November 2025 – A standard month

November 2025

In November, we only did a few things, but it was nice. We still do not have much time on our hands, but we managed to do most of the work we wanted in the backyard.

I also managed to finish all the work I wanted to do in the office for now. The office is still not perfect, but the important pieces are here. On the other hand, we have not even started on the workshop.

We have not gotten any more bills for buying our house. I expect the two important bills (notary and land register) to come in early next year. We are sitting on a bit too much cash at this point, but I want to keep it available for these bills.

On selling our house, we still have not fully emptied the old house, but we are close to it. And we have hired a company that will do the cleaning for us. It is not the most frugal way of doing it, but spending an entire day cleaning is not something I am looking for. The first week of December, we will make sure that the house is entirely empty. And then we will do the visit of the house with the new owners, and then we should be good.

Financially, it was a good month. This month, we had two extra pieces of income. First, I receive some shares from my employer. And second, we got back some money from taxes we overpaid last year. And more importantly, we spent more reasonably this month.

As a result, we saved about 48% of our income this month. This is a nice result.

Expenses

Here are the details of our expenses in November 2025:

In total, we spent 13026 CHF this month. Without taxes, this amounts to 5269 CHF. This is a reasonable level of spending, given that we bought some things we should not have to buy again. For instance, we bought some bar stools for the bar in our kitchen.

This month, I bought a chainsaw. The house we got had an old stock of wood (I estimate it to be about 6 cubic meters). I want to cut it entirely before buying new wood, but I need a chainsaw for that. Most of the wood is in good condition and can be burned directly. This will save us from having to buy wood for at least a year. And this will save some space in our backyard.

Other than that, other expenses are not really remarkable. I had to take the bus on several occasions simply because my wife needed the car. I truly hope we do not have to take a second car, but this month was a bit complicated on that.

As I mentioned, we paid too much in federal taxes in 2024. They paid us back about 2000 CHF this month. It feels good to have some positive numbers in this account. Of course, it still does not make much of a difference given the amount of taxes we are paying. We can expect slightly lower numbers next year since we have moved to a cheaper municipality, but the federal and cantonal taxes will not move.

Overall, I am satisfied with our level of spending this month.

2025 Goals

Here is the status of our goals by the end of November 2025:

Overall, the progress on our goals is quite mixed. We are almost at the end of the year, and we can see that some goals are very likely to be met while others will be impossible to meet.

Financially, we are doing fine. We will likely not meet our income goal, but we will have increased our income this year. We also know that our spending is too high for our goal. But our savings rate is great this year. I did not find another bill to optimize yet.

I did not do as well as I would have liked with my workout goals. I have to be honest and say I procrastinated too much on these goals and skipped a few workouts. Likewise, I also did not walk enough this month, both outside and inside. Next month, I will need to break this trend.

Early this month, we stopped the pool, so we are back to a standard level of water usage for the month. This also means less power used since we do not have to heat it. On the other hand, we have started heating the house now, and this increases the power consumption there through the heat pump.

Overall, I am still happy about our goals. Buying the new definitely impacted them, but we will try to correct the direction next year.

FI Ratio

Here is the progress of our FI ratio as of November 2025:

Overall, our FI ratio has slightly risen this month.

Seeing the amount of taxes we pay per year (already 64K CHF this year), I doubt that using our current expenses as a proxy is a good enough estimation of how much we will spend in retirement. Currently, we spend about 70K CHF per year without taxes, so planning for a retirement at 100K CHF makes more sense for us.

Therefore, I will focus on the 100K CHF retirement for now. We may have to adapt this slightly for the new house, but we should have a significant margin of safety currently. If we have to get a second car, this may be a different story.

On this ratio, we have improved by about 0.6% in a month. This is a nice result thanks to some savings. The stock market itself was pretty flat in November.

Normally, we should see another nice bump in December once we receive the rest of the house payment. And then we should see another drop in early 2026 when we have to pay the land register for the new house.

Overall, I am happy with our progress. I am looking forward to some more stability.

The blog – Meetup and Christmas pause

Only a few things happened on the blog this month. I wanted to start a new project for the blog, but in the end, other things came in the way and my motivation was low, so nothing special happened.

In December, we will have a meetup in Fribourg. It may not be too late to register if you are interested. You can check out the meetup information on the forum.

On a small note, I got an interview on a Swiss German website. You can read the interview (in German) on Sichtweisenschweiz. I also got contacted by the Swiss French television for a small interview, but no details are yet available.

As usual, I will not publish new articles over Christmas. This means that there will not be any article on the 23rd and the 30th of December. The next article will start on January 6th.

I have also completed the next upgrade of the servers with 10G networking. The next step is getting a UPS and then the servers will be in a good state.

My motivation and time levels are quite low as I am writing these lines, so I do not have any new projects for the blog happening next month. I hope I will be able to get more motivated next year.

Next Month – December 2025

December 2025 should be relatively quiet. I do not see anything big happening (except for Christmas, of course). We usually only have two small celebrations over Christmas. And we may do something for New Year’s Eve too.

Financially, I do not expect anything big either on the expenses side. We may see the notary and land register bills coming in, but I expect them to come even later. On the other hand, we should receive the rest of the money for selling the house. This will make a nice bump in our net worth.

What about you? How was November 2025?