That's a really great and comprehensive answer.

You are right about difficulty of finding good advice on international pensions issues. If we think tax is bad... pensions is worse. My father retired last year after a career fairly evenly spread between UK, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Germany and the USA, across 45 years. He has spent the first year of retirement trying to work out who should pay him what...

Your comment re transfering your UK pension to get the retrospective credit is based on the new rules right? I did a big top up last year but have never transferred any credit to CH.

My only frustration with the CH system is the difficulty of selecting your own investment vehicles for employee second pillar contributions, and the return on eg a Servisa fund is peanuts (ok so its guaranteed 2.5% tax free but still). Of course normally pension savings should be "safe as houses", but if you are in a position to take more risk due to other portfolio considerations, I would much rather take the risk and reward on the tax free side etc.

Daniel