September 2020 – More furniture!

September 2020

Not much happened to us in September 2020 except for a few dinners and lunches here and there. It was a good month, but an expensive month.

I almost completed physiotherapy for my knees. But I do not see any significant difference. The only thing that I realized was that I need to get back to doing sport. I will continue the exercises given by the therapist and add a few more I can do at home. But now, I am dreading the incoming bill for the therapy.

We continued our furniture shopping this month for the new house. We were able to find quite a few things this month. Currently, we only need three more items before we move in. And we still need to buy two things for the garden, but these can wait until next year if we do not find something good this year.

But after the massive amount of expenses that we will spend this year and probably early next year, we will have to be careful with our finances once we are properly settled. I am starting to get worried about the increase in our expenses this year. And I will have to sync up our goals with Mrs. The Poor Swiss, who has many expensive projects for the new house.

We also started looking for people to take back our lease for our current apartment. We had several visits, and a few people were interested. Hopefully, they will sign the lease and release us from our apartment. Otherwise, we will have to pay three extra months. I dislike the lease contracts in Switzerland. They are so painful to deal with.

We still managed to save 28% of our income this month, so not all is lost. But this level of spending is not sustainable. Our income this month is entirely average.

Expenses

Let’s see the details of our expenses in September 2020:

• Insurances: 795 CHF. Average. Only our health insurance.
• Transportation: 333 CHF. Above average. I had to replace my car battery.
• Communications:70 CHF. Average. Internet and one online service.
• Personal: 3051 CHF. Well Above Average. Mostly furniture for the new house.
• Food: 348 CHF. Slightly above average.
• Apartment: 1478 CHF. Average. Just our rent and the quarterly power bill. It went down by 11 CHF this month because of the interest rate reduction in March.
• Taxes: 2’467 CHF. Average. Taxes for the three different levels of taxes.

In total, we spent 8543 CHF this month. This amount is much higher than what we are used to. But it’s mostly explained by all the furniture we have been buying.

The good news is that we are slowly finishing buying what we need for the new house. The most significant items remaining are the washing machine and dryer. But aside from these two items, the rest should be fairly reasonable.

I have decided to cancel some small complementary health insurance policies for next year. This change should save us something like 30 CHF per month starting next year. It is not much, but they were not useful anyway.

I am glad we finally moved our average for our food budget back to around 400 CHF. Ideally, I would like it even lower. But 400 CHF for two persons with what we eat is reasonable.

2020 Goals

Let’s take a look at our goals at the end of the month:

Overall, our goals are still doing good. But the goal for our expenses is failed already. Unless we do not spend anything during the next three months, we will not make it. It is a bit disappointing since we started the year very well in that regard. But it was to be expected given the purchase of the house.

Other than that, there is not much news for our goals. I reached the traffic goal for the blog in time for its due date this month! It is a significant milestone to be able to achieve it. I will not update this goal until next year.

Net Worth

We can also take a look at our net worth during the month:

Our net worth jumped by another 2000 CHF during September 2020. We saved about 3000 CHF this month from our income. But the stock market did not play very nicely this month.

But overall, our net worth is going well. Once our expenses have stabilized, I am expecting us to be able to save more money each month.

Last month, I said that there were some mistakes in my net worth graph. I have now fixed them retroactively. Therefore, the graph looks much smoother.

For people wondering, we still have not paid anything substantial for the house this month (except pieces of furniture, of course). Therefore, our purchase is not reflected in our net worth. I only paid 250 CHF this month as taxes for the withdrawal of the third pillar. For now, the money is just being moved around.

The Blog

Overall, it was a good month for the blog. The traffic went up this month, which is excellent. On the other hand, the monetization went down. While I welcome the side income, I am not yet focused on that. So for now, I do not mind the lower income here.

I have not done anything extraordinary on the blog this month. But I started an experiment to translate some articles in French. I want to see if this can work well in the future. For now, I have translated about ten articles. And I plan to translate ten more articles next month. I have only translated the articles themselves, not the entire blog. If I see that this starts to bring in some traffic, I will begin translating the whole blog.

Translating the blog in French was one of my ideas to increase the traffic on the blog. We will see how it goes. For now, it has zero effects on the traffic, but that is to be expected. It will take a while for the new articles to rank on Google.

I am mostly done with my updating effort for the year. Except for small edits here and there, I will not update articles normally. But I am already thinking about doing the same thing next year. I know that more articles need updating.

Except for that, nothing special happened on this blog this month. The traffic was quite good, but there was no particular event regarding the traffic.

Next month will be the third anniversary of the blog! I will make a full update on everything that happened (that I can remember!) on the blog during the third year.

Here are the three most-read articles of the month:

1. Wise vs Revolut. The usual winner.
2. Best phone plan in Switzerland. Very nice result for a post about Switzerland.
3. Online Shopping in Switzerland. This post has been doing quite well since the beginning of COVID-19, and now it is slowly going down.

What about you? Which of my articles was your favorite in September 2020?

Next Month – October 2020

That’s it for September 2020. Let’s see what we have planned for October 2020. Next month, we have very few events scheduled. We still have a few dinners and lunches planned, but nothing out of the ordinary.

We will continue to shop for furniture next month. Hopefully, we will be able to get it done by the end of October 2020. It means that this will add again to our expenses. And we have a colossal dentist bill for Mrs. The Poor Swiss that I delayed until the next month. If the physiotherapy bill comes simultaneously, it will be a costly month.

Overall, October 2020 should be very quiet for us. But we will still spend too much next month. Hopefully, it will be cheaper than this month, but I am not hopeful about that.

What about you? How was September 2020 for you?

Recommended reading

• More articles about Updates
• October 2019 – Holidays
• Sixth year of blogging – Summary
• Mid Year Review of My 2018 Goals