We left the U.S. for Switzerland and our apartment costs $2,883/month

When Mary Braun met her husband Sébastien, they were both living in Chicago. But on their second date, Sébastien, a France native, told Braun he wasn’t planning on staying in the United States for much longer — he had been in America for 15 years and wanted to move back to Europe soon.

“He actually almost moved back but then decided to stay just a little bit longer and met me, so it was very serendipitous in that way,” Braun tells CNBC Make It.

At the end of 2020, the couple moved into a two-bedroom apartment together on the North Side of Chicago. At the time, Sébastien worked as the head of the business unit for ZF Group, a German technology manufacturing company, while Mary worked as a social media manager for a haircare company.

Both worked remotely and eventually the apartment proved too small for them, so the couple moved across the street into a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom duplex where they paid $2,585 a month in rent.

“I miss it so much. It was a really cute building that still had brick walls and Chicago character but was gutted and renovated,” Braun says.

Braun and Sébastien lived in the apartment for about a year and got through the covid-19 pandemic together there. During that time, they started seriously considering a move to Europe and which country they would soon call home. Switzerland was at the top of their list.

Sébastien was enrolled in an executive MBA program at the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland. “He chose it because he was able to do a lot of it remotely from the U.S.,” Braun says. “Since the long-term goal was moving back to Europe, it made sense for him to do a European program.”

Another mitigating factor for the couple was that Sébastien hadn’t been able to see his family in France for an entire year because of pandemic travel restrictions. He started actively working to get transferred to his company’s European offices.

The ZF Group offered Sébastien a transfer to an office in Germany, but Braun balked at the idea. She didn’t speak the language and there were no direct flights to and from Chicago. Sébastien was then offered a transfer to Belgium, but that fell through. He was given one more opportunity to work out of a brand new office in Bern, Switzerland, the country’s capital.

Though a move to Bern still didn’t appeal to Braun — it also has no direct flights in and out of Chicago — she realized Zurich was close enough that Sébastien could commute into the office every day.

“He really thought it was the best career opportunity for him, and at the time, the company that I worked for was willing to let me go and work remotely for them from Switzerland,” Braun says. “The stars aligned.”

By December 2021, the couple had started the process of moving to Switzerland — which included attaining Swiss visas — so, they didn’t end up actually moving until September 2022. Braun and Sébastien married in March of that year, shipped most of their belongings to Switzerland, and moved in with Braun’s parents while they waited for the paperwork to clear.

“We still had a long time to adjust to it and be with my family,” Braun says. “Which I think helped make the transition easier.”

When Braun and Sébastien finally made their move to Zurich, they lived in temporary housing — first in a furnished 1-bedroom, 1-bathroom that they paid 3,880 francs or $4,253 USD and then a 2-bedroom, 1.5 bathrooms that rented for 5,090 francs or $5,580, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.

“I remember sitting on the bed in the temporary housing with our dog and thinking how is this real? How are we in Switzerland? How did our dog make it here? How did everything fall into place?,” Braun says.

“This was our real life now and we had to deal with it. It was just surreal.”

That December, the couple found a more permanent living arrangement. It was a 2-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom apartment in the Enge neighborhood of Zurich where rent was 4,120 francs or $4,516.

The couple loved that apartment, but in January 2023, Braun learned she was pregnant. Living on the fourth floor of a building with no elevator became a major concern. The couple were also notified that their rent would be raised. They figured it was the right time to find a place with more space.

Five months later, Braun and Sébastien left the old apartment behind and moved to a 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom apartment in Uitikon, a town just outside of Zurich, for 3,950 francs or $4,330 a month. Braun says one of the upsides for them was that their taxes went down because they weren’t living in the city anymore.

In Switzerland, people pay federal income tax rates ranging from 0 to 11.5%, but that doesn’t include local taxes, according to H&R Block. The cantons, which are similar to states in the U.S., and municipalities also charge taxes.

A downside? It wasn’t all that easy to get around their new town without a car. When Braun gave birth to the couple’s daughter and went on maternity leave, she was employed as a social media manager for a Swiss company that wasn’t friendly towards remote work. “I was starting to get concerned about just balancing life,” she says.

There was a possibility that Braun would lose her job if she didn’t return to her office full-time when her leave was up.

“If I were in the U.S., I would have my mom or someone I knew well to watch our daughter. We started thinking that we needed to have a plan for the worst-case scenario financially.”

When Braun’s boss confirmed the worst, Sébastien set out to find a higher-paying job while she considered her options. “I appreciated that [my boss] was very honest with me, but it was a bummer because I kind of had to choose between my career or my family,” she says.

“I took the loss, but there are other bonuses to being at home with our daughter. Being a stay-at-home mom is just a different job.”

Last year, the couple and their daughter moved to a town outside of Fribourg, just under two hours from Zurich’s city center, where the family still resides. They pay 2,630 francs, or $2,883, a month for their 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom apartment.

“We were able to save a huge chunk of change and Sébastien was making more money. It didn’t really close the gap between me losing my income but it definitely helped from a financial standpoint,” Braun says.

Plus, as French is a primary language in that area, Braun was excited to raise her daughter there, knowing she would learn the language and she could improve her own.

Since becoming a stay-at-home mom, Braun says she really appreciates the sense of safety that comes with living in Switzerland. She takes a lot of nature walks alone with her daughter and the family dog.

“The safety level is so different here that honestly, as a woman, I just feel safer doing things that I would probably think twice about doing in the U.S.,” Mary says. “It feels very secure and safe while still being beautiful at the same time.”

Braun and Sébastien have lived in Switzerland for over two years now, and though they miss America’s sense of celebration and having so much readily available to them like Amazon delivery and stores that stay open later than 6 p.m., the results of the 2024 presidential election means that, for them, moving back is off the table: “There’s too much uncertainty in the U.S.”

“I never want our daughter to feel like she’s not American and I want her to culturally identify with the U.S., at least the good parts of it,” Braun says. “It’s also tempting because for me, it would be easy to get back into the job market with my journalism background, especially as a freelancer, which isn’t really a thing in Switzerland.

But, “I think socially it doesn’t really make sense for us at the moment,” she adds.

The couple thinks they will eventually move again to be closer to Sébastien’s family, but that won’t happen any time soon. “To have the ability to have help and have someone to rely on and watch our daughter is amazing,” Braun says. “To have her grow up in one of her cultures, I think, would be really cool for us.”

Until then, Braun is focused on learning French to expand her career opportunities if and when they move to Sébastien’s home country and she’s ready to return to work.

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