I've been here for 8 months now and still find myself converting from francs to pounds to see if I'm getting a bargain or not. More recently I'm noticing that as my reference currency is on the slide, things appear to be getting a lot more expensive I need to snap out of this habit quick otherwise I risk turning into a right scrooge McDuck.

Does anyone else still think in pounds, dollars, euros, rands etc.. having been here for a significant period of time?

15 months and still doing it! You're not alone.

No. I have been here 8 years and stopped doing that after about 2 years. I earn in CHF, spend in CHF, and have seen costs of things rise and fall over the years so have been able to kind of reset a benchmark for the value of things in my mind.

7 years, and yes, still doing it. Same situation with the currency slide as well. Almost gagged the other day over a $50 Dominos pizza!

q

After nearly five years, I am used to doing it for high end electronic gadgets (normally much more expensive in S. Africa). Spoil myself here and cart it home on my annual visit.

Now with the weakening of the rand I'm still doing it, but now looking forward to how cheap stuff is back home on the back of my franc

It's normal enough to keep comparing if you still have contact with your home and live part of your life still there. I know a lot of people who think in three currencies years later... pre-euro currencies are hard to give up...

Been here 10 years and i think i stopped converting back after around 5 years when I figured out I was pretty much here for good and not just temp.

My own take is rather different.

I only spend a few weeks each summer in Switzerland, and over the years have learned that it is far better not to convert things back to dollars.

I have a vacation budget in CHF, and that budget takes the higher prices into account.

30+ years and still converting, trouble is I'm doing it in Chf, Euros and pounds sterling!

Been here six years, and only convert when either I'm comparing prices to see if it is cheaper here or there if I have the option to buy either place or want to get a feel for what the item costs here or there. It is kind of like time zones to me - when I board a plane going to a place in another time zone, I set my watch immediately to the new time zone and think it in straight away.

All the time for the first few years, now after 10 years only now and again.

Sticking to your home currency is a hiding to nowhere. I left the UK in 1989 and all my prices in pounds are locked into that year. You can imagine my horror at doing something as simple as buying a round of drinks in the UK now.

In the first years I found a simple solution for me and visitors from the UK was to convert at CHF10 to GBP1. This made even the meanest of visitors uncommonly generous while here and helped my settling-in no end...

I finally forgot about greenbacks for French Francs and then stopped there.

I am completely obsolete.

Sorry to briefly veer off topic, but my last time in CH having been the mid-1990s, imagine my shock – shock! – at learning there's been Dominos pizza since 2000!

As for currency-thinking, I order stuff from CH with some regularity, and though lately the US$ and CHF have been pretty close to parity, the saying remains reliable: "You can buy anything in Switzerland, it just costs more."

(Often a lot more.)

Ditto Sterling vs Euro. Look at this way - at least at parity it saves the need to convert back into home currency. Maybe next year same will be true of Sterling vs CHF!

Took me atleast 5 years to stop thinking in pounds sterling....trouble is I now convert between pounds, euros, chf and US dollars before I decide to buy something

3 years and still doing it! The price of baked beans horrifies me.

I snapped out of thinking in pounds pretty quickly, as I realized that my take home pay, the cost of a beer, a coffee, a meal out and even my apartment was all about the same price in CHF as I had been paying in French Francs in France in the 1980s. It worked very well as a guide to which places and items were good value and which weren't. I did find myself "saving" on eating out, as the restaurants here don't have the same appeal as the Parisian ones, and I had a much better kitchen at home here than in Paris.

I still compared with pounds for electrical goods and clothes, as I was still travelling back to the UK on a regular basis for the first couple of years and had the chance of buying there. I ended up buying very little in the UK.

I am here too many years
My home currency was the punt so once Ireland moved to euro. I was completely lost and had to embrace the Chuff.

Nah, I was for a few months but gave it up fairly recently when it stopped being a neat 2:1 ratio for sterling: chf. Can't be bothered to do the difficult maths now!

kodokan