Final departure from Switzerland can be a strenuous affair in itself. Here is how it was handled by my partner and myself. As usual, YMMV; also, there may be better ways to go about the tasks; just sharing our own experience here. To give some context, we were moving back to Australia in 2017 after living and working in the canton of Zurich for 3.5 years; we had B permits from our third year on.
The checklist we made for ourselves and followed was this:
Three full months in advance (e.g., December if departing[*] on the 31st of March)
- give written notice to the landlord. That was in our lease contract that it was only possible to end the lease on the last day of a month and the notice period was 3 full months. Fortunately for us, it could be any month except December. You will definitely want to check your own lease contract for the termination conditions well in advance (up to a year)
- get rid of any unwanted items in the suitable annual / semi-annual rubbish pickups such as Mineralabfallsammlung (old crockery, empty plant pots, etc), Metallsammlung (old metal items such as pots and pans etc), and so on
Two full months in advance (e.g., January if departing[*] on the 31st of March)
- sit back and relax (I was really surprised to have nothing big going on for the month)
One full month in advance (e.g., February if departing[*] on the 31st of March)
- give notice to the employer. Mine required I quit on the last day of a month and notice be given one full month in advance. You will need to check your own job contract for the termination conditions and/or talk to the HR department well in advance (a few months)
- shop around for overseas shipping options
1st half of the last month (e.g., March if departing[*] on the 31st of March)
- first of all, deregister at the Gemeinde. Just our passports and B-permits were required for the procedure itself. However, on top of that we needed to provide a Swiss contact that would be getting our mail from the taxation office once we left. In our case it was the local office of an international tax agency as my wife was transferring within the same global employer. From what I heard, other options may include your Swiss tax agent if they are OK with that, or even a friend who is going to keep living in Switzerland for some more years. Basically, the contact just needs to forward you any letters from the Steueramt (e.g. scan & email them) until you are done with all of your Swiss tax liabilities (up to 3-4 years?)
- cancel the Internet/ADSL/mobile contracts as of the departure date using the departure certificate(s). At least with UPC Cablecom and Swisscom it was perfectly OK to cancel an annual contract early if leaving Switzerland for good; there seems to be a special clause for that case in favour of the customer
- cancel the Mobility subscriptions. The guys require 1 month of advance notice, if I remember correctly
- cancel the liability insurance policy renewal so it doesn't get extended automatically. The insurer (ours was AXA) requested a copy of the departure certificate and kindly issued a refund for the remaining period until the end of the year
- cancel the health insurance policy (KVG) as of the departure date using the departure certificate(s). A refund should be issued if the policy was annual. I had had our policies switched to monthly premium payments just in case at the beginning of 2017, so I just paid for the last month's premium and that was it. Probably I was overcautious since getting a refund for the unused time turned out to be a standard procedure for all other services
- stop Billag (the radio/TV tax) via their self-service website. The guys accept an online request for that in advance and then you don't even have to provide supporting documents, just your departure date and a bank account IBAN for refund. (But if you do it after departure, you need to give them a copy of your deregistration certificate etc)
- stop the automatic extension of the Halbtax via swisspass.ch
- request transfer of the Pillar 2 pension to Pensfree. We went with Pensfree to minimize the cantonal tax on Pillar 2 cashout. See, e.g.,
https://www.englishforum.ch/finance-...-lump-sum.html . It was useful to learn that Pensfree had a special 'holding' account type that accrued no interest but could be transferred from immediately unlike a regular vested benefits account (which can be transferred from only after 90 days IIRC). All communication went in English via email and the whole process was pretty easy and straightforward. All in all the guys were very helpful
- book professional cleaning of the apartment at the end of the lease. We went with Zuriclean and were very happy:
https://www.englishforum.ch/housing-...ml#post2772168
2nd half of the last month (e.g., March if you plan to depart[*] on the 31st of March)
- sell on ricardo.ch any good items we weren't taking with us. We weren't looking to recover much of their original value, but it was really great to have unwieldy pieces like a modular wardrobe just picked up from our place by people who wanted them
- forward mail to the new (overseas) address. Having no fixed overseas address yet, we just asked an Australian friend to do us a favour and hold our mail for the time being
- talk to the bank (Postfinance in our case) about the change of 'domicile' status to non-resident and the contact address to overseas. Once I convinced them I needed the account to stay open for a few years for things like paying tax bills, they were pretty helpful with the procedure, which involved mailing them a signed form they emailed to me first, if I remember correctly
- apply for Pillar 1 refund as per
https://www.englishforum.ch/leaving-...ess-story.html
- apply for Pillar 2 refund as per instructions from Pensfree. We just kept our Postfinance account to receive the money into and see what we want to do with it later on
- ship our stuff to Australia
- have the apartment cleaned
Last day
- remove the name plaques from our mailbox and doorbell and keep them as a memento of our time in Switzerland
- hand the apartment over to the landlord
- celebrate
First month after departure
- file the final tax return
After that
- file the tax return for the previous year if you haven't yet
- watch and pay any bills you still may be getting from Switzerland for a while such as tax, utilities, rent, etc. For example, our former landlord sent us a final settlement of the Nebenkosten only 6 months later. Keeping a Swiss bank account open really helps to deal with those
That should be about it.
(*) Above, the departure date is what you are going to have in your departure certificate (Abmeldebestaetigung). Depending on your circumstances, you may not have to actually fly out from Switzerland on that day. For example, we 'departed' as of March, 31, flew to Sydney on April, 11 and had a holiday in Mallorca in between. At the border control for our flight to Sydney we were asked if it was our actual final departure, which it was.