Fees and Taxes

Good morning RIPvestors,

welcome to another post in the investing series, where I gradually introduce you to the world of investments and go deep on topics I have some experience with, mainly related to investments in Switzerland.

Other posts in the Investing series:

In this post I’m going to show you the importance of fees and taxes in investments, with a focus on Switzerland brokers fees. We’re not going to take a deep look at assets related fees since my only experience is with funds’ fees – and we’ll take a look at that in one of the following posts in this series.

In the previous post I left you with a lot of unanswered questions. Sadly we’re going to answer to almost none of them in this post, just throwing a lot of confusion (read: data and pessimism) on the table.

Oh, finally RIP… I was waiting for this series to continue! What’s next? I heard that MyCoolIndex went up X% last year, if I invested back then and sold everything today now I’d have X% more, what a shame!

That’s sadly not true my imaginary friend, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today: actual investing will bring you slightly less money than theoretically expected, due to some kind of second principle of thermodynamic applied to investments. Like friction slows everything down and generates heat, every time you move a Dollar you experience financial friction and your money evaporates into nothing. Well, not exactly into “nothing”, but into someone else’s hands. Sadly, frictions in finance are everywhere, not just on money movements. They take several names, mainly taxes and fees. Taxes are on wealth (nominal value of your assets) and/or profits (dividends, capital gain) so they are there to smoothen the good news: reducing the gains. Fees are there anyway, as permanent bad news.

Before moving on, please read deeply this article by The Simple Dollar on the math behind fees compounding. Essentially, even a small difference of decimal percent points between recurrent fees will lead to gigantic absolute differences if given sufficient time. Here‘s another detailed article if you want to know more.

Ok, let’s take a look at fees and taxes.

Fees

feezInvesting is not a zero sum game. It’s not but due to two opposite factors:

  • it’s a less than zero sum game, since every action has a cost/fee.
  • it’s a greather than zero sum game since economy grows over time and everyone win.

We covered the expected greater than zero (I hope) so far in this series. Here let’s focus on the costs, the frictions, the energy loss due to transactions and managements.

We agreed you shouldn’t buy shares of an actively managed fund, right? Anyway, passively managed funds have costs. Usually they are costs proportional to the invested capital and to the number and volumes of transactions.

Brokers/banks may charge you for the custody of your securities. Depending on what you invest on (banks usually offer you discounted fees if invest in the funds they manage), you may incur in:

Account opening/closing fees.

Say you want to start investing and don’t know what to do. You find a mediator (a bank, a broker service, a financial institution, the government,…) and want to use them as a tool to buy, sell and hold your assets. You probably need to open an account with them. This operation alone may have costs and/or other kind of requirements like, for example, you may also need to open a checking account with the same bank, you may need minimum initial deposit, you may be forced to accept an expensive initial consultation with a physical person to assess your risk tolerance, et cetera.

perpetualmotionSame is true for closing the account. Please double check before opening an account with them. Must say that these kind of entry barriers are not very popular, since everybody wants to have you in with them.

I’ve also heard you can get “credits” for opening a brokerage account with some firms. I’ve not found yet someone who did it Not in Switzerland though. We use to respect thermodynamic principles. There are referral bonuses though. Like my favorite broker firm does! Note that the above link is not a referral link (yet), just a link to the referral program.

In the long term, opening/closing fees are negligible anyway since they are only paid once.

Deposit/withdraw fees

Your brokerage account is like a virtual world where you buy and sell things which reflects on moving number in databases. On its own, it’s an interesting world. But you probably want to connect it to the real world, where real money moves around. To do so you must be able to deposit money into your account and to withdraw from it whenever needed. Another source of friction.

On top of that you may need to take into account money transfer fees at source. Real case scenario: you have a bank account with bank X, you want to transfer money to entity Y that handles your investments. You instruct bank X to wire a certain amount of money to entity Y. Both X and Y may charge you for this.

I’ve actually found firms that issue a deposit bonus (as always, not in Switzerland), like forexbroker – well, forget about that: after a very deep 10 seconds research I’ve found it’s considered a mostly scammy broker.

Usually deposits are not charged by the entity Y (they want you to deposit money) but your bank X may apply transfer fees. I’m lucky enough that CHF deposits from my “CH – CHF – Individual – checking” account (row 19 on my NW) are not being charged, despite the bank and the underlying broker bank account for CHF deposits are in different nations (CH vs UK). Sadly, USD deposits from my “CH – USD – Individual” account (raw 23, different bank in CH) to the underlying broker bank account for USD deposits (which is in US) are charged a little by the CH bank.

Same is not true for withdraws. Here X and Y goals are reverted. Y doesn’t want you to take money out. For instance, with interactivebrokers, (a.k.a. IB) I get a free withdraw per calendar month, then each subsequent withdraw is charged with a flat rate of 11 CHF at the moment (September 2016).

Anyway, even though these fees can be somewhat recurrent (you want to deposit/withdraw with a higher frequency compared to opening/closing accounts) in the long term they don’t mind too.

Yearly custody fees

Here’s the first fee that matters a lot!

Custody fees are usually proportional to the invested capital and are paid out yearly or quarterly. They are in the range 0 – 1% of the invested capital. 0% is very rare, the only broker I’ve found that offer such a good deal in Switzerland is again IB, but you need to have invested at least 100K USD or else you’ll pay 10 USD per month.

Custody fees are strong forces that accumulates over time and cost you a big chunk of your invested capital. Again, let’s skip the math here and please take a look at this article on how a 1% fee will eat 25% of your investments in 40 years, or play yourself with this Investment Fee Calculator.

If you choose your bank as investment broker, you’ll probably discover that they have 2 separate custody fees: a higher one (0.5 – 1.0%) for holding your generic securities and a lower one (0 – 0.5%) for holding securities issued by them. It’s a scam, run away! Their securities are managed funds with obscure – but high – management costs. I’ve chatted with both UBS and Credit Suisse and they are similar in this. Last time I chatted with UBS they had a quarterly fee of 0.14% (and somewhere around 0.04% quarterly for UBS managed assets) but at the time of writing they changed it to annual model, with a 0.35% base fee that can grow till 0.75% for non traditional funds outside Switzerland. 50% discount for UBS issued assets (which are in Switzerland and are not non-traditional funds, so 0.17%). Here‘s the link to the up to date information. Scam anyway.

Same holds true for Credit Suisse, even though their fees seem slightly lower.

If you plan to be a long term investor (and we’ll see why you should in next episode), choose a broker that applies the lowest custody fees.

Trade fees

So far you opened a broker account with entity Y and wired some money over. It’s time to buy securities! Is that free of charge? Of course not! Each trade has some friction in the range 0.05% – 3% of the value traded, sometimes with lower/upper barrier fees.

Yes, I’ve seen 3% trade fees at UBS for pension Pillar 3a funds like Vitainvest 25. Note: they state in the bullet points list under “Your benefits” the fact that the fund has an “Active management” so that “the weighting is always in line with the latest market forecasts”… wow thanks a lot UBS, I’m so lucky to have this team of financial expert to help me managing a fund that should simply match a Swiss Market Index like SMI or SPI with 25% of its capital and invest the rest in a Swiss Bond Index (SBI).

My experience, again, is with IB that has a dual trade fee model: Fixed vs Tiered. I actually don’t understand in which cases the Fixed model is better, because to me it seems the Tiered model is always better. Anyway, if you know a use case when Fixed is better, please write it down in the comment section of this post.

The IB Tiered model charges 0.08% of the trade value, assuming we are all trading less than a million CHF at a time. 0.08% – or as seen sometimes 8 basis points – means 8 CHF for a trade of 10K CHF. Fair enough. There’s a minimum of 1.50 CHF per trade, which means trading less than 1875 CHF in a single transaction ends up being more expensive.

Trade fees are relevant, you’re going to trade a little bit over time. Anyway, as we’ll see in next episode, if you’re a day trader you care more about these fees than if you are a buy&hold investor, like you should.

Premium fees

Brokers offers a wide variety of services and premiums you can benefit from. Do you want real time stock exchange data instead of 15 minutes delayed? If you wonder why it matters, maybe you’ve never heard about high frequency trading. Well, actually the high frequency guys don’t use a broker, they interact directly with the stock exchange. Anyway, if you are a day trader and want to make a fortune by timing the market and trading several times a day you may need better market data.

If you’re like me and don’t want to care about this stuff you don’t need any premium package.

Adviser fees

Are you managing your wealth or asking for help? This is not free. Advisers may eat another big chunk of your money via consulting and performance fees.

You should simply run away. No value added.

Funds management fees

Essentially, we can forget about minor fees like deposit/withdraw, open/close and premiums. Understanding custody and trade fees covers 95% of what you should really know about your broker. We’ve done with it.

Now it’s time to dig a little bit on fees related to the security you want to invest into. Note: I may use the words security or asset inconsistently across this series, but I mean the same thing. If I want to be specific I say stock, fund, bond,…

If you buy stocks, there are no other hidden costs. You follow the stock price on the internet (Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, your broker web/app interface) and that’s all. If you buy a fund, there are fund management costs. We’ve seen them in a previous post of this series and we said they strongly depend on the fund being actively or passively managed. Anyway, the fund management fee is never (as far as I know) paid out directly, but it’s withheld from the fund’s capitalization and reflected into the fund’s share price. It’s universally called Total Expense Ratio (TER). As we’ve seen it’s in the range 0.07 – 3%, yearly.

The TER is another fundamental number to try to keep as low as possible! Two funds who track the same index can be compared using their TER. The lowest, the better!

Always.

Well, it’s not true.

Why? Taxes…

Taxes

tazzesEssentially, taxes are other fees. Usually bigger fees. There are several kind of taxes on investments:

Wealth taxes

The concept is that you pay a yearly tax proportional to your NW. Proportional is not the correct word since, as every other tax does, the tax brackets are higher the higher your NW is. This is something new for me, since in Italy we don’t have a wealth tax (for now).

Sadly, Switzerland has a wealth tax that can reach 1%, yearly, of your wealth. Following this or this sources of information you can see that where I live (German speaking Switzerland, lower taxes) wealth tax for a NW of 1,000,000 CHF is between 0.1% and 0.4%.

Since, all your after-tax investments contribute to your wealth, you need to take this into account as an extra cost. Pension Pillar 2 & 3 don’t contribute to your wealth-taxable NW.

Dividend taxes

When companies distribute a dividend and you own stocks of that company, you earn the dividend. In almost any country the dividend is taxed either as income or separately. In Switzerland dividends are income. In Italy there’s a flat “financial return” tax bracket by financial asset category. Here‘s a link (in Italian) about rates. Currently, it’s 26% on stocks and funds.

Another problem is when the company is traded in a stock market in a different country respect your residence. Sometimes you may incur in double taxation. For example, US tax authority (IRS) withholds 15% of dividends, like a tax at source. If you’re Swiss resident and want to avoid problems you can use the DA-1 form to reclaim that tax.

Capital gain taxes

When you sell something that you paid less than that, you have a capital gain. This is taxed on several countries, like US and Italy. Luckily, Switzerland doesn’t have a capital gain tax. Italy has a flat 26% capital gain tax.

Lump Sum Taxes

In Switzerland – like in US – you may withdraw under certain circumstances (leaving the country, buying a house, starting a company) from your Pension Pillars 2 & 3. When you do, you pay taxes on it since your Pillars are pre-tax money. Luckily, you don’t pay full income tax but a fraction of it. You can calculate how much you would pay withdrawing from your Canton using this calculator, and then check how much you would pay withdrawing from Schwyz Canton clicking here. Note: you can always move your assets to another Canton before withdraw.

Anyway, if you invest your Pillar 3 (I’m not aware of investment opportunities for Pillar 2) you need to take into account these extra taxes you’re going to pay at withdrawal time. I’m accounting for this tax on my NW spreadsheet (row 58) with a tax rate of 5.3% which correspond to the expected rate in my Canton for the expected capital I’ll withdraw.

Trade Stamps

trading stocks on some stock market may incur in extra trade taxes. Trading stocks on the Swiss stock market as a Swiss resident you pay the Swiss stamp tax. I’m not aware about italian situation on this.

Costs (Taxes and Fees) Recap

As we’ve seen, all these fees and taxes will likely kill your strategy. The 4% rule is just a study based on S&P500 performance, assuming no fees and no taxes. Well, let’s say assuming no capital gain tax and gross withdraws. An ideal situation.

When planning for your actual situation you need to take these costs into account. What it means is usually a couple of things:

  • You may discover that your plan is not viable in your target country. In my case, Italy is not well suited for living off of investments thanks to too many taxes.
  • You may want to revisit your Withdrawal Rate, adding few safety margins. That’s why I’m not planning to go for a 4% but a 3.33% instead.

Open question: I didn’t find a nice non-standard retirement calculator for Switzerland/Italy. Kudos to who’ll point me to a suitable one 🙂

Now, back to your strategy my dear friend!

See you on next post on this series.

20 comments

  1. Very informative – I really like the depth of the info shared and I also find your writing style pretty enjoyable. I’m coming from a neighboring country so most of the info on investment you share is very relevant. Looking forward to your upcoming posts.

  2. Very informative. What I would TRULY welcome is a summary of how to live off your investments in CH (before retirement age). I mean what are the costs, taxes, etc. I know you must pay AHV up to retirement age, but what about capital gains taxes. If all your income comes from investments (at least until 60 when you can withdraw 2nd pillar), you might be categorized as professional trader. Then you need to pay not only AHV, but unemployment, income tax, etc. But I don’t have a full picture of all this.

    I assume you did this calculation, si I would appreciate you sharing it.

    Thanks a lot

    1. That’s an amazing question and no, I didn’t do the math yet. Mainly because I plan to not retire in Switzerland. But I want to run the math anyway.
      Spoiler: yes, need to pay Pillar 1. Not sure if minimum payment of 476 CHF would be ok, since the only research I’ve done so far said that Pillar 1 contribution in case of unemployment depends on your wealth. And for the capital gain tax I also read a couple of official articles saying “if investments profits are your main source of income, than that’s your taxable income”. Which in turn would also set the bar for Pillar 1 payments.
      I guess the best way to operate would be becoming a self employed professional and try to earn something but not much. Kind of forced baristaFI.
      Will do a deeper research one day 🙂

      1. Sounds like partial retirement is much much easier than full.
        Say your savings rate is 50%.
        The threshold for capital gains taxes, seems to be at about 50% of income.

        50% of 50%= 25%
        So you would to earn 25% of your previous salary to stay below the threshold. Does that make sense? Since income taxes are much lower in that range, you might get away with working only 20%. Now the challenge is to find a job where to work only 20%.

        BTW: I am not sure I want to retire in CH, but I would only call myself FI if I had the choice.

        In any case I welcome your response and looking forward to a post on this topic.
        Maybe move the discussion onto EF?

        1. Your analysis makes sense, but we need some more information here.
          Will do my research, any reference you can find please send it to me.
          Would involve EF but the forum doesn’t seem to be very FI welcoming 🙂

  3. Hi Mr. RIP
    I’ve been through quite a few US Blogs, but being Swiss led me to yours. Very cool – well done!
    What I’m not getting: you’re buying US-securities to reclaim the tax withheld in the US (amongst other reasons likefavoura le spreads etc). My understanding of the relevant ESTV-tables is that your normal tax for US securities is 30%. The DA-1 Just allows you to reclaim 15%, the rest is lost to the IRS. But even if you could reclaim all US taxes, so do you with Swiss taxes in dividends. The Money is reimbursed with the best tax invoice. Sure, there’s opportunity cost die to the time lag… I’d Love to hear your comment
    Hille

    1. I only get taxed (withheld) 15%. That’s the standard for non-US citizen or permanent resident, i.e if you file a W8-ben form in IB.

  4. Hi MrRIP – I only recently discovered your blog and in general the FIRE movement however I’ve been saving & investing (mainly in Real Estate so far) for the last 6/7 years.
    Like you, I’m Italian and I spent all my working life outside of Italy in a few countries. I currently live in Australia and planning to retire in Italy within the next 8-10 years. I’m currently mid-30s.
    I saw that in your post you are discounting retiring in Italy because of high taxes, but I actually think it would be MUCH easier to retire in Italy (especially in the South) than, say, Switzerland or Australia mainly due to cost of living (including medical and education costs) and cost of Real Estate. Taxes are a strong consideration obviously but I suspect you’d still be better off in Italy for the reasons I mentioned above.
    What is your thinking on this? Are you still convinced that Italy is not a good option and, if so, based on what argument(s)?

    1. Hi MC, welcome to retireinprogress and thanks for your interesting comment.
      Italy is still on top of my list, and most of my concerns are intellectual, political, and in general I don’t know if I want to downgrade my very high quality of life. Things like “interactions with local bureaucracy”, “faxes”, queues, cycle lane, noise level… Italy is amazing for many reasons, but also a threat these days.
      Taxes also are scaring me. They may raise them to give money to the unemployed for populistic reasons. They may add a wealth tax. They already have foreign stamp duty on your foreign ETFs. It’s hard to plan, even though life costs much less there.

  5. Hi MrRIP,

    Thank you for the shared info.

    I have to admit that Swiss tax system is a grey area for me and I started studying this from reading your post.

    Several years ago I came to Switzerland and started working in one of the United Nations organizations. According to Agreement on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations (UN) concluded between the Swiss Federal Council and the Secretary-General of the United Nations,
    officials of the UN are exempt from all taxes on the salaries and emoluments paid by UN organizations.

    As a result of this, I have never filed a tax return in Switzerland and have no idea how it’s normally done and when. This is a very boring subject for me and I would probably never look at it. However, since recently I decided to buy several ETFs domiciled in US and Ireland, so I am about to open an account in IB. In the light of the above, I suddenly realized that I have to deal with taxes.
    So my main question is: starting from the time I receive my first dividends am I obliged to file a tax return?

    This question is raised by the fact that I don’t understand how Swiss tax system works in general. Why swiss people have to pay taxes yearly?
    Is it because when they get their salary, they get 100% of the earned money, without tax deduction and by the end of the year they should return taxes from their yearly income? If that is the reason, then I have one more question: the dividends I get from ETFs will be alredy reduced by the amount of taxes? If yes, it might mean that I already paid the taxes from these dividends and don’t need to pay anymore. Or I might be completely wrong.

    I will appreciate your comment on this.

    1. Hi UKV,
      I must admit I don’t know how to answer your first question.
      I guess you’ll have to file a tax return because you earned money subject to a different tax regime, unless UN exemption allows you to earn extra money tax free (but it’d be borderline anti-constitutional and unfair in my opinion).
      I’d contact a tax advisor for that. I know standard rules, your situation is special and I have no clue about it.

      Swiss people and C permit holder get their gross salary (after Pension Pillar 1 contribution) and then pay taxes on their own during the year (or after, with some interests).

      The dividend you get from US stocks are taxed 15% if you filed a W8-Ben form or 30% if you filed a W9 form. This is a withholding tax that can be recovered (max 15%) filing a DA-1 form.

      1. Thank you for your reply, MrRIP.

        Following to your advice, I had a quick consultation with a tax advisor. His reply to my main question was: You must file a tax return if you have taxable income which is not taxed at source and your net wealth is greater than CHF 150’000, or if your interest&dividend income is greater than CHF 3’000. He was referring to the following document : “Antrag nachträglich ordentliche Veranlagung (NOV)” which can be found here: https://www.sv.fin.be.ch/dam/documents/FIN/SV/de/Formulare/Quellensteuer/Aktuelles_Steuerjahr/form_qst_antrag-nov_de.pdf
        In particular:
        Begründung:
        Ich verfüge über Vermögen von mehr als CHF 150000
        Ich habe einen Vermögensertrag (inkl. verrechnungssteuerfreie Erträge) von mehr als CHF 3000 erzielt

        I don’t know how to calulate net wealth, but I doubt I will get more than CHF 3’000 of dividends per year.

        1. Thanks for reporting this back here 🙂
          I didn’t know about the 3k condition for dividends and interests. Good to know 🙂

  6. Hi MrRip,

    I’m a University student here in Italy and I’m studying ETF investment for FIRE. Tax is huge but I’m still going with it trying to minimize every expense that I can (Vanguard ftw). I just opened a Degiro account and ready to buy my first ETF, which one would you recommend considering taxation here in Italy? The main difference boils down to an accumulation or distribution ETF from what I’ve learnt…

    Any tips or suggestion would be really appreciated. There is a lot to learn and study which I’ll never stop doing but at the moment the best thing to do is to act asap!

    Thanks! This blog is an incredible resource!

    1. Hi Riccardo,
      First of all DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT FIRE AT YOUR AGE!
      I mean it, seriously. FIRE burns you from the inside. Yes, some pun intended 😀
      Phrase it differently, tell yourself “I want to accumulate some wealth for further use / for financial stability / for freedom”.
      Or else your 10-15-20 years grind will be unpleasant. I’m in the process of writing a very long post about this topic.

      You’re starting your career, let yourself be driven by passion and the good old Jobs advice of being “hungry and foolish”. Do not think about FIRE now!

      Now, what’s the best ETF to invest in Italy? I don’t know anything Italy specific, so I’d go with same recommendations for other European countries.
      If you want to be super lazy and take a single ETf, then go for IWDA. Then you may want to add some small caps (if VSS is not available in Italy you can take WSML but 0.35% TER is not super attractive), and some EM (EIMI).

  7. Hi RIP,
    I have recently found out your blog, and I spent last 10 days reading all posts. Great Blog!!! I’ve discovered a new world!
    I have a doubt about taxes. If you buy stocks in Switzerland, you never sell those stocks, after 40 years you retire in Italy and start selling your stocks, are you going to pay taxes for all the 40y capital gains? which might be a lot! In this case it will be better to sell everything before moving to Italy and then buy same amount of stocks when in Italy. Am I correct? or am I missing something?
    Thank you,

    Giovanni

  8. Ciao Mr. Rip, sono un ragazzo italiano di 30, aimè ho scoperto prima il movimento FIRE da meno di due settimane e dopo il tuo blog.
    Sono davvero interessato, leggendo i tuoi consigli finanziari inizio a sentirmi scoraggiato da ciò che vivere di investimenti in Italia è difficile, è impossibile fare il 4% l’anno in Italia?

  9. Grüezi Mr Rip,

    Let’s take for example a Swiss Resident with B permit that due to low income don’t reach the limit to be obliged to do tax declaration.
    In the post you report that “In Switzerland dividends are income”. From that I assume if some dividends are distributed, it’s possible to go over the limit and be obliged to tax declaration. Did I understand right?

    In the scenario where you do tax declaration, I assume you should attach also the DA-1 module. What if you are not obliged to do the tax declaration?

    Thanks!

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