Hi RIP readers,
I think this Covid thing, while being hard to cope with in the short term, will improve the world thanks to the survival of the fittest! We’ll get rid of the old ones, the already dying ones, those who we should actively be shutting down and we weren’t because in a Dodo-friendly environment they’re able to survive. I’m talking about…
“RIP, how dare you!! Are you really THAT utilitarian?? You’d scare even Ayn Rand! I’m unfollowing you right now. You don’t joke about this, I’m calling the cops.”
… companies.
“Wait, what?”
Maybe I’m just a dreamer, but I envision a world where paper is not needed to exchange information. Where “companies 1.0” go extinct.
“RIP, what happened?”
You know me pretty well 🙂
“Ouch.. I don’t like the smell of rants in the morning”
And there you have it!
I want to tell you guys a funny “horror story” with my bank (PostFinance) that happened to me yesterday.
Spoiler: I hope they go extinct.
Heroes: RIP (and his financial monitoring skills), Nice-PF-Employee.
Foes: Bureaucracy, Stupidity, Paper, and Lazy-PF-Employee.
Lets get started!
Life at RIP 2.0 is intense. I’m doing a technical coding interview every day. Done 3 so far… yes, I’ve done the Huawei one as well! And I must admit I still rock 🙂 I actually had a lot of fun solving technical problems, and having to code solutions within 30 minutes on platforms like HackerRank and DevSkiller. Solving interview questions is fun, challenging, creative. Ok, you’re heavily under pressure because of time constraint, but who cares! It was long time I hadn’t had so much fun with coding! I guess I wrote more code during last 2 days than the previous 2 years!
“RIP… PostFinance?”
Yeah, sorry. I tend to digress a bit 🙂
“We all know… btw, did you pass the interviews?”
First one I was rusty and didn’t pass even though I’ve solved 2 out of 3 problems in 90 minutes. Startups in Silicon Valley have a high hiring bar it seems. The other two I don’t know yet, but I don’t really want those jobs so I “didn’t push that last 10% of the pedal” while having a lot of fun 🙂
“So you ARE cheating the system!”
No, I’m not! The system is wrong! It’s designed for regular professions where sending 100 CVs makes sense. In my field it doesn’t. To get the job at Hooli back in 2012, I put on hold (almost) every other activity and focused on the interview process for 2 full months! That’s how it works if you want to find a decent job. Instead, they ask me to fill a paper with 10-12 applications per month and that’s what you get.
P.S. next rant will be on “unemployment duties stupidity”. Almost same foes: Bureaucracy, Stupidity, Paper, and the amazing Asshole-RAV-Employee. The evilest of the foes ever!
Anyway, this post is about my horror story with PostFinance, are you interested? Let’s not digress.
“Look Who’s Talking! Ok, let’s move on…”
On Tuesday evening, before my professional funeral, I was doing what a Financially Intelligent person does every last day of the month: closing the financial month. Cash flow, net worth, expenses, bank accounts statement, credit cards statement, investments and so on.
Something was weird though. Usually Mutuel, our health insurance company, charges insurance premiums for month X on the last day of month X-1. Plus I was notified long time ago of a few medical bills expected to be debited to my account on March 31st.
No activity from Mutuel visible on my bank account on March 31st.
Weird.
It only happens when the last day of the month is a Saturday or a Sunday. On March 2020, last day of the month has been a Tuesday.
Ok, who cares, maybe there’s some temporary problem on either PostFinance or Mutuel, let’s attend my funeral!
Nothing happened on Wednesday April 1st either.
Then I realized there was also another expected bill by UPC Cablecom. I changed subscriptions with them on mid January, and got new hardware. They grouped February and March bills and sent me a 200 CHF bill for the two months together, bill expected to be paid by April 1st.
I granted both Mutuel and UPC “Direct Debit” rights on my PostFinance account.
UPC bill didn’t execute as well.
Now things are getting weird, time to take a deeper look.
Found on some mailing lists (or maybe it was an internal Hooli mailing list during my last night in corp network…) that PostFinance silently killed all your eBills permissions – no notification whatsoever – because they switched to a new eBills platform. Not good, PostFinance, not good. You gotta tell your customers what you do. You don’t cut their regular bills payment. Yellow Flag.
I logged in, registered to yet another third party company who has access to my sensible data (how cool is that?), and re-enabled my eBills.
Let’s see what eBills were pending/rejected!
None.
Let’s take a look at which entities are registered to send me eBills. Only one: SBB, the Swiss trains company (for Halbtax card and sometimes monthly/yearly public transportation pass).
Well, I know that both Mutuel and UPC (and Cembra, my credit card!) take money from my account via Direct Debit, not eBills.
The new eBills platform was not the problem. Weird… ok, let’s go to sleep.
April 2nd, nothing happened. Neither Mutuel nor UPC took my money. This is extremely weird.
I logged in my E-Finance dashboard from PostFinance website and after several clicks (no notification) found a non-urgent communication of a standing order not having been executed today. It was our monthly rent payment.
The rent payment was not executed.
Whaaaat?
Time to call them.
Player RIP joined the game (good side).
After 15 minutes of waiting time I get to talk with foe number 1: Lazy-PF-Employee.
RIP: “Hi… sorry to bother you, but it seems direct debts on my account are not working. Plus a standing order did not execute… my rent is not being paid… you know, I’m now unemployed and I’ve always mocked the american B Movies where one loses their job and the day after becomes homeless, you know…”
Player LazyPFE joined the game (evil side).
LazyPFE: “If a Direct Debt order is not executed it’s their fault, not ours. It means they didn’t ask for the money. Please contact them!”
“Hmmm, we’re talking about two different companies. It’s extremely unlikely that both of them didn’t ask for money.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. Have a nice day, Goodbye”
“Wait, ok, I’m going to call both UPC and Mutuel soon. But what about my standing order?”
“Aaaaaah wait… let me ask my colleague. Don’t hang up Mr RIPPO”
… another 10 minutes listening to the music. I’m still wearing my pajama, and I’ve already had a fight with my RAV “Assistant” (Arbeitsberaterin). It’s almost 11am and I didn’t do any shit. I have the Huawei test to do for unemployment duties and we all slept 4 hours tonight since BabyRIP is on a routine transition and… is this the life I dreamed about when dreaming about early retirement? How many other immense efforts should I put in to achieve full “life intentionality”? How many dark hands life will keep throwing at me, locking me into a socially accepted normality? What’s the real price of freedom? Does it makes sense anyway? Do we really have free will?
“Mr RIPPO, sorry, your account has been blocked.”
“What? Why??”
“That’s because your wife didn’t sign a mandatory document 3 months ago”
“Excuse me? O_o”
Player Bureaucracy joined the game (evil side).
“Yes, we sent you a document several months ago. It seems you signed it and sent it back to us. Your wife didn’t”
“Which form? Where did you send it? Via email?”
Player Paper joined the game (evil side).
Evil side is dominating the game.
“We sent you via post several months ago. It was the mandatory form for AEOI and FATCA compliance. Your account is co-owned by you and your wife right? She never signed the paper”
“Via postal services, ok… (I suffer Paper more than Bureaucracy and LazyEmployee) Well, I obviously can’t remember it, but I know for sure that I handle the mailbox in our family. I would have recognized the important paper and asked my wife to sign it and send it back to you. But I mean, you block my account for this? With no notice??”
Player Stupidity joined the game (evil side).
Endgame is near.
“I can’t do anything, that’s the way it works. Anyway, we sent the doc several times!”
“But wait, we changed flat in December 2019. I keep a list of entities that needed to be notified and the Post (thus PostFinance) has been notified of our new address. Look, I can access my E-Finance dashboard and I see my new address there”
“But your wife didn’t”
“So you’re telling me… that you sent several times the same postal package to our old address? Didn’t it return back all the time?”
Player Stupidity levels up.
“I don’t know anything about this”
“And wait the fuck a minute… you block a bank account? You keep telling me that you know we’re talking about my wife, don’t you kind of think that we might incredibly live under the same roof?”
Player LazyEmployee levels up. Player Bureaucracy levels up. Game, Set, Match...
“I’m not supposed to know about it”
Player RIP levels up!
“And then you’re not supposed to know that’s my wife either! Oh come on, you block an account for that? Don’t you call the customer first? You have her phone number, don’t you? What about an email? what about a fucking pop-up in her E-Finance dashboard? What about a fucking push notification from her mobile App, or a 1990s blinking BANNER when she logs in, warning her to fucking comply with the fucking bureaucrazy??”
Player LazyEmployee levels up. Player Stupidity levels up twice.
“We sent her the package many times! She had plenty of time to sign it!”
Player RIP levels up three times.
“Ok, you’re stupid like a deaf donkey. What about me? What about ME?? You block MY access because a person who’s co-owning the account is missing a signature somewhere? Why didn’t you notify ME with a huge red button saying HEY, YOUR ACCOUNT IS GOING TO BE BLOCKED IF YOUR FRIEND DOESN’T DO THIS SHIT. Why? Btw, I saw your fucking 5 CHF monthly fee has been charged, so the account isn’t ‘completely blocked’. I’m still paying your salary and your incompetence ah? Since you’re company is so retarded, why the hell didn’t you send ME a fucking postal package, to MY address – the correct one – warning ME that MY account is going to be blocked? Or a fucking message, or a phone call, or a email, or a inFuckingMail or whatever your internal mailing service is?”
Player LazyEmployee is now Super Saiyan Level 3.
“I don’t know what to tell you”
“Oh, shut up! You’re dinosaurs! You must go extinct! Time to close this shitty account and switch to fucking modern banks. REVOLUT! I’m going to close this account and switch to a mobile only bank! I don’t want to see Paper ever again, you must be destroyed and forgotten like ancient civilizations. Studied by modern archaeologists! ‘The Paper era’ they will call you! Go away, disappear in the dust, get off my life!”
Player LazyEmployee left the game.
“Uh… she hung up the phone. Now what do I do?”
Driiiiin Driiiiin
[RIP phone ringing. Ok, just metaphorically. I hate ringtones like every non-boomer with a functioning brain]
Player Nice-Employee joined the game (good side).
“Hallo, I’m Mr. NiceEmployee 🙂 My colleague told me you have some problems, I’m here to help you. First, is your wife around? Can she log in into her E-Finance? If I send you the doc digitally, can you print it, sign it and return it asap? I’ll reactivate the account as soon as I receive the form back from her. I know this sounds stupid, but it’s something outside our control. It’s a regulation. But I’m here to help.”
Player Stupidity left the game.
“Oh… well… thanks… You know, I got infuriated by this thing. It’s borderline ridiculous. I have rent to pay! Anyway yes, wife is here, she can access E-Finance, but we don’t know how to print a document. We don’t have a printer and you know, there’s a kind shortage of public places where to go to print a document during a pandemic…”
“I totally agree with you, it’s ultra annoying. Anyway, can’t you have your wife sign the doc ‘digitally’ and send it back somehow in a PDF?”
Player Paper left the game.
“Well, uh… we can produce a ‘signed’ PDF and send it back to you via mail. I’m a photoshop pro 😉 ”
“Ok, cool! Once I received the form I’ll unblock your account. please mind that it may take an hour for the effect to propagate. Yeah, shitty servers, you know. Then you’ll need to manually enter a single order for your cancelled rent payment. Plus, maybe you need to check if the Direct Debits will retry few times. Better to call them once the account is unblocked and explain the situation 🙂 ”
Player Bureaucracy left the game.
“Thank you, I really appreciate your support 🙂 Please, fire that other asshole who I talked to before”
“You’re welcome. If you need extra support during this phase, call back this number which is my direct contact, and you skip the call center 🙂 ”
An hour later, few image manipulations later, a call later the account has been unlocked – on paper.
Team good (probably) won the match.
That’s because I will only know the day after if orders would execute.
UPDATE: On April 3rd everything is back to normal and all payments have been done.
Team good won the match!
Anyway, the morale is:
- Be financially savvy. Check your accounts, find a system (a set of spreadsheets work fine for me) that helps you track expected expenses. If you don’t monitor, you don’t know what’s happening.
- Be proactive. Act immediately If something looks weird. What would have happened if I had waited? Well, I called UPC right after the call with NiceEmployee, and they told me they were going to cut my internet access within few days. And that would end up in my Debit Register (Betreibungsregister). If I missed rent payment it’d also end up in the black register. And maybe they kicked me out of the flat. Good luck finding a new one without a salary. If the credit card company doesn’t get paid in time, it’d trigger criminal interest rates on my carried over debt. And what if I don’t pay health insurance (while there’s a pandemic)? I don’t even want to know.
- Practice Active Darwinism. Let those companies who deserve to go extinct die. If they don’t pass few sanity checks, let them die. Paperless. Remote. Virtual. Smart. Mobile-First, Bureaucracy-less. I know it’s hard, but favor these criteria as much as possible.
“So RIP, when are you closing your PostFinance account?”
Player Laziness joined the game (evil side).
Well… Sooner or later I’ll do. Reasons to get rid of it are growing:
- I’ll move our Pillar 3A somewhere else (VIAC?)
- I’ll move Mrs, and probably mine as well, Vested Benefit Account (was Pillar 2) somewhere else.
- I’ll open a smart bank account that allows us to do all we can already do today with PF. Where? I don’t know if Revolut can support all my needs. Other suggestions?
- I’l communicate all the dozens of entities that need to be notified of the change in bank account.
Player Busyness joined the game (evil side).
It’s a lot of work… I don’t know when will it pop up in my priority queue.
Any recommendation?
Have a nice day 🙂
Player RIP-Follower invited to join the game (good side).
Haha that was a funny read! Crazy that PF let’s this kind of worker in custom service. This is exactly how you loose clients.
Well, I speak each times of Raiffeisen… Find it perfect system.
If you own min. 1 part sociale, you get free checking and saving accounts. Ebanking is clean, if you have a problem, you juste call tout local office and they do the job. No endless phone responders (click 2 for french), just direct phone contact with employee you often know from OTC relations and it does the job everytime.
Hi Polo, do you think Raiffeisen is perfect?
Doesn’t seem to pop up frequently in “best banks in Switzerland” posts.
What are fixed, unavoidable costs per month?
What are weirdest fees they charge for things that you shouldn’t be charged?
Hi Mr. RIP. I also switched to Raiffeisen from PF after they introduced their monthly maintenance charges. I’m happy with Raiffeisen so far, the only thing is that we pay 40.- each for our debit Mastercards (although it gives us free entrance on 500+ museums and discounts at a lot of events). If I really wanted to get rid of that, I might try Neon or something like that.
The bank clerk at Raiffeisen lost a good 90 minutes with us to open our accounts, I don’t know how they’ll ever recover that money from us 🙂 That’s also an advantage of mobile-only banks, less time lost for everyone.
Switching banks wasn’t as much of a hurdle as people make it seem – I just aggregated all the debitors from the past year at PF and made a list so I wouldn’t miss any of them. E-bill also makes it relatively easy.
Leave PF and you’ll never look back!
Thanks for your feedback 🙂
40 CHF per year on each Debit card sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. We can have a single one, we only use debit cards for cash withdrawals, which are in the order of one per quarter.
Is it the only fee you pay? No other fees?
Hi RIP, you might want to try and avoid direct debit (LSV) authorizations altogether, as it’s a relatively closed system where you, as a user, have very little self-management options. E-Bills and LSV are two very different beasts and if you ask me the new Swiss E-Bill system is quite good, as it appears to be uniformed between almost all Swiss banks.
For the smart bank account, I’ve recently heard about Neon that looks like a better fit to the Swiss system than Revolut (Revolut does not provide you with a Swiss IBAN and is not well integrated with the Swiss tax system as it does not provide you with the detailed information you’ll need for your tax declaration).
For the rest, by all means, avoid UBS, they might have gotten the best ebanking software, but they are thieves. Honestly, I’m surprised by the outcome of your situation, and knowing that they are such “good employees” at PostFinance, I would reconsider leaving PostFinance… They might have messed something up with the change of address, granted, but how many times do you plan to move in the coming years, honestly?
Lery: I agree with you about Revolut, but why you say UBS are thieves? I had a pretty decent experience with them so far.
RIP: Never had anything to do with PosteFinance but this story is crazy sh*t! The next time you move (hopefully in year 2129) consider paying the Poste for the 1-year address forwarding service, you’ll be surprised how many things escape your “important parties to be notified” list.
Very good point OT!
I considered address forwarding for a while, but then declined it. What could possibly go wrong? I said…
Hopefully Paper gets extinct before I move again. Both I and the environment would be grateful 🙂
Oh well, I paid for the address forwarding and… they started sending to my old address the mortgage payment reminders for the new places!
LOL. Like they don’t know where you live!
Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll look into it. It’s just very low in my priority list of things to do right now. But I’ll look into it one day.
Neon and Zak (mostly Neon though) seem to be the most recommended among my readers. I might give it a try.
One thing: do they have joint account? I and my wife would like to share the same account, it makes things much much simpler.
Hi RIP, interesting read. Time for the dinosaurs to pass away. On the side note: It’s good RAV is annoying you, because government support need to go to those who really need it. Financial Independence involves an emergency fund which should allow ourselves (fellow FIRE fighters) to withstand a shock like unemployment independently for some time. Gaming the system is obviously allowed, but I am kind of stuck in the antics of ethical behavior.
I still don’t see how RAV annoying me is a good thing for anyone.
If paying 2.2% of my gross salary per year on an unemployment insurance would have been optional I’d have opted out and kept the money. I could have used the 35k CHF premiums I paid over last 7.5 years for the insurance.
I meet the conditions for accessing to unemployment, which is not having a job and be willing to look for one. And I’ve been diagnosed in burnout for six months last year, so quitting was not on a whim. Maybe due to the fact I quit on my own, I’ll have to wait up to three months to see a Rappen, and that’s ok. And I’m actually looking for jobs and doing interviews. Maybe I’l end up accepting a job and the economy would be much happier with that that with a “lazy unproductive early retiree”.
If you think I should not get paid (even having the right to and meeting the conditions) by an insurance because I have enough money, why don’t you apply same ethical standard with your salary and health insurance? “Hey boss, I have enough money for another month, so you don’t have to pay me April salary!”
One of your best posts. I might be biased because I have been hating on PF, as well.
Anyways, few months ago, I was ready to throw in the towel and after much research, switch to https://www.neon-free.ch/en/. However, me being a cursed American, I cannot open an account with any of these fancy new age fintechs.
So, I am stuck with dinosaurs.
Neon seems to be the most recommended one.
But I don’t understand if you opened an account with them or not
No, I couldn’t because the underlying bank doesn’t take US citizens. Cool thing was that I emailed them on a Saturday morning about why USA is not on their list and they emailed me back within the hour.
So I am stuck with PF for now. Otherwise, I would have made the switch already.
Considering PostFinance is a “systematically important” bank, their funding is pretty much guaranteed by the state and if they become unprofitable you are going to pay for it with your taxes anyway. If you are not happy with them it still makes sense to switch but even if 20% of their customers do, that won’t put them out of business.
That said, PF has been the best Swiss bank I have had in term of customer service (and I tried 3 of them). I haven’t used Revolut but, from my understanding, unless you have a popular Twitter account, it seems fairly unreliable. Otherwise I don’t have any specific recommendation for retail banking in Switzerland. But if you are going to switch, consider the ethical aspect (e.g. abs.ch but I have no experience with them).
Yeah, I know, PF is not going anywhere of course. It’s the dinosaur in the zoo.
But I hope other dinosaurs, without public parachutes, would disappear thanks to this cleanse… oops, crisis.
And I also must admit that with few exceptions (all around customer support) I’ve been a satisfied customer of them.
Hi RIP,
I was a lifelong PF customer myself and closed my account 6 months ago. I wasn’t unhappy with them, just didn’t want to pay the fee.
I’m with Neon now and I’m happy with the account (they also support eBills now). I also use Revolut a lot, but I didn’t want to use Revolut alone, because I want/need a Swiss IBAN.
At the same time I closed my PF account, I also closed the PF account of my girlfriend and opened a ZAK account for her. I did it that way, because I couldn’t decide between Neon and ZAK (Neon didn’t have eBills back then).
We don’t use her ZAK account very often – but if I compare Neon with ZAK, I like Neon more, as it supports eBills, you can do everything with 1 card and the app is much faster (at least on our phones). ZAK has other features that Neon doesn’t provide, such as virtual pots – but those aren’t relevant for us.
I also opened a Revolut account for my girlfriend. I’ve used my Revolut account for 2 years now without any problems. Right now we’re in Ecuador since the beginning of the year and we use the accounts a lot and we also didn’t have any problems with them here.
As for the Vested Benefit Account (Pillar 2):
VIAC will launch their Vested Benefit Account shortly. I can’t wait to move the Vested Benefit Account of my girlfriend there (and my 3a is also there since 2 years). I last checked with them one month ago and they told me they’re going to launch by the end of March or start of April – which is now. So, it shouldn’t take long.
I’m also waiting for VIAC to offer a Vested Benefits Account solution 🙂
Ont he Neon vs Zak question, I would really like to have a joint account with my wife. It would be a mess to have to split accounts. As far as I understand, neither Neon nor Zak offer joint accounts. Am I right?
Zak offers virtual shared pots. Don’t know if that would be sufficient for your use cases. As far as I know they both don’t offer real joint accounts.
https://www.cler.ch/de/info/zak/gemeinsame-toepfe
This is a 90% required feature for our family.
I’m going to try it anyway, but it has to be 150% turbo-awesome to compensate the lack of a fundamental feature.
Yellow flag on Neon, I moved my savings account there because I was fed up with the dinosaur bank fees. They do have a hard 20k CHF outgoing money limit per day (hence the 620k CHF monthly withdrawal limit in their FAQ. Had to move 80k CHF from TrueWealth to IBKR recently thru Neon which forced me to split it up to 4 transactions. I also got a nice call due to suspicious activity form a lady from Neon.
Revolut might also be tricky because they usually request pay slips for their AML (only was requested once tho).
Well, 20k per day doesn’t seem a huge blocker, unless you plan to buy a house…
call me old school but i would strongly recommend ubs (as a mere happy customer, nothing else): quality, platform and service are top-notch and if you’re reasonable it’s pretty much free.
working in financial services myself, i would be cautious about so-called “neo-banks”. not saying all is bad, just stay alert and critical thinking, always. for instance, for a starter, ubs and pf are banks whereas neither zak nor neon are. revolut is not licensed (i.e. regulated) in switzerland. and that’s not even talking about all thoses stories related to it/security issues or concerns linked to their rapid growth…
With Neon you actually get an account at the Hypothekarbank Lenzburg and ZAK belongs to the Bank Cler.
I suppose, those are real, regulated banks in Switzerland.
So, as I understand it, with Neon and ZAK they just replaced the counters with an app and removed/reduced the fees. I’ll still consider them safe. Or why do you think choosing them could be risky?
You should do some research.
Both Neon and Zak are based on real Swiss banks and come with the standard 100k protection.
no ofc i know that and that’s exactly what i meant: maybe not here but in real life people won’t see the nuance. they will believe opening a bank account with zac or neon while in fact they are contracting with a bank they have never heard of.
as a young educated professional in your 20/30’s would you have opened an account with hypothekarbank if not for neon?
as you say, it’s just a sugar-coated interface for millennials and “reduced” fees. the best analogy for me is diet/zero coke: the new coke recipes that were introduced as sugar free and calories free to “address health concerns”. we all know the rest of the story (:
then again, i am not saying all is bad with neo-banks and that you shouldn’t look at them. same as drinking a can diet coke won’t kill you either.
“sugar-coated interface for millennials” made my day 😀
I was a UBS customer for few years, but 10 CHF/mo is a Goodbye-Ciao-Sayonara for me.
But being a GenX myself with an aversion to “whatever millennial” I agree that for basic services like banking a good old used stainless steal machine is better than a Tesla prototype, but in the PF case we’re talking of steam engine machine. Maybe time to let them go.
Hi Mr. RIP,
Glad to hear you are OK and you are enjoying the coding challenge in the interview, this may be
an excellent opportunity to resurrect your former coding desire and may be find a good SWE opportunity on less challenging environment and lay back corporation.
Hi ATM, welcome back to my blog 🙂
Yes, maybe I’ll resurrect my old passion, but only if I decide to go and test it.
Part of me would like to move on and try something completely different, but another part is screaming “you’re still a f***ing good software engineer! Go out and prove it!”
I’d love to hear updates from you 🙂
I wonder why nobody mentioned “*er Kantonal Bank” in this discussion as an alternative to PF or UBS?
One of their benefits is unlimited protection of customer’s funds, backed up by the canton, i.e. no 100k limit. This seems to be also reflected by the bank rating AAA for ZKB vs. AA+ for PF or A+ for UBS (https://www.moneyland.ch/de/bankenrating).
As for eBaking, I didn’t have a chance to test the ZKB solution, but I believe it can’t be worse than PF 🙂
Last time I checked my Kantonal Bank it was everything “German Only”. And I heard it’s a mess to even get someone speak English, or the e-banking UI in English.
Nope.
I also hate monthly fees. At the beginning of this COVID crisis, I tried to zero PF montlhy fees on my family shared account. Hence I invested in PF funds, and yesterday, just after few months, they announce they will introduce a custody fee for funds … I hate them … and I hate myself for hating monthly fees 🙁
Don’t hate yourself for hating yourself for hating monthly fees, it’s all normal!
Just move money out of their funds!
Pay the fee if you think their banking services are worth the fee. Do not buy into the fallacy that purchasing 25k CHF of their inferior funds – which would make you lose at least 1% per year, 250 CHF/y, 20 CHF/mo compared to other alternatives – is letting you save 5 CHF/mo, 60 CHF/year.
Detach investment decisions from banking decisions.
Hi there
Thanks for the fab writing and analysis. I’m wondering about your vested benefits account….you say your wife’s is in PF but I couldn’t find a post where you picked yours. PF too or VIAC?
What about Liberty? Have you looked into that? I’ve seen a lot of support for Liberty as a great place to park the money and be able to invest.
Any insights into how you are investing the Vested Benefits account (and why) would be so appreciated.
Thank you!
I’m still employed so I don’t have a Vested Benefits Account yet.
i will surely write about it when time comes 🙂