Just to confirm the blog isn’t dead, we are just coming from a relatively quiet period.
The 2020 Tax Odissey is indeed over, they refunded me with the 2024 tax declaration. Yay!
Regarding the 2024 tax declaration, I learned three things:
- I was surprisingly accurate in assessing the amount I had to pay for the house in Italy (Eigenmietwert).
- Expenses for the daycare for children can only be deducted if both parents are employed. That was a hard lesson learnt, luckily they didn’t fine me, just correct me and then I had to pay the missing amount. But the interesting bit is that, apparently, parents do not need to be both 100% employed. I wonder what happens if, e.g., both Mei-Lin and I work 50% and then we try to deduct these expenses.
- People at the Tax Office of Zerneve take their job… seriously. Scaringly so. I had the option of deducting only one of these two expenses: either a fixed amount (Pauschale) for public transportation for work, or an amount for car commute costs to the office by the km. It turned out that the latter option was slightly more convenient for me, so I deducted that. But nope: you can only deduct the car allowance if the trip by car saves you at least 60 minutes of commute time over public transportation. The Tax Office checked on Google Maps that this was not the case, so they reverted my choice to the Pauschale.
Well, well, that’s the Swiss precision.
The other funny thing is that, since Penelope is now 4 years old, she has entered her first year of Kindergarten, which is mandatory school here in Switzerland. Coming from Italy, I found so many quirks in the Swiss Kindergarten system that I was not used to, but so far so good. The only issue is that from now on we won’t have all the freedom we had before to travel, since we’ll be bound by the school holidays. I remember watching the news on the many kilometers of traffic jam at the Gotthard Tunnel on summer weekends and I thought, “HAH! SUCKERS!”.
Well, those suckers is going to be us from now on.
Are You Fucking Kidding Me 