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Written in an agreeably diverting style with a touch of humor, Living and Working in Switzerland is designed to provide newcomers with the practical data necessary for a comparatively trouble-free life. It contents include finding a job, permits & visas, health, accommodation, finance, insurance, education, shopping, post office and telephone services, public transport, motoring, TV and radio, leisure, sports and much, much more. It is packed with critical info and insider tips to support minimize culture shock and reduce the newcomers rookie amount of time to a minimum. Living and Working in Switzerland is necessary reading for anybody planning to spend an extended amount of time in Switzerland.

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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Essential.
By Matthew Tomich
The latest version of this book is mandatory for all who are looking to move to Switzerland as an expatriate. While your newfound Swiss friends may be full of necessary counsel in regards to how things work in your new country, they are normally unfamiliar with issues affiliated to foreigners, such as residence permits (as you would suppose - how a great deal of Americans are intimate with the bureaucracy surrounding a green card?) Regulations modify quickly, particularly as Switzerland is in the midst of adjusting to a great deal of new immigrants after opening up their borders in a throughout history unexampled way to the Schengen Area, so up to date versions of this book are legitimately required.

After living in Switzerland myself for 5 fantasti years, here is a lot of further and added counsel that I wish I had before:

1. If you need a credit card, look at the Migros' M-CARD. It is free, different from the 100-250 CHF annual fee (!) for a simple credit card from most banks.

2. There are entire industries in Switzerland committed to living off expats and corporate relocations. Some of these are remarkable services, but numerous of their exercises are less than transparent.

2a. Language schools vary widely in what they charge, but in the end, the quality comes down to the teacher. Almost all of the schools have both great and mediocre teachers. I never found any correlation amid what the class cost and the quality of the teacher. I strongly commend picking up an old edition of a university French or German textbook from half.com for $1-2 before coming to Switzerland - it will always present the selective information in a dissimilar way and will help reinforce what you learned in class.

2b. Realize when a relocation agency helps you find an apartment, they receive a commission - not just for finding the apartment for you (which is reasonable), but often times >>for each month's rent as long as you stay in the apartment<<. This is not explictly stated in the rental contract or in the breakdown of your month's rent.

Be peculiarly conscious of this when you have set your heart on a place and the agency says they will arrange it for you, and then come back with a minutely inflated on a monthly basis rent apologizing for their fault of misquoting the firstborn time. (I can't tell you how galore times I have seen this.)

I commend if you use a relocation agency plan on staying in your new place only temporarily until you find another for the longer-term.

3. When renting, >>join the renter's union<<. There are distinct features of the rental market in Switzerland that are highly predatory, specially towards expatriates. You may find all the info from the government on the 'www.ch.ch' website if you search for "Tenancy law / Tenancy agreement".

Make sure a representative is with you when you check into the apartment. Take pictures of everything. When you check out, prepare for the grilling of your life, particularly as an expat. During the final inspection all the years built up of friendly service will decrease rapidly and you are faced with their attempts at getting whatsoever they may from you, even for things which were not explicitly brought up in their move out instructions. When you are in the midst of moving or on your way out of the country, this is the last thing you want to deal with. This is why it is specially indispensable to show you have representation when they realize you are with regards to to leave the country that day, do not have time to negotiate, and would have a hard time legally challenging the charges when outside the country. This is one of the most mutual complaints of expatriates in Switzerland.

I was commended that if you have a larger place and consequently more at stake, it is even suitable to fetch a local lawyer in so the rental agency knows that you can not be browbeaten or taken vantage of just because you are not from/leaving Switzerland.

4. Swiss accountants are not cheap (500-600 CHF/year) but I saved at least that amount with their friendly calls to the tax authorities, as each year the local tax office miscalculated my taxes. (Especially if you live in the comparatively higher taxed areas of Geneva or Basel-Stadt, make sure to look into maximizing your third pillar investments for the tax break.)

Also make sure you also have an American accountant who is intimate with the tax exercises for all expatriates residing in any country, such as state emphatically and authoritatively the presence of all your overseas accounts each year (FBAR), a direct result of the UBS bank scandal.

Switzerland is a extraordinary country and full of beauty and surprises. Just be conscious in advance of the predatory exercises towards foreigners, as they are less apparent than in other countries because they are many times concealed within rightful charges.

0 of 0 persons found the following review helpful.
Good Nuts and Bolts For Those Already There
By CrankyInGeneral
If you are already living in Switzerland, this book makes good sense. If you're not, this book is missing out on why you might or might not want to move there -- because, yes, a wealth of data is contained, but you'll have to dig it out and connect your own dots.

Should this book intent to connect those dots -- help in a decision-making routine -- it would need to be expanded to explicitly list the DIFFERENCES amidst life in the US vs. life in Switzerland vs. life in, say, France or Britain, even in tabular form. This would aid a person like me who is taking into account where to angle to live in the future.

For example, Switzerland seems to have a health care system like that of the US state of Massachusetts, in which it's required that you buy health care insurance, or have your employer buy it for you. This is dissimilar than in other EU or commonwealth countries; you might like this or hate it. More examples: your yearly Swiss income tax includes a wealth (net worth, even non-income constructing stuff) tax; speeding tickets are proportional to your salary. (This means that the authorities, with whom you registered as soon as you moved into a town and explained your intentions, know your salary.) All of this you might like, or not.

In summary, the book says in it is title precisely what it is, and does a good occupation of that! However, my whiny wish is that the book would take me conceptually from where I am right now to why I would want, or not want, to live in Switzerland.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Very poor index
By Sylvia Moestl Vasilik
I was looking for info on childcare, and it was inconceivable to find. If you look in the index, there's a listing for "children", underneath the Odds and Ends chapter, one paragraph with regards to laws governing the conduct of children in public places. That's it, not one thing with regards to childcare.

As I was looking for data in regards to something else, I found a lot of applicable data in regards to childcare. But it was in the Accomodation chapter, with all the housing information!

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