So this is what it feels like to be poor....
Discussion
This situation is nothing new really. I lived in Geneva about 23 years ago. At the time the exchange rate was about CHF2.50 to the pound. Typical price for a coffee or a small beer was around a pound.
Petrol was cheaper in Geneva than neighbouring France. Meat was cheaper in France so the Genevois often nipped over the border to shop. Conversely electrical goods and kids toys were cheaper in Geneva so a lot of French people did the reverse trip. The bins in the Jumbo (hypermarket on main drag into Geneva) were full of packaging on a Saturday afternoon. The French used to rip the goods out before crossing back over the border so they looked used and thus avoided the tax.
At that time supermarket food was reasonable on a comparison basis and anything home produced e.g. dairy was "quite" cheap. A cheapy meal out at somewhere none to flash would have been about 30-50 CHF so about £12-£20.
As mentioned above skiing was a lot cheaper in France and a lot of people living in Geneva used to head down
to the French Alps (about one hour away) at weekends.
Petrol was cheaper in Geneva than neighbouring France. Meat was cheaper in France so the Genevois often nipped over the border to shop. Conversely electrical goods and kids toys were cheaper in Geneva so a lot of French people did the reverse trip. The bins in the Jumbo (hypermarket on main drag into Geneva) were full of packaging on a Saturday afternoon. The French used to rip the goods out before crossing back over the border so they looked used and thus avoided the tax.
At that time supermarket food was reasonable on a comparison basis and anything home produced e.g. dairy was "quite" cheap. A cheapy meal out at somewhere none to flash would have been about 30-50 CHF so about £12-£20.
As mentioned above skiing was a lot cheaper in France and a lot of people living in Geneva used to head down
to the French Alps (about one hour away) at weekends.
My parents lived in Versoix (just east of Geneva) and did all of their grocery shopping in Ferney-Voltaire, on the French side of the border, which saved them a fortune. The customs post on Rue de Versoix is only manned part time, so they rarely got tugged and even when they did, they just had their meat confiscated (and probably consumed) by the border patrol officers.
Ribol said:
Living anywhere is cheaper if you don't pay all the taxes 
I pay all the taxes I am meant to. Whats more the wealth tax thing would only make a difference once you start earning above a threshold and after you have been there for 12 months. As it is, I can voluntarily choose to do that at my first tax return side and take advantage of the further tax breaks on offer and use my mortgages to offset any wealth. Any move to Zug anyway.DJRC said:
Ribol said:
Living anywhere is cheaper if you don't pay all the taxes
I pay all the taxes I am meant to. Whats more the wealth tax thing would only make a difference once you start earning above a threshold and after you have been there for 12 months. As it is, I can voluntarily choose to do that at my first tax return side and take advantage of the further tax breaks on offer and use my mortgages to offset any wealth. Any move to Zug anyway.It may not apply to someone just there short term to work but it certainly does to Swiss citizens.
There's a lot of bulls
t being spouted on here. Switzerland does not have a high sales tax - VAT is 8%, having recently risen from 7.6%. Imports do have tariffs, but so do non-EU goods going into the UK. Wealth tax exists, but you have to have a decent amount of assets to begin with and can net off mortgages, loans and so forth and even then the tax rate is tiny.
One of the main reasons that it costs CHF 50 a kilo for lamb is that the checkout staff get paid around CHF 3500 a month (£2800 at current rates), of which they will keep 90% of it. The numbers I have seen say that the average Swiss salary is CHF 67,000 a year and median household income is around CHF 115,000. So it's all of a merry-go-round with the money. The difference is in absolute terms we end up being left with more disposable income. That's why, even though they are more expensive here, there are so many high end motors - The Porsche dealership in Zurich has the second highest sales of any Porsche dealership in the world.
Things don't have to be that expensive either - you certainly couldn't rent an apartment or house of equivalent size and quality in a decent part of London for what we pay, but we are walking distance from the centre of Zurich and have a train line, two tram lines and a bus route all within a couple of minutes of the front door.
We spend less on food than when we lived in London, but that's mainly due to shopping in Lidl instead of M&S and Waitrose, but the quality is good and when you don't recognize the brands in the "proper" supermarkets you don't bother as much.
Eating and drinking out is a killer though if you think in British terms. In Zurich it's around £7 a pint now and it's hard to eat out for less than £40 (although at our local Vietnamese we can eat for 2 with a drink for less than that). It's certainly novel to go to a ski resort and pay less than you do at home though.
t being spouted on here. Switzerland does not have a high sales tax - VAT is 8%, having recently risen from 7.6%. Imports do have tariffs, but so do non-EU goods going into the UK. Wealth tax exists, but you have to have a decent amount of assets to begin with and can net off mortgages, loans and so forth and even then the tax rate is tiny.One of the main reasons that it costs CHF 50 a kilo for lamb is that the checkout staff get paid around CHF 3500 a month (£2800 at current rates), of which they will keep 90% of it. The numbers I have seen say that the average Swiss salary is CHF 67,000 a year and median household income is around CHF 115,000. So it's all of a merry-go-round with the money. The difference is in absolute terms we end up being left with more disposable income. That's why, even though they are more expensive here, there are so many high end motors - The Porsche dealership in Zurich has the second highest sales of any Porsche dealership in the world.
Things don't have to be that expensive either - you certainly couldn't rent an apartment or house of equivalent size and quality in a decent part of London for what we pay, but we are walking distance from the centre of Zurich and have a train line, two tram lines and a bus route all within a couple of minutes of the front door.
We spend less on food than when we lived in London, but that's mainly due to shopping in Lidl instead of M&S and Waitrose, but the quality is good and when you don't recognize the brands in the "proper" supermarkets you don't bother as much.
Eating and drinking out is a killer though if you think in British terms. In Zurich it's around £7 a pint now and it's hard to eat out for less than £40 (although at our local Vietnamese we can eat for 2 with a drink for less than that). It's certainly novel to go to a ski resort and pay less than you do at home though.
I had one last conversation about this before leaving Switzerland for France (which now feels third world cheap in comparison) with a hotelier in the resort we were in.
He told me he has not one single booking for the winter season, and many of his peers are in the same boat, and all wondering if their businesses will survive.
Having a strong currency isn't much fun in his shoes.
He told me he has not one single booking for the winter season, and many of his peers are in the same boat, and all wondering if their businesses will survive.
Having a strong currency isn't much fun in his shoes.
Indeed Kermit. Conversations about the currency dominate round the coffee tables at work. As we all say, any privately owned Swiss businesses that export will be really hurting right now. The Swiss dropped their rates last week and released about 40bn in QE to try and drop the rate. The relief spike it bought though has already been given back up.
DJRC said:
Not sure on your housing costs there eyebee. I think London is a lot cheaper than Zurich.
Having been here for a couple of years now, I'm out of touch with London prices, but I'd be surprised if you could get similar housing in a similar location for a similar price:116 m2 over 2 floors
2 beds (25m2 and 15m2)
2 baths
25 m2 living room
Kitchen diner another 25m2
Laundry room attached to master bedroom
25m2 terrace + communal grass
cellar (+ nuclear shelter)
underfloor heating
Own entrance (it's a duplex maisonette I guess)
Poured concrete construction with foot thick external and internal walls.
3 minute walk to the train station and from there either 2 or 3 stops into the centre of Zurich (4-7 minutes) or a half hour walk max.
Nice residential area
Let's be generous and call it the equivalent of zone 2, though I'd argue it was zone 1.
Current exchange rate it costs £2,200 a month including heating (which I'm in the process of querying as we barely have the heating on in winter) and service charges. Could you get similar for a similar price in London, including council tax, which we don't pay here as it comes straight out of our direct taxation? I'm not so sure you can, but I've been wrong before
When we first moved over it cost £1500 or so a month, which including council tax was pretty much what we were paying for the dump previously mentioned in Twickenham.
Kermit power said:
Why is it daft? Do you know of any other currency against which Sterling has lost roughly half its value in 5 years? If there are any, I've not been there.
BRL.The small stash of Rais I have in a drawer has offered far a better return than any of my other investments.
WhoseGeneration said:
I was really impressed with the nuclear shelter I saw in Switzerland.
Thinking, at least there's a Government concerned about it's citizens.
Here, in the UK?
Something about closing curtains and tables?
I haven't fully got to the bottom of it, but there was a national paranoia that the Russians were coming up until the end of the cold war. Our block was built in 1997 and still had one built into it. It's use now for extra cellar space, but it still gets inspected every 10 years and you have to be able to convert it back to its original use within 24 hours notice.Thinking, at least there's a Government concerned about it's citizens.
Here, in the UK?
Something about closing curtains and tables?
I'm not sure whether it was a governmental or citizen driven idea. I'm sure there was originally a referendum about it, so there could well have originally been one bright spark who had the idea and collected enough signatures on a petition to gain a vote (cf e-petition site in the UK
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