Who we serve · 01
Expats in Switzerland
You moved here for the job. The salary is good, the deductions are large, and the annual statements arrive in German. You have a pension you did not choose, a 3a account you may or may not have opened, and savings in a country you no longer live in. Nobody has ever sat down and explained how any of it fits together.
What people in this position ask
On the first call- What is actually in my Pillar 2The occupational pension your employer runs. Contributions come out of your salary, and the pot is yours even if you change jobs., and what happens to it if I leave?
- Should I be paying into 3a at all, and is the bank account version the wrong one?
- Do I keep my old country’s accounts open, or is that creating a tax problem?
- I am taxed at source. Does that change what is worth doing?
- If I buy shares here, where does that get taxed, and by whom?
- Everyone says buy property. Is that advice, or is that just what people say?
None of these has a general answer. Every one of them turns on facts about you, which is why the first thing that happens is a conversation rather than a recommendation.
What actually makes this hard
The honest version- 01
Two tax systems, and they do not agree
Switzerland taxes wealth and income but usually not capital gains. Your former country may tax the gain and ignore the wealth. Which rules reach you depends on residence, domicile and the treaty between them, and the answer changes the moment you move again.
- 02
The paperwork is in a language you are still learning
Vested benefitsFreizügigkeitsleistung: the pension money left behind when you leave a job and do not immediately join another Swiss scheme. It sits in a holding account until it has somewhere to go., Pillar 3aThe voluntary private pension, called Säule 3a in German. You pay in yourself up to a yearly limit, deduct it from taxable income, and cannot touch it until close to retirement., QuellensteuerTax at source. For many foreign residents in Switzerland, income tax is deducted from salary before it is paid, rather than settled once a year by return., Pension buy-inEinkauf: paying extra into your pillar 2 to fill gaps from years you were not contributing. It reduces taxable income now and locks the money up until retirement.. The words are not hard once translated, but until someone translates them the documents are unreadable, so they get filed and forgotten.
- 03
You may not be here for ever
Almost every piece of Swiss financial advice assumes you stay. If there is a real chance you leave in five years, several standard recommendations reverse.
What we would do about it
And why that pieceA share of the gain means an initial conversation about your pension and your paperwork costs nothing, which matters when you do not yet know whether you need an adviser at all.
Every term of the feeCross-border advice is constrained by where you are resident, not where we are. If your other country restricts who may advise its residents, that is established on the first call rather than discovered later.
If this is you, the first call costs nothing.
Thirty minutes. You describe the position, we tell you what we would do and what it would cost, and one legitimate outcome is that you do not need MB Financial Advisory at all. Our fee is 10% of the gain, so a conversation that leads nowhere leads to no invoice either.