Rosbotham Finance

30/10/2026

The financial regrets I hear most often: 'I wish I'd done something with this money sooner.'

It's definitely the most common one by far, and the stories are usually nearly identical.

They were waiting for the right time. The market looked high, or uncertain, or due a correction, so they held off. Then the market went up, which made getting in feel even riskier, so they waited again. And it went up again...

Now there's a pile of cash that's been sitting for years, earning next to nothing, and a feeling of having missed the moment. It's the feeling that is the real trap though, because it makes it harder to act. The longer you've waited, the more it feels like you've left it too late to bother.

But this is the part people get backwards. Nothing has been missed...there was never a perfect moment to spot in the first place. Waiting for one isn't caution, it's just a decision to stay in cash, made over and over without ever actually deciding it.

And cash doesn't sit still, inflation chips away at it the whole time, so money left 'safe' on the sidelines is losing ground every year it waits.

The cost of waiting isn't the crash you avoided. It's all the years that money could have been working and wasn't.

There's an old line that fits this almost too well. The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second best time is today. Money is no different.

12/10/2026

Good financial planning is really about keeping two things lined up that drift apart on their own: the life you actually want, and the money arranged to fund it.

Both of them move. But they get very different amounts of attention.

The money side gets watched closely. Markets, contributions, the portfolio, all monitored, reviewed, and adjusted. The life side, on the other hand, barely gets looked at, even though it drifts just as much. What you wanted at 45 isn't what you want at 55, nor at 60 or 70. Priorities shift, children need less, or more, the picture of a good retirement constantly redraws itself and yet nobody checks whether the plan still points at it.

This is where I think most ongoing advice falls short, though not through bad intent, it's a financial review first and a life review second, or often not at all.

The usual questions get asked: did you get a bonus, change jobs, is your income different. Fair questions, but every one of them is about the money. They rarely reach the deeper one: has what you want fundamentally changed, and is the plan still aimed at it?

A perfectly managed plan aimed at a life you've outgrown is still off target.

So when we review, the financial update is the easy half. The part that matters more is revisiting what the money is actually for, because that's what decides whether any of it worked.

If you started your plan from scratch today, knowing what you know now, would you build the same one?

07/10/2026

The biggest financial planning mistakes I see: Building the whole plan around working until 65.

It's an assumption sitting underneath most retirement plans I see. I'll keep earning, at this level, right up to my planned date, and everything's built on those final years of contributions landing as expected.

More often than you'd think, they don't.

Study after study finds the same thing: a large share of people stop working earlier than they planned, and usually not by choice. Depending on the survey it's somewhere between four and six in ten. The most common reasons aren't 'I'd saved enough and fancied it'. They're health problems, redundancy, a restructure, or having to step back to care for a parent or partner. People expect to retire around 65. The actual average is closer to 62, and that gap has been there for decades.

Those last few working years are usually the ones a plan leans on hardest. Peak earnings, kids often finally off the payroll, the biggest contributions of your life. Lose two or three of them unexpectedly and you don't just miss that income, you lose the saving those years were meant to do, and you add years onto the retirement that money now has to cover. It hits from both ends at once.

The damage is worse the less room the plan has, and a stretched mortgage leaves very little. If a big mortgage was signed off on the assumption of a full salary running to 65, an early, unplanned exit turns a comfortable commitment into a frightening one.

A plan shouldn't depend on everything going exactly to schedule, because for a lot of people it simply doesn't. A strong plan is one that's been stress-tested against the things that don't go to plan, which is why it's the planning step we always finish on.

Here's the test worth running on your own plan: does it still work if 65 becomes 62?

05/10/2026

Every couple's plan works great...right up until there's only one of you left.

At some point, one of you will be on your own. It's not a comfortable thought, but a plan that only works while you're both here isn't really finished.

When one partner dies, the household's income usually falls, but the cost of running the same home doesn't fall in step. The rent or mortgage is unchanged. The heating, the insurance, the standing charges are much the same for one person as for two. Less coming in, not much less going out.

How much income is actually lost depends heavily on where your pensions are, and for expats this is where it gets messy.

Switzerland is relatively kind. The surviving spouse keeps their own AHV pension plus a supplement of 20%, capped at the maximum. There's a cushion built in.

The UK is the opposite. The new State Pension is designed for individuals and is largely not inheritable, so when the first partner dies, a whole State Pension can simply fall away, with little or nothing passing to the survivor.

Private annuities depend entirely on how they were set up. A joint-life annuity keeps paying the survivor, usually at a reduced rate. A single-life one ends with the person it was bought for.

So for a couple with pensions spread across two or three countries, the picture on the first death is a patchwork of different rules all landing at once, at the worst possible moment. A plan built on two incomes arriving forever can leave a real gap that only shows up years later.

This isn't about dwelling on the worst. It's about making sure the plan still stands up when it's down to one.

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.