September 2024 – Got a new car

September 2024

Overall, September 2024 was a pleasant month. We had a few things with friends and family, but not too many, a good balance. I even managed to go back to Europa Park with my siblings, which is something we had not done in a while. It was really fun. We had a wonderful game meat lunch with our friends.

And, we celebrated our son’s third birthday this month. We had a really good time. We did a smaller event this year and decided we would do a larger one for his fourth birthday.

As hinted last monthly update, we changed our car. Our car was getting too old. And Mrs. The Poor Swiss really wanted something more modern and more comfortable. After some research, we opted for a Cupra New Formentor, new. We know it is not a frugal car, but it was a compromise between me and my wife. After driving for a month, we are both happy with the model, even though we are talking about a car worth more than 50’000 CHF with the options.

We hesitated a lot between different options for financing the car. The first thing we decided was that the car would be bought by the blog company and not by us. This allows us to save more money because it means we can deduct these expenses, and we can also then deduct the fuel. On the other hand, we must add some virtual salary since the company now gives us the use of the car. Ideally, the best way to finance the car would have been a margin loan. However, at this point, we do not yet have enough in our company broker account to get a margin loan. So, we opted for a leasing. We did not look a lot, but the few car loans we could find had higher interest rates than a leasing. Since this is a company, we can deduct the leasing (contrary to personal taxes).

Other than that, it was a nice standard month, with significantly colder weather. We have prepared our chimney to start some fires again to heat our living room. And we will soon have to turn on the heating system. The transition between the warm and the cold was rapid this year. It almost feels like we did not have any autumn.

Financially, we could save a third of our income this month. Ideally, we want to save more per month. But in a month when we spend too much and our income is average, this is really not so bad either.

Expenses

Here are the details of our expenses in September 2024:

In total, we spent 12’033 CHF this month. Without taxes, this amounts to 5490 CHF. Our target is to spend less than 5200 CHF per month on average.

I was thinking we would be below our goal this month. But ultimately, we are actually significantly higher than I expected. Again, we have many small things adding up. And of course, the new 920 CHF per month for the two days of daycare are weighing a lot. We also paid for the first semester of kindergarten, another 200 CHF.

We had a few exceptional expenses. Our chimney was cleaned, as is the rule every year. We also paid for the power for the house. And we had the usual yearly dentist checkup for my wife. But most of the expenses are smaller and simply pile up. The list is too long to detail, but for instance, I bought a new wallet and my wife started a German course. I also had a day in Europa Park.

Our goal was to spend less per month than last year. But I do not think we can do that anymore. Obviously, the new daycare fees are not helping. However, this is mostly because we are less careful than before. If we want to spend less, we will have to be thinking more about each expense.

Overall, I am a bit disappointed by how much we spent in September. I was thinking we could do better this month.

2024 Goals

Here is the status of our goals by the end of September 2024:

Overall, progress on our goal is all over the place this month.

As explained in the previous section, we are not close to meeting our goals to spending less than last year. In fact, we are very likely to miss that goal. Thinking about next year already, some expenses will not be duplicated. However, I am sure some new expenses will come to replace them.

We are also extremely unlikely to increase our income by 5% this year. We will likely end closer to 1%. But this is already a great result. I did not account really well for the lower returns of the blog. Indeed, we are now getting a salary for the blog, and this salary is lower than the average returns of the blog.

And our savings rate goal is likely to fall short as well. So, our financial goals are not doing terribly well. However, our finances themselves are good, so this is all fine.

This month, I missed two workouts, but I have kept up with their intensity. I am thrilled with the results. I should really not have let myself slack off with these workouts over the years. Next month, I plan one extra improvement, so this goal is definitely in a good place.

On average, I managed to walk more this month than the previous month. This is great because I even went to the office twice so I could not use my treadmill. I still wish to use it more. My goal is to be able to walk all day, but this may take a while, and it is not always to deal with meetings at work. With the poorer weather, we have walked less outside than the previous months, so this is compensated by the treadmill.

Finally, our energy consumption went back down again this month. We used almost 20% less power than last month. This makes sense since we do not need our A/C anymore.

Overall, our financial goals are not doing too well. But our personal goals are doing well.

FI Ratio

Here is the progress of our FI Ratio as of September 2024:

Our FI Ratio went up this month to 31.24%. This is a nice increase of 1% since last year.

Our FI ratio is driven by three different factors:

• The value of our investments.
• The USD/CHF exchange rate, since we compute our net worth in CHF.
• Our average expenses since our target is based on average expenses of the last 12 months.

We spent almost the same as we did last year. Therefore, our target did not move.

Our portfolio went up significantly during this month with a very nice return. Only our Swiss domestic bias ETF did not perform as well.

The USD was very volatile this month. It started going up, but it went down when the Swiss National Bank announced lowering the interest rate again.

Overall, I am happy about the progress towards Financial Independence.

The Blog

Continuing on the direction of the last few months, I did a few extra refinements to the blog.

I hired a designer on Fiverr to get new covers for my two e-books (the free one and the paid one). I should have done that a long time ago because it makes a huge difference. And I can use nice-looking images on the blog for these two e-books.

The second thing I did was to redo entirely my free e-book. The design of the e-book was a bit stale, and the content needed refreshing as well. So, I redid it from scratch and added more information into it. One side effect is that I did not yet translate the e-book into French and German. But it should come at some point.

In the second half of the month, I had very little time for the blog and was barely able to keep up with the daily tasks. As a result, I am now very low on articles, and it may be a struggle next month.

Next Month – October 2024

So far, we have a few events planned for next month, like the traditional Bénichon from our canton. Other than that, it should be a quiet month, I think. I have nothing planned for the blog. And financially, it should be an entirely standard month.

What about you? How was September 2024?

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