Mastering Personal Finance in Switzerland with Baptiste Wicht (The Poor Swiss) (#10)

Episode Summary:

In this episode, Baptiste and I explore the journey toward financial independence and how to optimize wealth while living in Switzerland. Baptiste shares practical advice on frugality, budgeting, and investing, providing listeners with actionable tips to take control of their finances.

Expect to learn about Baptiste’s top frugality strategies, his favourite budgeting tools, and why he believes the traditional advice of keeping a 3-6 month cash reserve might not always apply. We also dive into investment strategies, his approach to portfolio diversification, and his views on real estate vs. stocks as investment options. Lastly, we talk about the growth of The Poor Swiss blog, how Baptiste balances it with his full-time job, and how he manages to stay objective despite sponsorship opportunities.

About Baptiste Wicht: Financial Blogger and Creator of The Poor Swiss

Baptiste Wicht is the mind behind The Poor Swiss, a blog dedicated to simplifying personal finance for Swiss residents. Known for his practical advice and objective product reviews, Baptiste has become a trusted voice in Switzerland’s financial space. His mission is to help others gain financial clarity and achieve their money goals through frugality, smart investments, and thoughtful planning.

Full Transcript

Read the complete transcript of my conversation with Baptiste, where we dive deep into personal finance strategies tailored for life in Switzerland. This section is ideal for revisiting key points or exploring the episode in detail.

Mike: Baptiste, good morning. Thank you for joining me.

Baptiste: Good morning. Glad to be here.

Mike: You have been on this journey for quite some time.

Your blog says you have been writing, you’ve been commenting this blog since 2017. What made you, how and why did you start this journey?

Baptiste: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a good question. So the journey changed over time. So as you said, I started the blog about seven years ago, almost exactly to the day. And in the beginning I just started the blog as a journal to kind of get myself accountable because my finances were not as good as I would like them to be.

Basically I was not, I had a decent salary even as a PhD student, but I was not saving much money. And I was thinking like looking into it I discovered the concept of savings rate, which is a very simple metric, but kind of told me that over the time as my income increased, actually my savings rate decreased, which was not very good situation.

So I started from there and started improving it. And as I [00:01:00] learned how to improve it, I found this fire movement, the fire Financial independence and early movement. And I kind of like the idea. So I tried to put that into my journey as well. And over time it was more and more tied to this story.

And as I learned things that I tried to share back to the community putting that on my blog. And I’ve been doing that ever since.

Mike: In your blog, you mentioned that you went from saving about 10 percent to all the way up to about 50 percent of your. income each month. That’s a huge jump. How long did it take you to make that, to make that change?

Baptiste: So at least from in seven years, that from 4 percent to 50%, but I think it took me three years. But it’s not only saving more, it’s also earning more. So, when I started, I was a PhD student. Now I’m a software engineer. In the industry, so that also makes a huge difference in terms of income [00:02:00] that has to be taken into account.

So it’s both being like much more How to say much more careful with the expenses and much more like mindful. And then also having a significant income on top of that, that definitely helps.

Mike: When it comes to saving, when you looked at your own spending habits, what are some of the things which were sort of the low hanging fruit to, to change, which really helped boost your amount you could save each month?

Baptiste: I think there were two. So, first of all, I was not tracking my expenses very well. So a lot of the things when, when I started tracking well and actually look at the overall view, I saw some things that were not really, not really good. There were many subscriptions I didn’t really need. Many things I did not really, I Let’s say my health insurance at the time, I just had one, but I didn’t really look for, for a better one each year.

Same with all the insurances. So I started to look at everything one by one and try to find a better deal for like, [00:03:00] The same kind of, coverage. I was also that my my groceries were like way above average for a single man. So I looked into it and then I found out, okay, I can use switch from like one shop to the other.

In that case, I switched from micro to little and I make like a huge difference in my in my spending at a time. So that things like that, but it needed kind of a, almost complete over overall.

Mike: Was it difficult? I mean, when you, it’s a big change to your life, right? It’s not just to decide, I mean, little to, migo to little, I guess, if they’re close to each other, that’s a pretty easy switch.

But I mean, some of these things aren’t so easy to change. Did you find it difficult to make some of these changes?

Baptiste: No, I don’t think so because I didn’t make anything really drastic. So I kind of kept living the same life, but being more mindful of expenses, I spent less for the same. So it was not really drastic.

I didn’t cut anything really. The only thing I was a bit more careful is about [00:04:00] computer stuff. I’m kind of a geek. So, I often like shop for. Computers, computer parts, things like that. And in the end I had like a kind of a crazy setup at home and realized, okay, that’s not sustainable in the longterm.

So cutting there was kind of the only thing I really cut. But not to zero. I still allow myself quite a lot of it, but significantly less than you in the past.

Mike: I suppose one of the principles of being frugal is consciously spending. So if you love computer stuff and it means something to you, you don’t necessarily have to remove it from your life.

Okay.

Baptiste: Exactly. Yeah. But so sometimes you also have to think, you have to be conscious, but also think a bit longer even though you, you like it, sometimes it doesn’t always make sense to just order on the spot. And these days it’s like, it’s so easy to just go and Galaxus, order something. And it’s already too late to think about it.

I mean, that’s the way it works. E commerce works. They make it easy just for a reason because then they make money. But sometimes it’s difficult to like say no or like later.

Mike: I think [00:05:00] it’s actually probably a good thing that there is no Amazon Switzerland. At least we have to go to Amazon Germany. So it’s the one extra step you have to think about before that one click purchase.

Baptiste: Yeah, I think so. But. Now, honestly, I’m starting to think that Galaxys is kind of the Amazon of its own. There’s like almost everything there. Sometimes I even order some canned food or things like that there. So it’s like, it’s starting to be almost everything. But it’s true, compared to like the US, where you can really order anything you want on Amazon.

It’s just there sometimes even on the same day. I think it’s an advantage. It shouldn’t be more difficult to order things. Thanks. Should get slower and people will actually spend less money.

Mike: So if someone came to you and said, Hey, I’m looking for a suggestion, I have a bunch of money coming in, but every month I don’t have any leftover.

What are some, what are some of the practical first steps I should take to really figure out where all my money is going?

Baptiste: So I [00:06:00] think the most practical one is actually to track down everything like for one entire month you put down every single expense you put on anything on a piece of paper or a spreadsheet or whatever, it doesn’t really matter.

And then at the end of the month you see exactly where everything goes and ideally you start from the big tickets like, can I save on the health insurance? Can I use a cheaper one? Can I save on the The, then the other insurance, can I save on food? Can I save on eating out? And if you realize like 20% of your budget is going to restaurants, maybe you are, maybe you are going out too much for, for drinks, for, for food, things like that.

So look at the big tickets first. The, the other one is like either big tickets or recurring ones. Things that happen all the time. That subscriptions. not always easier to cut them, but we have like so many these days, everything is on a subscription. So we have to be careful about actually needing them and actually trying to paying less for them.

Mike: The problem with budgeting is that it is very time consuming. What [00:07:00] do you, what tools do you use to allow you to continue budgeting, but not have a huge time consumption in doing so?

Baptiste: Yeah. So I think you have to be very, like, very Precise at the beginning of the journey. But then you can be a little less precise these days.

For instance, when I spend some cash, I just write down the amount I get out of the ATM and I, let’s say I always wrote 300, I put 300 in my budget and I don’t really keep track. Okay. We went to this, like, this small market and we bought this and this. No, I don’t do that level of precision anymore.

So that kind of allows you to save some time. And for me using credit cards is really. It makes it easier because I actually do my budget only once a month. So, I looked at my credit cards and my debit cards. I put everything from there into my budget application and then it’s basically done. It doesn’t take that much time.

And that way I don’t have to think about it every single day. Like, okay, I just bought this. I need to write it down. I just do it once a [00:08:00] month and I’m done.

Mike: Which budget application do you use?

Baptiste: It’s maybe not a good example because I’ve wrote my own as a, as a side as a side project. I wrote it like almost 10 years ago.

I still using it to this day. It’s called Budget Warrior. It’s, it’s not very user friendly because it was really made for me. But it’s, it’s available online.

Mike: Have you ever assessed different budgeting apps out there?

Baptiste: Not really, no, because I, if I was not using that, I would use a spreadsheet. And I, I’ve, I’ve made a few for my readers on my blog.

I have like a simple one, an advanced one. I think that’s more than enough. And then you can, it’s easy to build like features on top of it. The only thing that’s going to be very difficult. I mean, I would say the only added value of a budget application, if there is a good one, will be if they can parse your like credit card transactions and put them on your budget.

I think that will be really the only added value. And [00:09:00] I think there are a few that can do that in Switzerland, but we are way, way behind for banks as like digital things. So, unfortunately, we’re not well integrated, but I would say that’s the only. Think I would pay for in a budget application.

Otherwise a free one is more than enough.

Mike: I committed to YNAB for a year. Because that’s, if you Google best budgeting app, this one consistently comes up because of the philosophy. And I thought I’ll give it a go. And you’re completely right. The fact that Switzerland does not allow you to import transactions means there is still a huge amount of manual labor and whilst I appreciate the philosophy and level of granularity it goes into, it ends up, for me, maybe I just did it wrong, but it takes so much time that I thought this is not worth the amount of time that I’m spending.

It is great to look at your finances, but I thought the trade off is every week hours, I think in the end, I never got better at it. Yeah.

Baptiste: Okay. Yeah. No, I think I [00:10:00] spend like at most half an hour per month for my budget. So, and I don’t really, I don’t, Actually, I relatively enjoy it because I like numbers and stuff and I like putting data into, into the system, but it’s not like, it’s, it’s still like copying from one sheet to the other.

It’s not really, really interesting. But yeah, and some of these applications that they have, they also track, like if you want to transfer from your account A to your account B, you have to track this here, but I don’t care. When I, when I spend money, if I spend it for my debit card, my cash or my credit card, I just don’t care.

I spend it. It’s the same for me. So at the end of the month, I don’t want to know where the money came from. I just want to go where it went to. So, I don’t want to track every single transaction. Otherwise, as you said, it gets very quickly complicated. And if you have multiple accounts, it’s a, it’s a bit, it’s quickly a nightmare.

Mike: And that’s exactly where it fell apart for me. Every single time you move, you know, you set [00:11:00] up your, you try to be smart and you set up your Automatic movement of money each month to different accounts and every single time you’d have to enter in which accounts you moved it to Anyway, I have a yeah, I have a beef with YNAB even though the internet seems to love it But I’ll park it there for now

Baptiste: Yeah, I’m not convinced either.

Mike: When it comes to budgeting in general, I mean, you’ve been doing it so long that it takes you half an hour per month. If someone’s just starting, how do you think they should go ahead and think about the amount of money they should be trying to save?

Baptiste: That’s a very good question. I don’t think there is like a rule for how much you want to save.

It kind of depends on your goals. Because some people don’t really have like long term goals. Some people, they just want to save for like their yearly holidays for, I don’t know, three weeks in in Haiti or something like that. And once they’ve done that, the, the good I, I would say it makes sense for most people to still kind of think a little about their retirements.

So I will, I will say [00:12:00] that as long as you can, the minimum amount you should save is the amount of your 3A of your third pillar per year. Seems like a good minimum. And then. Save something for your other goals.

Mike: how did you come up with your goals? Cause I agree, but I’ve also struggled with this. How do you know what your goals are?

I mean, yes, I understand. There’s a, there’s a philosophy of, yeah, okay. I mean, I, I, I like mustache and post a lot, the retirement by 40. That’s great. I don’t know what my life is going to be like at 40, whether I want to retire. How do you actually, how did you come up with your, the goals that you have now?

How did you come up with them?

Baptiste: So it, They evolve over time. So I don’t have a framework for that. It’s true that, and I will say that my goal is like early retirement is a big goal that requires a lot of savings that require a lot of dedication and investing as well. But not everybody wants, or even can to be honest, retire early.

To each their own goal maybe it’s to, I don’t know, a goal could be like to buy a house in 10 years or to buy a cabin in [00:13:00] the woods or, you know, To do like a huge trip around the world, but it’s really difficult to know what other people’s goals are, because I think that they are all different. People should not follow the goal of somebody else just because they saw it online.

I mean. Most of my readers don’t want to retire early. Most of my readers, they just want to save more money. And I believe that they are going to save more money to spend more on what matters more for them. If they can save something by going from Migros to Lidl, they will probably spend more on their vacation or their or their trips during the weekend or whatever they spend it to.

So yeah, figure it out. Your goal could simply be like spending more on what you like rather than spending more on what you just have to spend on. I mean, nobody likes paying the health insurance, for instance. I mean, especially in Switzerland, that’s these days, it’s a nightmare to pay that, but so paying less makes a lot of sense.

On the other end, people usually like going to restaurants or going to [00:14:00] that’s where they like to spend money. So it’s kind of moving. From one category to another.

Mike: If you Google what should my. Budgeting strategy B, what, and what you’ll typically find is the standard generic ratio is 40 percent goes towards your basic needs.

30 percent goes towards spending on what you want. And then 20 percent goes towards your savings in general. How do you find that as a principle?

Baptiste: I think it’s a good start if you really don’t know where to start. It’s just like, it’s a good starting point. If you don’t know where to start, 10%, 20%. And if that’s real savings and not like just moving spending around saving, I think already 10 percent of your income is a good milestone and 20 percent is great.

I would say that most people don’t save 20 percent of their money probably even less than 10. I know many people would not just don’t save money.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I don’t, I get as a starting point, it’s good. [00:15:00] Similar to if you. Want to get healthier than following a paleo or vegetarian diet is a good starting point.

It’s a set of rules of which you can follow until you get your feet on the ground. What I don’t like about it is there is no way there is a one size fits all budget for everybody. I mean, how could you possibly say this one thing fits for everyone? It’s depending on your lifestyle, your situation, your age, your location.

There’s so many factors.

Baptiste: Exactly. And like, for instance, for early retirement, if you are like 40, you want to retire in 10 years, there’s no way you can make it if you save less than 50 percent of your income. It’s like, with 20%, you will, will just have like standard retirement. So you also have to adapt this to your goals, your, your, your term, of course, the longer you have the less aggressive you can be.

But yeah, it’s a starting point, but. The goal should be different for everybody. And so people don’t feel really comfortable, like spending less. They feel horrible if they even like switch shop or whatever, or spend less on their on [00:16:00] their car or something else. And some people don’t feel well if they don’t have like private health insurance.

For example, it gets very different for me, like using private health insurance will be stupid. But for some people that will be almost mandatory. So you can. Cannot really cut costs the same way for everybody.

Mike: What advice would you give to someone who is attempting to cut costs and stick to a budget but is failing to do so?

Baptiste: That’s a very good question. I think you kind of have to sit down and see like exactly where is spending in some some people are like it also depends the situations people are in really bad situation with already debts and they’re just like There’s nothing to save in their case because like they have they just paid their debt back their debts and sometimes adding more so that’s critical situations, but in standard situations I think it comes back again to conscious spending.

So you have to be You have [00:17:00] to look at your expenses like the non mandatory one and think like, does that really work towards what I want? I, again, if, if somebody wants to save money to buy a house in 10 years maybe a trip around the world for one month is not working towards the goal and making it.

Two weeks instead of one month could make a huge difference. They have to think like, does it, does it take me to the right direction or not?

Mike: One of the things I personally struggle to factor into my budget is you have your anticipated costs per month, but every so often the unexpected costs happen.

You, you have to go to the hospital, you are in a car accident, something like that. How do you factor in those big unexpected costs? In all those financial setbacks when while still maintaining your overall budget.

Baptiste: So I don’t think it really comes down to budgeting, but I think it definitely you definitely need What usually [00:18:00] is called an emergency fund?

To at least be able to cover that without touching your savings your investments or or whatever but it’s true that if you get like, I don’t know A huge damage to your car that is not insured and you have to pay like six or seven thousand Swiss francs, it will make a huge hole into your budget, but there’s no no way to work around that So that month or even two months your savings would be zero and you will work towards like Putting back the money into the emergency fund after that, but that’s kind of thing you, I think you cannot plan for the unexpected.

You can have like a buffer of cash for this. And I think that’s actually necessary. But planning it in your budget is very difficult. You could like going back to what you said with moving like automated money from accounts, you could budget every month for like 500 Franks of like unexpected expenses.

But then if it’s 5, 000, again, you’re 4, 500 [00:19:00] down. It’s very difficult to really put that into budgeting. I think the emergency fund is the only way to go.

Mike: Tell me if this is too much of a personal question, but what did your buckets of money look like within your bank account?

Baptiste: So I have almost no cash.

So, but, but what I do is that I have my, currently my emergency fund is 10, 000 Swiss francs which is, We choose to be two months of expenses. Now it’s slightly lower, so because we spend more than before, so maybe I should increase that. But that, that’s the, the one I, I chose. I chose like two months of expenses.

And then at the end of the month just after my salary, I pay all my bills and I transfer almost everything that’s left to my investments. Mm-Hmm. To my broker account. So in the end, in my bank account, there’s like. a little buffer on my emergency fund and that’s about it.

Mike: You said two months the typical recommendation for a cash reserve is three to six months.

And I know you think that’s dumb. Why is that too much?

Baptiste: I don’t think that’s necessarily dumb, [00:20:00] but again, that goes back to what you said before. There’s no One size fits all solution because you have to take into account also what you really need to cover. So in Switzerland, even though that’s very expensive, we are kind of well covered, I mean, we have mandatory health insurance.

We have mandatory civil responsibility insurance. We have mandatory household insurance. So a lot of things are insured, so they will not. Be taken out of your pocket or they will be paid back in many cases. We also have like disability insurance rules of unemployment insurance So when you factor all the things we are covered for there’s not that much left that you need to cover and if you add into that that you can also use like After your emergency fund you could also use your credit card to kind of expand it By a month or two In that case, I think like two months is actually, enough You And if you are really comfortable with it, you could have zero months and simply then you use your, your credit card [00:21:00] limit to, to reduce it.

Mike: I bet no financial advisor would ever recommend that to one of their customers.

Baptiste: No, no. Again, as a default, that will be like for only a very aggressive people. But again there’s for some people, they cannot sleep well if they don’t have like six or 12 months of expenses. And that’s where it’s important.

I mean, if you cannot, if you have nightmares at night about that, just because you have two months in your emergency fund, just put six or eight or 12. But I don’t think that three to six, three, I think is reasonable. Six for most people, at least interested in this too much. But again, every situation, every situation is different.

Mike: You said that you now transfer most of your money to your brokerage account. Does that mean essentially all of your savings goes towards stocks and bonds and, and that portfolio. What’s your view before we go down that road? Cause I’m curious. What’s your view on property? Are you working towards buying property?

Baptiste: So we do have a property, but it’s where we live. So that’s not an investment [00:22:00] that just like, we just ran to the bank instead of renting to another landlord. That’s, that’s not really, it’s mostly dead money. I, I’m not entirely convinced about property as an investment because it’s also A lot more work than simply in stocks.

I mean, stocks are lazy. You just buy them and just, just connect the next month and you buy more and that’s, that’s all you have to do. But if you have a property and if you manage it yourself, so I know you have a property, but then you pay a company to manage it and then you kind of lose a lot of the earnings, especially in Switzerland, houses and apartments are like very expensive, even though mortgages are low.

So like the time and the cost necessary to maintain them is a bit too much for me, given like the returns.

Mike: But are the returns significantly higher, given that you’re earning against the money you’ve borrowed?

Baptiste: It’s true that you have a huge leverage. I mean, you have something like 80% from the bank and [00:23:00] if the, if you sell and make a profit, then you can hold the profit is basically for you.

And if you rent, you also rent it out based on, on the relatively lower cost because you only put 20% down. But I, I know a lot of people do like very optimistic competition and they think like they can earn it. A lot more than stocks, but on paper, often you don’t really earn that much, at least in Switzerland, from what I’ve seen, unless you do huge projects.

And that’s also why many Swiss people invest in foreign property like in France, because you can make more money there than here. That’s what I’ve heard, but again, I’m definitely not an expert there.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Talking about Your investment strategy then, how do you choose to allocate your funds, splitting it between stocks, ETFs, Swiss versus international?

How do you decide to do that?

Baptiste: So I, I kind of [00:24:00] studied like the, the subject, look from experts and my profile is extremely simple. It’s two ETFs. That’s what I got. So there’s one world ETF, and one Swiss ETF, which is my own bias. I, I started with 80 percent forward and 20 percent for Swiss. I, I lowered it down to 15, 85, 15, just because over time, also my third pillar has a bit more Swiss stocks in that.

And my second pillar has also grown. So if you look at the complete picture, I have like enough of what I call like the own bias for now. So that makes sense to reduce the Swiss stock CTF. But again, one size fits all probably doesn’t exist. But 80 20 is like a kind of good rule of thumb to get started.

If you feel more comfortable having, like, more sweet stocks, many people do. Many people are highly overrated on their, like, Stocks so that that can be a ba a bad bias of course, but you have to diversify as well. But I would say that 80 20 to 60 40 [00:25:00] are good portfolio. That makes sense for most people.

And of course, that’s on the aggressive side. If you want like less aggress, less aggressive, and more conservative, then you can add bonds to the, or even cash to the

Mike: mix. What are the, if you know them offhand, what are the average returns of your world stock versus the Swiss ETF?

Baptiste: So it’s difficult because there are different currencies.

So my, my world stocks, I think is an average return of 8%. But that’s in us dollar. Once you put that back into Swiss franc, I think that’s something like 6%. And my Swiss stocks, I believe it’s five. I believe, I’m not sure. I took like the most diversified ETFs I could find. And I believe that the best ETFs.

So exactly the, the best. Like the average returns don’t that matter that much to me.

Mike: And the reason that the, the ETF in US dollars is only 6% as opposed to eight in Swiss [00:26:00] Franc, is that that’s just ’cause over time the Swiss Franc is going stronger and stronger against the US dollar.

Baptiste: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it, it, it, even this last few, especially this last year, it went down like, almost 10% I think in a year. Maybe, maybe slightly less now, but yeah, it’s been depreciating for a while. There are ups and downs, of course, but You definitely have to take that into account. Like some people invest like in S& P 500, which is like the, probably the most famous, famous index, and they, they, they claim they can get like a 12 percent average returns, which is probably right in US dollars.

But once you translate that to Swiss dollar, to Swiss dollars, sorry, to Swiss francs, there’s no way you can get that. And again, you will be like even less diversified than on the on like a world ETF.

Mike: Have you ever gone down the road of individual stocks?

Baptiste: Yes. And yes, but for fun. So I, I’ve never been into individual stocks for like really value investing and like [00:27:00] researching stocks because I, it’s way too much work for me.

Like that’s job best left to experts. And I’m not an expert. I don’t want to be one. For me, ETFs is really way to go, but yeah, I’ve had like some Microsoft stocks for instance, because I, I liked the company, but. My research is done. I like the company. That’s basically it. I believe it will do well, but I have no basis for that.

So I’m definitely not going to advise anybody to invest in Microsoft just because of that.

Mike: There is this, there’s this interesting graph that I’ve seen recently, where it looks a bit like a bell curve and on the left hand it’s, and it’s it’s intelligence. And on the left hand side, you’ve got the stupidest people and the right hand side, you’ve got the most genius people.

And the majority of the people are in the middle. And, when it comes to investing, often the people on the furthest to the left and furthest to the right make the same decisions. Someone who looks at the stock market and greatly oversimplifies things is often for just the same conclusion as a person who is the expert.

Whilst most people overthink things to a degree and get it wrong. So maybe if you look at Microsoft and you go, yeah, it [00:28:00] looks good to me. Everyone still uses windows. That might be the smartest decision based on the, yeah. I

Baptiste: think it’s a fair point. Like keeping it easy is very important for investing because otherwise like you, you get crushed by all the complexity and like.

Trying to really research stocks is like, I think it’s, it’s, it’s actually a job. And if you do that on the side, I’m not sure you will do it as well as some actual good managers.

Mike: What about day to day activity when it comes to banking, you have done a lot of comparison in terms of different banks, which one’s optimized.

Which ones would you recommend to people first moving to Switzerland and wanting to start somewhere? Because when you first moved here, Switzerland’s famous for banking, but also it’s like, this is overwhelmingly old and in Swiss German and everything comes in the mail in five different letters.

Baptiste: Yeah.

It’s, it’s a nightmare. I mean, the reputation of Swiss banking is, is really dumb because it’s [00:29:00] the only reason we have this reputation is because we had like banking secrecy in the past and people just, just hiding their money in Switzerland. But The banks are just not good when you come back to other countries, every expat I know, they complaining that Swiss banks are like 10 or 15 years late.

It’s like, it’s actually crazy. So personally I use neon as my main bank account. So I think that’s, that’s a great one for people to start with, especially because the debit card can be used abroad. So if you just like are at Switzerland, you can get it and you can also use it to spend back in your own country.

If you still go there, for instance, as an expat. And it’s very useful also to shop on online. Sometimes the problem is that depending on your origin and your your your kind of permit, you can be limited. Like, US people have a very hard time finding a bank in Switzerland. They’re, they’re very limited to like the big ones.

Or US people in usual, usually when you start just go to UBS and you can try finding something a bit more adapted later, or the. [00:30:00] The Zurich cantonate bank is also quite quite good for us expats, but yeah us people have the worst of times to find like financial services in Switzerland. It’s kind of sad

Mike: I read this interview by neon, maybe it wasn’t even an interview.

Maybe it was just an article they wrote, but it was essentially the question was, how do you manage to keep your. Conversion rates so low when you’re spending internationally. And the answer was, well, our CEO doesn’t make 25 million bucks a year.

Baptiste: Yeah. That’s one way to cut fees. I mean, they have a small team, they have like everything as digital as possible.

They’re definitely not perfect and they still have to make money of course. But yeah. That’s a big difference for like salaries.

Mike: What about credit cards? Switzerland does not seem to be as big in terms of offering different rewards for spending on cards. I’ve certainly noticed that, but you said that you put everything on your credit card.

What do you use there?

Baptiste: We currently use the CertO1 card from Sembra. It’s, [00:31:00] for me, it’s the best, like, free card. So we don’t spend that much on a credit card. So some people could use, like, a non free card, as they use, like, really a lot of money and get, like, a higher cashback. But in most cases, what you want in a credit card is just to be free.

And then you can use it and get a little cash back. I like it also for convenience that I don’t have to carry cash. I can use it everywhere and everything is on the same place when I do my budgeting. But it’s definitely true that if you compare like, especially to the U. S. where they get like 5 percent cashback for 3 months when they, and they get like bonuses when they get the new credit card and they have to get like 5 credit cards to get a good credit card score or whatever.

The game is like really much simple here. You get a free card, you get as much cashback as you can and you’re usually set for a very long time.

Mike: One thing I miss about Australia, because Australia is similar to the U. S. where the credit cards really go hard on like the frequent flyer travel points.

Oh yeah, actually I miss that, especially when you’re in Europe and you tend to travel quite a lot. You’d sign up for a [00:32:00] credit card and they give you the enough points to do, you know, multiple return trips to the other side of the world. It’s insane. So I certainly miss that.

Baptiste: Yeah, it’s really. It’s really something that expats miss because I, I often get the question, but what about the, the miles credit cards?

Yes, you can get the Swills miles and more credit card, but it, when you look at the condition, it’s, it’s, it’s bad. You will have to spend like huge amount of money just to get like one flight. And in the end you will have spent more in fees than what your flight would have given you. So yeah, it’s not really worth it.

I, I don’t really know why the difference is so large. Because they still MasterCard and Visa in the end or American Express, but I don’t really know why the difference is large, but it, it’s, it’s huge. Yeah, you don’t, you don’t really play the credit card game in Switzerland.

Mike: Okay, so you have the credit card, you have the NEON card, do you use any other cards for spending in any other situations?[00:33:00]

Baptiste: No, I used Neon One mostly online in foreign currencies and abroad. Sometimes also just for convenience, I use it in Switzerland just because when I sometimes just pick the wrong card, just like it’s not the world, it’s at most 1%, so it’s not a huge, but yeah,

Mike: that’s the really two cards I use. You don’t use Wise or Revolut or anything like that for international travel?

It’s fine with Neon? It’s fine.

Baptiste: I think it’s fine with NEON. So, Revolute used to be significantly better than NEON because it used to have, like, really the interbank exchange rate. Although you have, you have to be careful about, like, the monthly threshold. But now they’re introduced, like, their Revolute exchange rate, which basically means they do whatever they want.

And from, like, all the testing that have been going on, it’s about almost the same as NEON now which is about 0. 4 percent on top of the the interbank. And why is it also, like, often more expensive than than both of these options.

Mike: [00:34:00] Doesn’t NEON use Wwise for international? Transfer

Baptiste: or transfer?

Yes, not for payments. So if you transfer from your bank account to your bank account, they will use wise and add a fee on top of that. But if you just pay with your card, like in a shop, they will simply use the master the master card in exchange rate.

Mike: How do you go about. Comparing all of these.

So I know you compare cards or you do an analysis on different cards. Do you essentially just create cards, use it for a month, write about it, close the account. How do you do that?

Baptiste: It depends. Some I, I will use them and then actually review them whenever I whenever I feel I have used it enough but to be honest, I don’t want to use, I don’t want to have 25 cards at all.

And I don’t really see how to, to test them. So most of them, I will look at the conditions. And for me, in most cases, it’s enough to say like, okay, that’s not even interesting. If there was like a [00:35:00] really great thing coming out, I will test it out. But in credit cards, there’s not that Movement going on.

And in some cases, like the differences are so marginal, they’re not worth being an extra account.

Mike: In the past seven years, since you’ve been doing the blog, have you seen more and more competition appearing in the digital space when it comes to banking?

Baptiste: Yeah, I think it’s a bit crazy. I mean crazy in like the, in the context of Switzerland, so we don’t get that crazy in the end, but it doesn’t move very fast, but I think, yeah we have like many, many new digital banks.

So some are like brand new, like a neon which is like. A full startup, but some are like, like you it’s like a cooperation between Swisscoat and PostFinance. Or Credit Suisse did CSX in the past Copp also had one, and even Migros now just launched a digital account recently. So they all try to, to kind of follow the trend.

They all want their piece of the pie, of [00:36:00] course. But yeah, there’s many, many offers. And this kind of creates a bit of like, erosion of the user base in the sense that it’s very difficult for new ones to actually get their piece. something. So they, they, they often offer like huge advantages, but they kind of have the disadvantage that you don’t know how long they will last because it’s still not free for them to run.

And if they make everything free they still have to find the money somewhere. So there’s often a catch and sometimes it’s not like very sustainable.

Mike: They’re also not lean. I mean, how can a huge bank with a digital arm compete with a startup in terms of their abilities? I can imagine it’s inevitable.

Until Neon gets at least attempted to be purchased by something big. I wonder how they manage that.

Baptiste: It’s possible because it’s, it’s easier to buy something that works rather than make a new thing that that’s work. Yeah. I hope this will not happen because I can imagine that the first thing they will do is then add more fees on top of it.

Because. They want to increase the [00:37:00] margin. And as we said before, they have to pay their CEOs. But yeah I think we will probably see that. I think in the next few years, we will see some of them closing down. And we will see maybe some of them being purchased.

Mike: It would also go against the. Sort of the philosophy of Neon, which is existing to compete against the bigger banks and the fees that they get bought out.

It’s like, well, yeah, true.

Baptiste: I don’t expect that from Neon, but I mean, it’s often the case from small smart startups, they start kind of as a way, like to fight the system, but when they are offered like, I don’t know, a billion from a huge company from the system, they get, okay. They’re human. Okay. 1 million.

Then you divide this. Okay. That’s a good number. How will I just get paid out? So. I’m not sure that’s the case here because we’re not talking about billion wars companies, but that could still be the case that sometimes the offer just could too good to, to pass. Let’s hope not.

Mike: How has the growing, I’m assuming it’s growing, I get the feeling [00:38:00] is because I’ve used it quite a lot.

How has the growing popularity of the poor Swiss over the years changed your life? Has it changed your life?

Baptiste: I will not say it has changed my life. That’s a bit too much. I mean, it, it used to be fully like a hobby in the sense that it was not bringing back any money. Now it’s more of a side hustle.

So in that case, it has kind of changed my Plan for the future that I also factored as in so we, now we, we transferred the blog last year into an LLC and we are giving, we are like getting back a salary for it so we could factor that in, in the longterm plans. So it definitely helps our our goals.

But other than that, I don’t think that’s. Change my life. I can imagine also kind of maybe changing my, my plans in the sense that if the blog at some point bring back enough income, I could use it like as a, as a step towards retirement. So we’re not like fully retire, but I will just like. keep working like, [00:39:00] I don’t know, 20, 40 percent on the block and semi retire and then like later fully retire or even not fully retire.

Mike: What do you mean when you say you transferred it into an LLC?

Baptiste: So we, we started as a like sole proprietor, proprietorship and then We were just like imposed like taxed on the same as our personal taxes. And now it’s an, it’s an actual LSE. So it’s entirely separate from our, from our own finances.

The main goal was simply to get like, separate the accountability of both. So if something bad happens to us or happens to the company, it doesn’t get like mixed up between, but it also has the advantage that we can also keep a little money into the bank, into the, into the company and not have have it on our own taxes.

Mike: When did it go from being just a online journal to something that starts making you money?

Baptiste: It took a while. I think it took five years to make anything decent I would [00:40:00] say like the first two years made zero, the third year, I think I made like 50 bucks. So compared to the amount of work that goes into it, it looks like really, really nothing.

And I, if I remember correctly, I think it was the fifth year that started to be like looking like it could actually be a reasonable income in the longterm.

Mike: And that the money generated is from partnerships with different financial companies that want to basically promote themselves on your blog.

Baptiste: I wouldn’t say they want to promote themselves because I don’t accept like, promoted posts and accept like a paid guest boss or something like that.

And if like, UBS is going to ask me just advertise for our things and say, we are great and just said, no. So it kind of works the other way around. I find great companies. I review them on my blog and usually they. Sometimes these companies actually contact me to try to get like into a partnership and I get either I usually get a code [00:41:00] on my blog and that codes as advantageous my readers and for me So if they sign up I get something and they get something

Mike: How often do you get contact?

How often do you have to say no to financial institutions requesting to do business in some form or another?

Baptiste: Not, not that much actually. So I, I get some solicitation for like trying to get like sponsored articles about some services, but not, not that much. I, I’m definitely not big in the, in, in the industry, so I don’t, I don’t think I’m part of, and I really big financial institutions that I don’t think they do any of that kind of stuff.

I’ve never seen like, I was talking about UBS before, but that was a stupid example because they have no interest of being on my blog. That’s not the same readership. That’s not the same kind of level they are trying to achieve. And I would think the same for like large banks, which is like not it’s not the strategy I believe.

I

Mike: suppose so, but at the same time. [00:42:00] You and Mustachioed Post are probably the two blogs or two places that I can reliably go for information on what to do with different financial institutions. And like, there aren’t any others, it’s just in English that I have come across which I think, hmm, I trust this.

So, and before having this conversation, I spoke to different friends about having this conversation. Everybody knows the poor Swiss. When you first moved to Switzerland, you go, which bank do I do? It’s, it’s the poor Swiss, which I’m reading about when I need to know, okay, what the hell is the third pillar that’s tends to be where you go.

So I don’t know if you know, I guess you would know your numbers, but to me, at least in my bubble, which is relatively young professionals in the expat sort of community, you’re pretty big. I think you’re a bit of a celebrity. Okay.

Baptiste: Maybe, I don’t know. Yeah, it’s true that I have many expats in my readers and especially because of the fact that I started in English. And I, it’s at the time there was like mostly me and MustachinPost, it’s [00:43:00] true that we’re in English. Now there are a few more that I’ve started and also both me and Mustachin have actually translated their blog also in French and German.

So there’s also like more availability, but like 90 percent of my traffic is in English. So it’s not like, it’s really most of them coming there. And most of them coming from either like direct direct connection or true Google is where I find the most of my readers, but yeah. I’d also don’t think that experts is kind of, they also have often, it depends probably from where, which country they come from, but they are often more financially aware than most Swiss people.

We don’t have a great financial education. We tend to just. Pick one bank and stick to it forever. And just trust that if anything, our banker says, and our advisor says, and just like, don’t think about money that much, I think it’s kind of sad. And, but when I speak to expats, they, they, they really want to optimize everything.

They, they don’t only want the third pillar. They want the best third pillar. They don’t only want the bank. They [00:44:00] want the best bank. They want the best broker. They want everything like to be really like tied. I, I don’t think it’s, it’s really, I don’t know if it’s come from like the country they come from even though they all seem to come from different countries and that seems to be kind of the same or if it’s really like the expat mentality that they’re already moving to Switzerland often as an optimization and on top of that they want even more optimization.

I, I don’t really know.

Mike: I think it’s a letter. I mean, Australia is similar. I mean, there aren’t many Australians here because there isn’t much of a relationship between Switzerland and Australia, but it’s the same thing. Most people you ask, why do you have this bank account? It turns out it’s the same bank that their parents had.

Their parents opened the bank for them when they were in primary school and they still have the same one. I would imagine that people move here for career and financial opportunity. So you’re, you’re seeing this, the subset of people from those countries who are already sort of financially driven.

Baptiste: Yeah, it’s possible. And I can also see that there’s a big drift. I have like many subsets in my [00:45:00] readers. A lot of them like very, not a lot of them. Some of them are stronger, are like very financially driven and they have like very like significant goals for the future. They want to optimize everything.

They want to get like very large income. A lot of them just want like quick tips to save money. If they can save 10 bucks on their groceries, that’s already a lot of value from the blog, but they will not even invest either because this financial situation is not good enough or just because they don’t have any goals to invest towards so that, that’s a little interesting when I, when I discuss with them and when I read like which articles do well, which articles don’t do well or in the comments, like there’s really very different subset of people.

Mike: I imagine it’s a hard audience to make money off of because these are the people who want to learn everything and do everything themselves as opposed to pay for a service. Is that true? Do you think?

Baptiste: I think so. Yeah. Although I, so it, it’s true because you have to be very careful what you sell them to what you, [00:46:00] what you sell them in the sense that I only not, I also try not to sell.

It’s kind of, it’s difficult also to find the right balance of, What you review and what you don’t review and also how you review it. So, I, I tried to kind of sell only what I use. So the, most of the services that I have like codes with our services actually use myself, or I would use if I were like in another situation, because for instance, I don’t use a robot advisor, but I recognize that many people don’t want to buy ETF through a broker.

Because for them, even the thinking about that is like just too much hassle. So robot advisor is a good like middle steps, but. Some are actually like surprisingly willing to pay money to like get good advice. I don’t do it, but I received like many, so many people contact me just like, can just like do a two hours meeting with me just to, to watch around everything and optimize my finances.

[00:47:00] I just say no, because I, I don’t, I don’t have time. That’s the kind of thing, but they are willing to pay. significant amount of money to get like real advice. I’m not sure. So that kind of the two things that they’re willing to pay the least amount of money for the broker, but also paying for like good advice on the same.

Mike: I wondered about that I mean you being incredibly well researched given how long you’ve been doing it for and probably very similar, like minded to the people visiting your site, that you would be positioned well to offer advice if you wanted to, but I also think, is that illegal? If you’re not a financial advisor, are you allowed to recommend things to people?

Baptiste: I don’t know. I don’t know. I thought, so yeah, you have to be very careful about drawing the line between like real financial advice and like financial discussion. I would say that if I were to do that, like really seriously, like if I were to, I don’t know, like that’s 20 percent of the time, eight hours a week as financial advice, I will [00:48:00] definitely be To look into the law first because yeah, And that’s something you see I think it’s in the us.

It’s very strict for that I’m, not sure we are that strict in switzerland But I’m not sure, but yeah, that’s something if you do it, you have to be very careful about it. And if you could, if you give like, what could be perceived as bad advice later down the line, this could come back to you and could be very pricey.

Mike: Is it still just you? Is it still at the website, the blog, it’s all just you, or do you need you now have help behind the scenes?

Baptiste: It’s, it’s me and my wife. Yeah. So it’s mostly me writing the articles on my wife as kind of behind the scenes for many of the tasks, but yeah, it’s only us.

Mike: Do you ever think about, cause I’m thinking about this with the podcast where like, what’s, what’s, what’s the value of your time?

And so parts of the podcast, like at the moment, this conversation, this is what I signed up for. This is what I enjoy doing. But then there’s this, all the. back end stuff, the admin tasks, the editing that you think, yeah, this [00:49:00] is a useful skill to learn, but there’s no way I’m doing this for the next 10 years.

So I think about where can I optimize? I wonder if you’ve had that thought as well with the blog.

Baptiste: I’ve had, but I, I still struggle with it. Because there are many tasks like behind the scenes that have like, just boring things you do every time. And I would love not to do them. But. Yeah, I still want to keep my business small in the sense I don’t want to have like employees just like that’s not what I want to do.

But yeah, I, I delegate some things like I use some services on fibers to do some images, to do some design, to do some some, some copy things, but yeah. I still struggle with it because I will reach a point at some point where I can, I will not be able to do everything I do now on top of my, my, I still work full time on the side.

So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s difficult to, to put that. I

Mike: totally understand. And you listen to very successful people who have all these books about optimization and they make the [00:50:00] very strong case then that if you can outsource some of your admin tasks to someone in the Philippines where there’s a big a big economy around this and they It costs you five bucks an hour to do your admin tasks, and you don’t want to pay that.

You’re essentially saying that I, my time is worth less than five bucks an hour. If you look at it from that lens and you can’t really argue with that, but at the same time, it’s still extra money you’re paying somebody.

Baptiste: Yeah, but I think it’s, it’s, it’s, I think it’s an area where many entrepreneurs struggle.

And I don’t really consider myself an entrepreneur either, but like side hustler. But it, as you said, if you consider the time is worth like 5 or less, that’s then you do everything by yourself. But at some points, I kind of draw the line on what I like doing and what I don’t like doing. I hate everything that’s image editing like finding images, like doing nice featured images.

I hate that. And I’m very bad at it on top of it. So, that’s something I really [00:51:00] avoid. I like, I hate all social media things as well. So that’s not something I do myself. But that’s where I draw the line now. But at some point it’s. When things is not, does not need your particular skills, it’s true that outsourcing makes a lot of sense.

And if you want to grow that’s really very important. You cannot grow a company and do everything yourself. Some points you have to kind of set, like sit back and let, and delegate things. But yeah, it’s not, it’s not easy.

Mike: You have been going now for seven years. Where do you hope the blog is in another seven years?

Baptiste: I think if the blog is still up in seven years, I think that will be good enough. So I don’t really have plans for the blog. I would like to keep it going, but I, I see it becoming more and more difficult on top of the, the full time because every year it takes more time because there’s, there’s more readers, there are more comments, there are more emails there’s more stuff on the side.[00:52:00]

So yeah, if the blog is still standing and let’s say if the blog is still the same as today I think it will be good in seven years. Yeah, I know it’s not very, not very ambitious, not very optimistic, but yeah, it’s good enough.

Mike: Well, Baptiste, before we finish, I just want to say that as someone who’s been an expat in this country for four years now, the amount of value I’ve gotten from your blog is huge.

Your blog has helped me substantially. So I wanted to say thank you for that.

Baptiste: Yeah, you’re welcome. I’m glad it helps. That’s the goal. All

Mike: right. Thank you very much for your time. Keep doing what you’re doing. I love it. Baptiste: Thank you. Have a great day. Thanks for having me.