All-in-one comparator

[Michael]

@Baptiste Wicht , I love your broker and robo-advisor comparators.
This brought me to another idea. I have some friends which simply do not care much about what they could save when adjusting some of their current setup (bank, investing, credit card,...). Basically they stick with UBS, Valiant or whoever out of habit, or what I often also see, lack of insight in *how much* could actually be saved every year.

Sometimes there are these 'aha' moments where they realize that 1.5% fund every year is not 'cheap'. But if there would be a tool where users could plug in some numbers (e.g. cash interest at bank account, cash amount, yearly fee bank, etc etc) and it would give you as output a number how much money could be saved, that would be incredibly valuable.

I feel like many don't start because they always look at one 'construction site' after the other and individually it is not that significant. We don't want to force anyone to take care of their finances, so showing them a number where they can decide on whether to act or not could be a good option.

It would probably take quite some effort/thought into building something like this and also having the suggestions up to date (change in fees, change in interest etc).

But if you ever would want to level up your comparator game, such a 'all-in-one' comparator could be the final straw that sends people down the rabbit hole of your awesome blog content.

Open to discuss more of course if this would be something in the future.

 

[Baptiste Wicht]

Hi @Michael

This is a good idea. I am definitely not going to include all banks and solutions in the tools, but I can consider doing a few banks.
And one simple way to achieve that would be to provide the user some inputs:
* flat fee
* percentage custody fee
* percentage TER
* portfolio size

And optionally, if we want to take investing into account
* Currency conversion fee
* Fee to buy Swiss ETF
* Fee to buy World ETF

Based on this, I can easily compute a fee comparable to brokers and Robo-advisors.

I will try to keep this in mind on my next update of my comparators. I was already thinking of merging (how?) the two brokers and robo-advisors comparators to make it easy to compare both.

 

[Michael]

I also envisioned including even "simpler" things like cash position and interest on that. The investing costs will likely make up a big portion of the cake when portfolio grows bigger; but for people not wanting to invest currently the other things will be still useful. And while I don't want to force (or even overly encourage) friends or relatives to take on risk with investing, it is a different thing to urge them to reevaluating their credit card strategy, where they pay fees every month for no reason.


It becomes complicated though, that just a plain form as input might not be user friendly anymore. I could imagine something like a 10 question survey, where you get asked:
-Current allocation in cash & equity (including amount)
-Current bank account of cash (account with highest cash amount): Cost per year and interest --> provide like 4 banking packages as options/templates (e.g. UBS, Neon, Yuh, Raiffeisen)
-Current broker --> what you suggested; probably including investing amount/month etc.
-Current credit card (or debit card) --> cost per year, cashback in %, spending per year
-Current 3a account --> cost per year or TER, cash or equity --> few example offers with mixed attractivity again (finpension, viac, ubs, etc.)

And then it gives as output a summary of the entered values and (1) calculated cost and potentially, but more vague, (2) calculated return (interest, stock increase (average/projection),...).
This summary value can then be compared with the "cheapest" combination of all these things which shows how much money could be saved yearly. Also there could be a ranking of the "most critical" part to solve first to have the most impact (often that will be the broker I assume).

I know my description sounds more like a robo-financial advisor than a quick calculator, but wanted to include all the ideas anyway.

 

[Baptiste Wicht]

That's a great idea. The challenge will be to make it user-friendly. If there are too many questions, people will not answer them, so they should be mostly optional. I will try to think of it in the coming months, I am sure there is value in such a tool.