CHF. Without holidays, we spent 8528 CHF. This is not a great result.

The main expense this month was what we spent on holidays, about 1150 CHF during the week. Some of these expenses were for food, but we counted everything into the personal category for simple accounting. We already paid for the apartment last month.

Another large expense is that we bought another full pig for 1100 CHF. This makes a good restock of our freezer.

We had two yearly bills fall this month: the household insurance and the building insurance. And the power bill is a quarterly bill. This last one should get reduced soon now that we generate a significant amount of solar energy. We are also planning to measure power consumption more precisely in the house to know which rooms consume power.

On the taxes side, we only have the bills for the canton. Since we moved municipalities, we did not yet get a new set of bills. We will owe a significant amount of money to the new one, but the old one owes us money. Once we get our tax summary, we should be back on track.

Finally, we also bought new fans for the house. We are currently not well prepared for the heat wave. We have some long-term improvements planned that should help, but we cannot do them this year.

For the house maintenance, we only paid one of the bills so far. We are expecting multiple ones next month.

Overall, our level of spending is not great (again). I am perfectly fine with our holiday spending, but spending 8528 CHF in a month is not the best, even when we consider that there were some yearly bills.

2026 Goals

Here is the status of our goals by the end of June 2026:

As usual this year, our goals are all over the place. As discussed in the previous section, our expenses are still increasing. Our savings rate and income goals are still in a good place so far.

During the holidays, I did not work out. And I have skipped a few workouts due to the heat in my office. This is expected, so I am fine with the lower number of workouts this month. As for the steps, we walked more than usual during the holidays, but this is still less than what I usually do on the treadmill.

On the solar panel side, they have done the final inspection. Everything is working, but they need to do one wiring change. At this point, we have not yet paid the last installment nor received the subvention.

Overall, except for our spending, I am happy with the state of our goals.

FI Ratio

Here is the progress of our FI ratio as of June 2026:

Overall, FI ratio has made good progress this month. We have grown past 67%.

We managed to save some money this month. On the other hand, the stock market went down during the month. This is not an unexpected event. We will see next month whether this is a new trend or a single event. In contrast, the USD strengthened its position against the CHF, so we did gain some on this front, ending almost flat on the stock market front.

As usual, we have not made any changes to our investment.

Overall, our FI ratio is doing really well. Its growth is not sustainable, but it is good to look at it that way.

The blog – Podcast appearance

Not much happened on the blog this month. I did not work during the holidays and did some work in advance before that so that I did not have too much to do when coming back.

I also appeared in a podcast, which was shot early in the month. I discussed FIRE in Switzerland with Charlene (I interviewed her on the blog). It had been a while since my last podcast appearance. Here is the podcast:

I wanted to work a little on my future videos this month, but I could not find the time to do it. Maybe I will be able to continue the first batch of videos in July. Other than that, I have nothing planned for July.

Next Month – July 2026

So far, July is looking to be pretty quiet on our end. We have almost nothing planned. It is likely to be hot, but I hope it stays under 30°C.

Financially, it should be standard but with above-average expenses. Indeed, several of the maintenance works we did this month will be paid in July. And we still have to pay the last installment for solar panels, which should come next month normally. And we are still waiting to pay the huge bill for the land register (I do not want to pay it, but I would rather have it behind me).

What about you? How was June 2026?