Hi All,

We're a young couple (no kids) currently living in Boston, my partner was just offered a job in Basel. We have a very comfortable lifestyle here (dine out 3-4 times a week, nice car, cleaning lady, nice apartment, lots of traveling...etc).
We were wondering if an income of 210K chf would allow us to maintain a similar lifestyle in Basel.

We're looking forward to moving to Europe!

Thanks in advance for your comments!

Gab

Yes, I would say it's quite sufficient to have a comfortable life here.

Now this makes me wonder how one can make 210K and at the same time have no clue ...

210K is about 5x the typical grad-student income. Figure out what typical grad-student income is in Boston and you should have your answer.

Sorry that this sounds like a silly question, but i've never lived in europe before and i've been told that life in Switzerland is quite expensive!

True but if you did a search before posting here you would see that most people are happy to get just half of that

With the minimum wage regulations, you might be struggling to keep all your staff: I had to let my butler and scullery maid go when I first moved here, which was something of a problem, but I have a nice little American maid who sees to most of my needs these days, so it's not all bad.

Parking might be an issue: Most dwellings, even those for the better class of person, only have one parking space attached, so you'll need to decide which car you want to bring with you. Given the treacherous nature of Swiss roads during the long hard winter, I decided to leave the Bentley and the Aston Martin in England, and bought myself a nice re-upholstered Land Rover, specially adapted to run on skis during the winter. Being American, you may be happy with some kind of Jeep or similar mass produced vehicle.

Hunting presents a terrible problem here: If you wish to indulge yourself in gentlemanly pleasures of a sanguinary nature, you will be compelled to travel to Scotland to enjoy sport of the kind to which you will be accustomed, local hunting being practised by scruffy men in camouflaged clothes, drinking schnapps and cursing in a foreign language. This, however, incurs the additional expense of hiring a pilot, covering the cost of fuel, and so on. You may, of course, travel by public airlines, but we all know how unpleasant that experience can be, don't we?

The worst, however, is the cost of accommodation for the dogs. I was unable to bring my pack with me, and was forced to have them all shot. You can bring one or two small animals with you, but Swiss landlords have an unreasonable aversion to permitting a chap to keep three dozen beagles in his quarters. Something about neighbours and noise regulations, or somesuch Mitteleuropean notion. You know what foreigners are like!

In all, you should be able to live quite comfortably on such an income, as long as you are prepared for the fact that the way of life is very different here, in a place where 'egalitarianism' and 'republican virtues' rule every aspect of life, and nobody cares about the pattern on your tie.

Good luck, and please do feel free to ask any further questions to which I may be able to furnish you with useful answers.

Loooool!! this is exactly the answer I was looking for! thanks for your feedback! I'll be sure to invite you to one of our hunting trips!
great sense of humor

For a good discussion of the cost of living well in Basel see Salary needed for family of 4 to live comfortably in Basel.

And, by the way, to the EF.

Welcome to the forum . And if you ever need to hire staff for your hunting trips, give me a shout; my rates are quite reasonable

I guess it's the current exchange rate back into Sterling that makes the offer I've just signed for working in Basel seem attractive. It's as a local hire hence no nice expat stuff.

Until I read the last few threads requesting whether it's possible to have a good lifestyle on around 3 times my salary, anyway. Oh well. Save as much as possible, if possible, hope Sterling stays low, and then go back to the UK in a couple of years before I'm bankrupt.

I plan on cycling/training around and exploring nearby cities/towns in Switzerland, France and Germany. Luckily, these seem like cheap activities. I wonder what local Swiss people think when they read this forum. If every local I meet asks me to buy them dinner then I will have got my answer

210 KiloChuff´s? A YEAR?? By the lord I just can not imagine the state of mind needed to survive living in such squalor.

There is a minimum wage here??

Well... to give an idea, hubby and I do alright on about 1/3 of what is typically discussed. No servants and no car though, just a 2.5 room flat and lots of public transportation.

So, for a couple who want to travel a bit and dine out "frequently" (to me, once a week or more is "frequent"), you should do more than fine with 80 - 100k in Basel. If you are homebodies like my hubby and I, even that is more than "necessary."

I won't kid you, we'd have more freedom to do more if we had more but since we've only been married for 2yrs, we're happy with each other's company for now.

That'll be management.

I plan on pimping my servants out on the mean streets of Basel during the day, so that they earn enough money to pay for themselves.

you've obviously never run into a banker that makes 750k then

Oh me, I knew as soon as I saw the title of this thread that the jolly folks on here were going to rip you a new one. The majority of the posters on EF live on significantly less than 210k per year, hence the witty repartee.

That salary for two people from Boston will get you the Swiss equivalent of an American lifestyle that includes Banana Republic, TGIFridays on a regular basis, Williams Sonoma, weekly dinners out a white tablecloth US restaurant, taxis when needed, two cars, a 2400 square foot house, a cleaning lady, buying wine from the wineries by the case, etc.

What it is not going to get you is real Louis Vuitton luggage, a chauffeur, a McMansion, a Rolex, a chalet in Gstaad, a Maybach, etc.

In other words, 210 is a nice living in the US and it is a nice living here. Welcome to Switzerland and remember when you are househunting, it is all about the view.

...and no matter how good the view is at the moment, if you see that the spacious field or two in front of the house has very long, slender bits of wood or metal sticking up in the air, with short bits of wood or metal sticking out from the top at an angle - that's showing the profile of the blocks of flats they will start building as soon as you move in (and the area between the poles, straight in front of your windows, is where the walls are going to be!!).

Hope all goes well and that we can go on enjoying your humour on here! Anyone who understands DB will be fine.

When do you reach here(Basel)?
after new years?
do let us know , and we'll meet up!!!