March 2026 – The bonus goes into the roof

March 2026

We did not have much happening this month overall. Which was planned after the last two months being too hectic. My wife finished her German course at the beginning of the month and successfully passed her German exam in the middle of the month! After that, we took it easy and we also had little planned for April.

We now have a date for the installation of our solar panels, in early May. We paid the advance payment, and there should not be anything to do on our end at this point until it is being installed.

Last month, we had a large expense to help someone in trouble. It turned out that the trouble was easier to resolve than planned, and we already got repaid. I have removed the expense from the budget for now. However, we will keep this money immobilized for now to be safe.

With me going into the office twice a week, we are now seeing a need for a second car. This is something I really wanted to avoid, but we are running out of solutions. Once our son goes to school in September, it will not be possible to stick to one car. And since we have no nearby public transportation (10 minutes from home by foot). But the used car market has gone nuts since the last time I checked (multiple years ago).

So, this is going to set us back. I still hope that in the future, we can go back to a single car.

Overall, thanks to the bonus and paying no taxes this month, we still saved 44.7% of our income this month. This is a good result considering we paid for the solar panels.

Individual taxation

As you probably have seen, Swiss citizens accepted a change to switch to individual taxation. This means that spouses will now be taxed separately instead of jointly. I do not believe we will have to fill out two tax declarations; this will hopefully be baked into the tax software, and it will impact the taxes we pay.

On the one hand, I am thrilled about this change because it will eliminate one of the unfairnesses of marriage in Switzerland. Being married or not should not impact taxes.

On the other hand, I am pissed about this change because we will pay even more taxes. We are in the category that will be impacted negatively since we have one large income and one small income. We already pay a ton in taxes (50% of our expenses), so I am not looking forward to paying even more. This will slow down our progress towards financial independence.

To help you, I wrote a calculator for the individual taxation.

What about you? What do you think about this change?

Expenses

Here are the details of our expenses in March 2026:

Overall, we spent 32,140 CHF this month. Without the solar panels, this amounts to 8640 CHF.

As mentioned before, the main expense this month was for the solar panels. We paid the advance payment of about 23,500 CHF. The timing is excellent that it falls on the month of the bonus. With my bonus, I bought the new Star Trek LEGO. I tend to buy something cool with each bonus.

We had the first surprise about the house. One of the heaters did not work. We used a local company to find the issue, but they could not find a viable solution even after coming three times (which is costing us a lot). Then, we asked another local company, and they proposed a solution that is guaranteed to work. We will go with this solution, but overall, it is going to cost us again about 3,000 CHF to fix the heater. The heater itself is fine, but it does not receive any warm water.

This year is really going to be house-focused, but we knew it might be the case when buying an older house. I should be mentally prepared to not save any money this year, which is difficult since it would be the first year in a long time.

Other expenses are quite reasonable. We went a bit overboard on the food budget this month. We should have been more careful, but this is not a huge difference compared to the rest.

Except for the heating, I am satisfied with our expenses this month.

2026 Goals

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

Overall, the results are quite mixed.

Our expenses are obviously going up with several unexpected expenses like the heating and the construction of the shelves. Our income is not great to look at in March since it includes the bonus and will go down over time. Our savings rate is quite good so far.

We are now close to the completion of the solar panels. We have paid the advance payment and have a date for delivery and installation in early May. I expect that by the end of May, we will start producing solar power! Then, the only thing remaining will be to get back the money from the single remuneration.

I have been running Windows on my desktop and laptop for a while. But all my servers are on Linux. After the recent changes and news for Windows, I got fed up with their stupid changes and switched these two computers to Linux. I should have done it a long time ago. This will save us money in the long term because we will never have to buy a Windows license again.

I am also looking at other bills we could cut, but there is very little to optimize in our budget, I think. We have very few subscriptions left that we could optimize. Some of the things left that we could optimize are mostly impulse buys that we should sometimes avoid. But overall, our expenses are good.

I missed a few workouts this month because I was a bit sick. I apparently got a bit behind on my sleep, and with the cold coming back, I got sick. So, I took it easy during this time. With going back to the office, it will be very difficult for me to meet the cardio workout goal this year. And the same for the steps; with two days a week without a treadmill, I cannot expect to pass this goal.

Overall, I am fine with the progress of our goals. Some of the goals are not going well, but it is either because they were poorly planned or because of the return to the office.

FI Ratio

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

Overall, our net worth went down this month. So, our financial independence ratio also went down. But we only lost 0.4%. Since we are quite far from financial independence and working on many home projects, this is a good result.

We saved some cash this month, but our shares went down, and so did our gold. So, overall, our net worth has gone down slightly. But this is fine because we have extra cash, which we will need in the coming months. And our shares are here for the long term; I am not worried about short-term movements.

We are still not investing much these days because we know that some large bills are coming our way. We are still expecting the bill for the land register. Also, we will have to pay the final installment of the solar panels in May. So, our cash is currently too high.

One thing I know that we have to be careful about is the expenses for the house. We have many projects for the house. Some of these projects are small, but some are larger. And we need to be careful that we spread these projects carefully over many years. We will also try to focus on DIY when possible, but DIY takes time, and time is currently what we lack most.

Next to that, I am also worried about the need for a second car. This will increase our expenses as well, and as a result, it means we need to accumulate more money in retirement.

Overall, our FI ratio is doing well. But I am getting less hopeful about the future since we are not saving much money for stocks.

The blog

Not much new happened visibly on the blog this month. But there were many things to be done under the hood.

This month, I had a big technical issue on the blog. One of the plugins screwed up massively and messed up hundreds of articles. I could find a fix to restore the data, and after speaking with the maintainers, they also fixed the plugin. However, this wasted hours of time for me and made me realize how much of a danger these plugins represent.

I am already very lean on plugins, but I decided to cut them down even more. I replaced the two plugins I was using for the contact form by doing it myself. Then, I could replace another email plugin with less than 10 lines of code. And finally, I replaced the plugin that allows subscribing to comments. In total, I now got rid of four more plugins. I only have five plugins left, which is quite low as far as WordPress installations go. Normally, all the features are the same as before.

Talking about plugins, unfortunately, WPML struck again this month. Somehow, it managed to screw up all new French translations and removed all quotes from it. I wasted so much time on getting this fixed. The plugin had improved in the past, but this reminds me how much I hate WPML. Unfortunately, I have not found any viable alternatives to which I could transfer existing articles.

I also integrated some of the comparators and calculators directly into the articles to make it easier for people to use them. As I did that, I improved the system to make the comparators and calculators slightly faster and remove an old dependency.

This year, I also want us to try to spend less money on the blog. We have been less careful with the blog money than we have with our own money. We had a business subscription to ChatGPT, for instance, but we already got Gemini for free in our Google Workspace subscription, so switching to Gemini will save us a significant amount of money this year. Therefore, we will study what we spent last year and be more mindful in 2026.

We are still waiting for the review of the German translation of the e-book. Other than that, we have nothing special planned for the blog for next month.

Next Month – April 2026

April 2026 should be relatively quiet. We want to continue to take it easy. We will have a few things planned, like Easter. But overall, it should be pretty much uneventful.

Financially, April should be a decent month. We do not expect any taxes yet (they should come again in May). If we buy the new car already in April, it will be another month without savings. And if we receive the land register bill, it will deplete our cash. So, plenty of ifs for the next month!

What about you? How was March 2026?