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Neubau Progress: I

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I should have shared all these pictures a while ago, but I’ve taken my sweet time doing it. I mean, I was busy writing weddingbee recaps when I took these last March!

We cheated a little during our first inspection and just went to some other flats in the same row that already had the wooden beams taken down so that we could get an idea of the true height of the ceiling.

I was standing next to the kitchen entrance on the left, the hallway to the door was to the right and closer in the foreground to the right is the hallway to the bathroom/bedroom. If you notice, this particular flat doesn’t have the built in wardrobes behind that big concrete pillar on the right. The plan would look like this without the built in wardrobe:

Was that big block with all the wiring really necessary to put there in the middle instead of by one of the side walls or up inside the réduit? If that could be somewhere else, there would have been a lot more layout possibilities with the flat. I mean, yeah it’s sort of a handy donut hole for wiring (there are other holes in the kitchen and the bathrooms) but I feel like they could have planned it a little better. The thing about hallways here is that you really pay a premium for that extra floorspace, but you can’t utilize the space for tables or sofas. It’s more “walking area” than “living area”.

Taking away the built in wardrobes does open up the space a lot, but to store coats, shoes and other things you would have to buy or build some storage next to the door. We never had a coat closet in either of the flats we’ve lived in together and I’ve never had one in the flat I lived in alone, so we are both looking forward to having a place to store all our winter and summer coats. Between the two of us we really have a lot of ski jackets, trekking jackets, etc, and now they are all piled up on a poor coat stand by the door and half are shoved under the attic roof in the laundry area.

Second bedroom. Those floor to ceiling windows will be nice!

Looking out our bedroom windows.

Standing in the master bath where the tub will eventually be. I’m obviously really excited about showering here someday. Kay thought the master bath is small, but I think it looks huge, don’t you?

Another view from the living room into the kitchen.

When we viewed the flat without the wooden beams up, Kay still thought it looked overall small, but I was happy with the size. I seem to have better spacial skills (whereas he wins with directional skills) and I was happy with how large it is. The bedrooms are not enormous, but the living room is huge for us and the kitchen will be a big upgrade.

Theoretically we could  have a baby here if forced to and it should be large enough that we can set up some kind of guest room. This makes it OK in my book!

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No Mortgages for Americans? Signing the Contract

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While many neubau owners have to make large payments throughout the building process that require them to take early mortgages, our company offered us a simple and attractive purchasing plan in three steps:

  1. 30k Reservation fee
  2. 15% Sale price due when the contract is signed (minus reservation fee)
  3. 85% Sale price due when keys are handed over

After we visited the flat and decided we really wanted it, we paid the reservation fee and in theory, we were given a week to sign the contract.

The contract took forever to arrive though, and when it did we took it to VermögensZentrum in Zürich to have it reviewed by professionals. VZ gave us some helpful tips of things we should have changed or clarified and we had the contractor make the changes for us to sign.

There were some scary tidbits in the contract that we couldn’t change due to the fact that I am not Swiss (which I’ll mention later), but overall everything looked good. However it took ages for the contractor to remember to include the motorcycle parking space that Kay wanted for his bike so we kept waiting.

Kay was also in Cambodia for a month traveling, so much of the back and forth about the contract was done by email in German. It was pretty frustrating at times if I didn’t understand something and Kay was hard to contact. I met him in Singapore for holiday and it was there that we had our first big scare about buying because I am American.

While VZ ist not a bank, they also offer mortgages and they notified us that while we were qualified to buy the flat, they no longer offer mortgages to Americans due to the new implications FATCA brings to financial institutions outside the US. They were warning us that it might not be possible to buy unless we came up with an additional 160,000CHF so Kay could buy the flat by himself. Riiight. Like we have that kind of money laying around…

“Whatever!”, I thought. We were already pre-approved for a mortgage with Axa-Winterthur, so we are fine.

Kay was nervous though. So when I got back from Singapore, he had me contact Axa to see if they would still accept us even though it had only been a month since I’d met with them. But sure enough, when I contacted our insurance representative again, he told me,

“I’m sorry, but three weeks ago we changed our policy. Axa-Winterthur is no longer accepting Americans for mortgages.”

SHIT.

I started contacting other banks and insurance companies about their mortgage offers. No, no, no.

When Raiffeisen told me over the phone that they aren’t accepting American customers, I felt my stomach sink further than it has in years. This is not something about myself I can “fix”. I am American and I am only American. I do not have another citizenship, nor can I toss aside my only citizenship to free myself from these prejudices.

It was a sobering experience. Ten of the fifteen banks I contacted told me they flat out do not accept Americans anymore. I’ll write you all the reasons why I loathe FATCA later, but I understand the viewpoint of the Swiss institutions. It is a PIA for them to fill out paperwork for the IRS just because their customer is American. The IRS’s filing requirements for Americans living and working abroad are unfair for everyone involved, so many places here are taking the decision to simply avoid working with Americans.

It left a hard decision for us though. Kay had come home from traveling in April. The flat we reserved would not be ready for over a year and we had no idea which banks would say “yes” or “no” to Americans by the time we need to pay step #3.

Would we risk committing to buy a flat and not being able to finance it later because we are rejected for mortgages based on my citizenship?

Hell yes, we did!

We had around 5 banks that said they still accepted Americans, so it’s not like we couldn’t get a mortgage. We even had another big bank pre-approve us again before we bought and we were moderately happy with the terms. The risk is that we might not have the best mortgage offers available to Swiss and non-Americans, but that’s a risk we were willing to take in order to buy.

Have you read up about FATCA yet? It’s really not well thought out. But more on that later.

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How we found our giant terrace

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When I was looking through flats in Building A, I was scanning over all the floor plans together and several flats with unusually large balconies caught my eye.

It seemed that on just one side of the building complex, the ground floor was wider and huge terrace balconies were built on top of the extended ground floor.

The second floor flats on this side of the building have huge 92sq m (990sq ft) terraces, but if you went one floor higher to the 3rd through fifth floors, you would lose the large balcony and pay 20,000CHF more per level rise.

The flats on that side of the building still had pretty big 29sq m (315sq ft). But who in their right mind would pay thousands more to have so much less space?

Continue reading How we found our giant terrace →

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Our future home: Part I

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Before we decided to put down a reservation on our flat, we visited it to see the floor plan in person and check out the surroundings.

All four sides of the complex were built and all the floors were finished on the other sides. They had just started building up our side of the complex, but luckily for us, our flat is at the lower part of the building so we could walk through it already.

At 39sq m (420sq ft), the living room is huuuge.

Continue reading Our future home: Part I →

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We (I) make a decision

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With the sunshine factor in mind, I realized that I did not necessarily want to live on the dark, busy street sides of Building A, but I was still interested in saving money, so I went to visit the site where Flat B would be built.

Do you see a building in progress? I sure as heck don’t!

It took me awhile to find the site because the Flat B project had not even broken ground. This was kind of surprising and disappointing because we had already visited Flat A and the whole complex was practically raised. Flat B was supposed to be finished by autumn, but it was so far behind that I wondered if it would even get done before 2014 and we wanted to move sooner to start saving money earlier.

While I was searching for the flat I also noticed there was not much in terms of shopping or entertainment nearby. The building site was also next to that big, ugly toll road. The whole place just looked unappealing and as I walked back to the train station, I thought about how long it would take to haul luggage to the train in the rain if we lived here.

Kay was out of the country and said he would leave the decision up to me, but after visiting both sites, my mind was made up. The extra space of a 5.5 room flat was verrry tempting, but we decided to go ahead and buy Flat A! We aren’t planning a family any time soon, so it didn’t make sense to sacrifice on location for space.

Money is important, but it if you have a choice, leave the decision up to location! I was much more excited about all the trains, trams and buses that will take us to our new flat! And location is always that one thing you can’t change later.

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