Grüezi from Switzerland!

[SalutNounou]

Hello everybody!

My name is Julien, i'm French and 30 years old. I just moved to Switzerland in Zürich with my girlfriend at the beginning of the year.
I have always been used to save a lot (well, i considered saving 40-50% of my income a lot before discovering ERE), but my discovery of the website two months ago motivated me to push even farther.
By the way, thank you for the website, this is a tremendous amount of useful insights.

I am starting to write on the forum to keep me accountable and stay motivated.
Switzerland has a lot of advantages :
-Much bigger salaries compared to the rest of Europe. I almost doubled my salary as a software developer when I came here from Paris.
-Relatively low taxes. Here you pay what you use. Let us take garbage as an example : the way you pay for garbage disposal is by paying a tax on garbage bags : 20chf for 10 bags. So the more you wate, the more you pay.
-Marvelous Landscapes : you would really need a lack of imagination to get bored here.

However, it comes with its drawbacks :
-The cost of life is super high. In one sense this is reflecting the taste of swiss people for quality products, which is good (hopefully when you really need something, if it is good quality you only have to buy it once).
- But for instance, food is really really overpriced. I would understand if there was a swiss-value-added something to pay for, but a big part of the food is imported and the price is multiplied by 2 or 3 as soon as the frontier is crossed. For instance bananas are worth 3chf/kg which is twice as much as the price in Paris, from the same importer with the same labels. And don't get me started on the meat. But i guess Swiss have money so they don't bother being milked.
-Overall, as soon as you need someone to do something for you (car reparation, it,...), it is going to cost you an arm : this has a very good benefit that you learn very quickly to be self reliant if you wanna save money.

Overall the benefits far exceed the drawbacks!


I don't want to expand much more because i will open soon a journal, but guys i hope to hear a lot from you in the future!

Grüezi!

[jacob]

Gruetziwohl!

I spent 4 years in Basel in grad school and I still think Switzerland is the sanest and most rational country in the world, that is, except for the Basel(*) dialect of Swiss-German which always struck me as some weird incomprehensible cross between Klingon and Swedish But, indeed, lots of smart choices, honest people (as far as I encountered) and fairly direct democracy. I remember you could either pay the "fire tax" or simply go serve 6 months at the fire station, your choice. I'd set up base if only English was the 5th language ... or I was better at Klingon or Swedish.

(*) Pretty sure that Basel-dytsch is the worst ;-P Even native Germans have a hard time with it.

[SalutNounou]

Yes I can relate to the language problem... Even if i love learning languages (i speak english, italian, french, polish and a good amount of german), I have a hard time understanding Züritüütsch. And i heard that Basel-dytsch is even more incomprehensible

And indeed i forgot to add the direct democracy in the advantages section, but this is a huge one. Very refreshing, comparing to the enormous nonsense that I witnessed in France the last 10-20 years...

[Jean]

The swiss price added is partly due to the fact that people working at the supermarket earn 4k a month. Animal welfare law are quite severe too.