Rosbotham Finance

30/09/2026

Property prices only ever go up ! 📈

It's one of the most deeply held beliefs in personal finance, and for anyone who's bought in the last twenty years it looks obviously true. Prices went up and they kept going up. So the plan becomes simple: buy, wait, win !

Switzerland's own history says otherwise, and most people have forgotten it.

In the early 1990s the Swiss property market crashed. Apartment prices fell around 25% nationally from peak to trough. Zurich dropped about 20%, Bern around 16%, some regions more. And in Zurich, prices didn't get back to their 1991 peak until 2005. Fourteen years to break even, before you even count interest and maintenance.

Go back further and it's not a one-off. Switzerland also had property bubbles in the 1970s and 1980s that gave back everything they'd gained. The steady rise everyone treats as normal really only describes the last two decades. It isn't a law of nature.

There's also no single 'Swiss market'. Zurich, Geneva and a handful of hotspots move one way, while other regions move very differently. UBS regularly flags specific areas as bubble risks while others sit flat. The average national figure hides a lot, and you don't buy the average. You buy one property, in one place, at one moment.

Now, I'm not predicting that prices will fall, it's simpler than that. I'm stating that 'prices always go up' isn't a fact, it's just an assumption. When someone buys more than they should, over-borrows, or counts on selling at a profit to make the numbers work, the whole thing rests on the market rising on cue.

Property can be a good decision. But 'it'll be worth more later' is a hope, not a plan, and the two get confused far too often.

29/09/2026

🇬🇧 Ahead of the UK Autumn Budget on 28 October, here's what's already on the books for British expats

Chancellor John Healey will deliver his first Budget on Wednesday 28 October 2026. Rather than speculate on what may or may not be announced, it's worth taking stock of the changes already in force or legislated that affect British expats in Switzerland.

Already in force:

- The UK moved to a residence-based inheritance tax system from 6 April 2025. Long-term UK residents (10 out of the previous 20 tax years) fall within worldwide IHT scope, with a 3 to 10-year 'tail' after leaving the UK

- Voluntary Class 2 National Insurance contributions for time abroad ended on 6 April 2026. Only the more expensive Class 3 route remains for topping up your UK State Pension record

- UK State Pension age started rising from 66 to 67 on 6 May 2026, phased through to 6 March 2028 depending on year of birth

Legislated for April 2027:

- Most unused UK pension funds and pension death benefits will be brought into the deceased's estate for UK inheritance tax purposes

Whatever the Chancellor announces on 28 October will layer on top of these. For British expats with UK pensions, UK-source income or a UK IHT footprint, the 'known' changes are already substantial and worth factoring into any planning conversation before the new detail arrives.

We'll follow up after Budget day.

Find out more (Chancellor's statement, gov.uk): https://www.gov.uk/government/news/budget-to-move-power-and-money-out-of-westminster-and-into-every-postcode-around-britain

Today (Friday 31 July), the Chancellor has confirmed that the date of the Budget will be Wednesday 28 October.

28/09/2026

There's a stretch of life where you're funding the generation above you and the generation below you at the same time, while trying not to forget about your own.

It tends to land in your late forties and fifties. The kids aren't cheap, university, a first car, help with a deposit one day, a wedding the next. And around the same time, your parents start to need things too. Sometimes money, but more often time, attention, a hand with decisions that used to be theirs alone. You're pulled in both directions at once.

The tricky part is that this arrives during your peak earning years, so on paper it all looks manageable because the salary's the highest it's ever been. The money comes in, and it goes straight back out, upwards to your parents, downwards to your kids. What gets squeezed is the bit in the middle. You.

The decade where the sandwich is tightest is the exact same decade when your own retirement saving should be doing its heaviest lifting. Every franc going to support the other two generations is a franc, and fifteen years of growth, not going toward your own future. It rarely feels like a choice...it just feels like what you do for the people you love.

And it's genuinely hard to talk about, because putting yourself first here feels selfish.

But it's the same logic as the oxygen mask on a plane. If you deplete your own security to prop up everyone around you, you risk becoming the thing you were trying to spare your children from, a parent who needs supporting later, at exactly the point they're deep in the squeeze themselves.

Supporting your parents, helping your kids, and funding your own future aren't three competing claims to feel guilty about. They're three parts of one plan, and the plan works far better when someone's actually looking at all three together.

23/09/2026

Most retirement plans assume you'll die roughly on time.

Around average life expectancy, give or take, is the number that gets used because it sounds reasonable.

The trouble is what 'average' actually means.

In Switzerland, a 65-year-old has a life expectancy of about 87. But that's an average, and an average has half the people above it. The single most common age of death is 90. More than a third of people live past 90 entirely.

So a plan built to last until 85 isn't a careful plan. For a very large share of people, it's a plan that runs out while they're still here, still well, still spending. Running low on money at 89 isn't the freak event nobody could have predicted.

This is the risk that hides right up until the end...you most likely can't go back to work at 89 and you can't rebuild a portfolio at 91. By the time the shortfall shows up, every lever for fixing it has already been pulled.

Planning to the average means, almost by definition, that around half of people outlive their plan. Averages are useful for populations, but they're a poor thing to bet your own retirement on, because you aren't a population. You're one person, who may well turn out to be one of the many who live a good deal longer than the table expects.

This doesn't mean assume you'll reach 100 and hoard every franc for a day that may never come. That has its own cost, in a life lived smaller than it needed to be. It means choosing a planning horizon on purpose, with the real numbers in front of you, rather than drifting into 85 because it sounded about right.

Have you checked: what age does your plan actually run to? And how do you feel about the odds of outliving it?

21/09/2026

A high income hides a lot...

Some of the least organised finances I come across belong to people earning very good money. Not because they're careless, but because a strong salary covers cracks. When there's always more coming in next month, you never quite have to look.

Earning well and having your finances sorted feel like the same thing, but they aren't. One is about how much arrives. The other is about what actually happens to it once it does.

The pattern is familiar by your late forties. Money lands, the big bills go out, the rest sits in a current account doing nothing in particular. There's a pension from an old job somewhere, maybe two or three. Some savings that were meant to be invested and never were. A vague sense that with this income things should be further along than they are.

And the higher the salary, the easier all of this is to ignore, because nothing ever goes wrong. The cracks only show up at the transition points. A job change, a move, a divorce, or retirement itself, the moment the income stops and you finally find out whether it was ever converted into anything lasting.

The irony is that high earners often have the most to organise and the least reason, day to day, to bother. More pensions, more accounts, more currencies, more tax to plan around. More moving parts, all running unmanaged.

So, a fair question for anyone on a good income: if it all stopped tomorrow, do you actually know what you've built and how it fits together?

16/09/2026

Where Expats Retire. Next stop: Lisbon.

Portugal has topped the retirement wish-list for years, and Lisbon is the reason a lot of people fall for it. A proper city, but not a frantic one. Full of character, hills, tiles, trams, and light. We went near Christmas and spent most of it, happily, eating.

✅ Why it works:

The lifestyle is the easy sell. The food markets & restaurants alone make the case, we visited more than a few and were really impressed. One evening we walked up to the Miradouro da Senhora do Monte and looked out over the whole city, the kind of thing you get to do casually when you live somewhere like this.

It has the feel of a big city without the intensity of one. Walkable, relaxed, safe, with a mild climate and a pace that suits winding down.

Healthcare is good. Once you're a legal resident, you can register with the public system, which is free or low-cost at the point of use. You need residency first, though, it's not something you can simply turn up and use. And because specialist wait times can be long, most expats add private cover, which is inexpensive by Swiss standards, ~ EUR 60-90/month in your early sixties.

⚠️What catches people out:

The tax deal has gone, and this is the big one. For years the pitch was 'retire to Portugal and pay 10% on your pension'. That regime closed to new arrivals. Its replacement is aimed at working professionals in specific fields and excludes pensions and retirees. So anyone retiring to Lisbon today faces Portugal's standard income tax rates, which climb to 48%. Almost everyone still 'knows' the old regime, and much of the advice floating around online is now out of date.

And then, the thing nobody warns you about: the cold. Everyone pictures Portugal as warm, and outside it often is. Inside is another story. Only around 14% of Portuguese homes have central heating as their main heat source. Most rely on portable heaters or fireplaces, insulation is often poor, and winters indoors can be genuinely cold and damp, mould and washing that won't dry are common complaints. Coming from a well-heated Swiss flat, this catches people off guard, and it matters more as you get older.

📊 The financial planning angle:

The end of NHR isn't just a detail. Plenty of people ran their retire-to-Portugal numbers a few years ago assuming 10% on their pension. Those numbers may no longer hold, and over a long retirement the gap is significant. If Portugal is on your list, it's worth redoing the maths against the rules as they are now, not as they were when everyone first fell for the idea.

Lisbon is still one of the loveliest places in Europe to grow older. The lifestyle case is as strong as ever. It's the financial case that's changed, and that's the part worth getting right before you go.

Anyone made the move to Portugal, or thinking about it? I'd love to hear what you'd add.

15/09/2026

🇳🇴 Norway becomes the latest European country to reshape its retirement rules

From 1 January 2026, Norway has raised the mandatory retirement age to 72 across almost all sectors. The Norwegian Parliament adopted the change on 20 June 2025, amending the Working Environment Act to remove the previous option for employers to set a company-specific age limit of 70. The state sector also moved from 70 to 72, meaning state employees no longer need employer permission to keep working past 70. A narrow exception remains for occupations with strict health or safety requirements.

This is a different lever from the state pension age, which in Norway sits at 67 (with a right to start drawing from 62 subject to accrual). What Norway has changed is the age at which employers can end employment on the grounds of age alone.

The direction of travel is telling. Across Europe, retirement rules are being reshaped, but not always in the same way. Germany has introduced its 'active pension' allowing tax-free earnings for working retirees. Spain and the UK are raising the state pension age itself. France has just suspended its own state pension reform until 2028. Norway is extending the working age ceiling while leaving pension eligibility unchanged.

For internationally mobile professionals and anyone with a working history across multiple European countries, the takeaway is a familiar one. Retirement rules move. The framework someone plans against in their 40s often looks different by the time they reach their 60s. Reviewing plans as rules evolve, rather than after the fact, is what turns a good plan into a durable one.

Find out more: https://www.spk.no/en/news/2025/more-people-will-be-able-to-work-until-the-age-of-72/

From 1 January 2026, the mandatory retirement age in the state sector will be raised from 70 to 72 years. This means that state employees no longer need to request permission from their employer to continue working once they reach 70.

14/09/2026

Are all the big financial decisions behind you at 47?

It can feel that way. The career's established, the mortgage is running, the pattern of your finances is more or less set. It's easy to assume the important moves were the ones you made in your twenties and thirties, and now you're just riding it out.

But you're not...you're sitting on one of the most valuable things in investing, and most people at this age don't realise the clock is still running in their favour.

Money you put to work in your late forties still has fifteen to twenty years to grow. That's not the tail end of anything. It's long enough for compounding to do some serious work.

Here's what that looks like. Say you can put aside CHF 12,000 a year at a 6% return.

Start at 47 with 18 years to run, and you pay in CHF 216,000. It grows to around CHF 393,000. Roughly CHF 177,000 of that is growth you didn't earn, the market did.

Leave the same plan until you've only got 5 years left, and you pay in CHF 60,000, which grows to about CHF 72,000. Barely CHF 12,000 of growth.

Same CHF 12,000 a year. Wildly different outcome. The only variable that changed is how long it was given to work. (Illustrative figures, assumed steady return, real markets don't move in a straight line.)

Your power at 47 is time, and time is the one input you can't buy back later.

A higher savings rate, a pillar 2 buy-in, finally sorting the pensions scattered across old jobs, tidying up an allocation that's drifted. All of them can have fifteen years or more to run. The same moves at 60 have five.

The big decisions aren't behind you. Some of the most valuable ones are sitting right in front of you, and they're worth more today than they'll ever be again.

When did you last actually look at what your money's got time to become?

09/09/2026

On Saturday I ran the Jungfrau Marathon. 42 kilometres from Interlaken up to the Eiger glacier, climbing nearly 2,000 metres, finishing at 2,320 metres with the north face of the Eiger staring straight back at you. It's often called the most beautiful marathon in the world, and having now done it, I'm not going to argue.

Regular followers will know I've become a fan of the Misogi, the idea of doing one hard thing each year that reshapes how you see the other 364 days. This was mine.

And it earned the name. The first 10km along Lake Brienz lull you into thinking you've got this...then the climbing starts and doesn't stop! The training behind it was months of literal and emotional ups and downs, some great, some where it felt like my fitness was rolling back down the mountain I'd just climbed. But that's the point of a Misogi. If the outcome were certain, it wouldn't count.

The thing that amazed me about this event was the organisation. A race that finishes at the top of a mountain is a logistical monster, and it ran like clockwork. Some numbers I've since read that put it in perspective: around 1,500 volunteers for over 4,000 runners, 12 stations, 175,000 cups, and over 14,000 litres of drink, bouillon and water carried up a mountain. An army of people standing on an alpine slope for hours so that thousands of strangers could get to the top. It's easy to forget how many hands it takes to make one person's finish line possible.

The scenery did the rest. Lake Brienz, the valley, the villages, then Wengen at around 27km where the car-free streets turn the crowd noise into a wall of sound, and finally the glacier. I'm not going to lie...I spent a fair bit of it in pain and wishing the km's to be over faster...but the rest of the time I was grinning!

The best part wasn't the finish. It was doing it with two friends rather than on my own, the low points as much as the high ones.

One down. Already wondering what next year's should be...

What would yours be?

07/09/2026

The most expensive habit you don't know you have...

The pay rises came over the years, and somehow the money still disappears every month. If that sounds familiar, you're not bad with money. You've just met lifestyle creep, and it's one of the easiest ways to arrive at retirement short without ever noticing why.

Every time your income goes up, your spending drifts up to meet it. A bigger place, a nicer car, longer holidays, better restaurants, more subscriptions than you could name. Individually, each expense is reasonable. Together, over years, it reshapes what your life costs. The baseline you live on keeps rising, and it almost never comes back down.

By your late forties, on a good salary, this creates two problems at once.

The first is obvious: if the money's going out, it isn't being saved. The second is the one people miss. The higher your lifestyle, the more it costs to maintain in retirement. So creep doesn't just eat what you could have put away. It also raises the size of the pot you'll need to fund the life you've grown used to. You're moving the finish line further and further away and slowing down at the same time.

And the cruel bit is that lifestyle creep is invisible while it's happening. Nobody makes an overnight decision to spend an extra CHF 3k a month. It arrives one sensible upgrade at a time, and you only notice the gap when you finally sit down and look.

The fix isn't misery or a spreadsheet you'll abandon by February. It's just one honest question, asked now and then: as the income has grown, has the saving grown with it, or only the spending?

For most people at 47, the answer is uncomfortable but very fixable. Which is the whole point of asking it while you've still got the years to do something with the answer.

Has your lifestyle crept up over the last decade? And did your savings keep pace, or get left behind?