Handling the EUR bond sleeve once you've FIRE'd somewhere that isn't home?
Brit, 54, packed it in last year after 22 years on the continent. Started in NL, been in Switzerland the last 9 and that's where I'm staying. Pension is two frozen workplace schemes ticking over on their own, one UK one Swiss, I don't touch either. The Dutch pot from the NL years I moved out a while back, wasn't doing much sat where it was. The pile I have to babysit myself is around €1.2M equivalent.
Thing I keep circling back to and the usual FIRE content is no help because it's all written for Americans: how are other long term EU expats dealing with the boring "safe" chunk once the paychecks stop?
Quick background so it's not totally abstract. Ran 100% equity till about 2021. Started tilting toward roughly 70/30 through 2022 as the actual date got real. That 30% is what I've been poking at all year.
What the conservative side looks like right now:
- AGGH (iShares Core EUR aggregate) as the big holding
- a bit of short duration EUR treasury ETF for the front end
- XEON for the genuinely liquid money market bit
- maybe 4% of the sleeve in EUR Maclear lending
- and a handful of direct EUR investment grade corporates, picked one at a time, held to maturity
The ETF side does its job but god it's dull. Yields are sat at a level where the duration risk feels lopsided to me. And here's the part that shifted at 45 I wouldn't have blinked at that duration. At 54 with no route back to a salary, I feel every bit of the sensitivity.
Anyway. What I'm actually after from this sub.
If you FIRE'd somewhere that isn't home, how do you actually think about currency on the safe sleeve? Pensions pay in GBP and CHF. Spending is mostly CHF and EUR, we still travel a fair bit and half the family's still in NL. And the safe sleeve is nearly all EUR, purely because that's where the non pension money happened to end up. Is anyone deliberately splitting bonds and cash across all three, or am I just inventing a problem for myself?
For the wider 50+ lot who've already pulled the trigger is the bond ETF approach still earning its keep in 2026, or have you drifted into other things? Ladders of direct bonds? Pure money market and leave it? Some mix?
I'm not after a pat on the head for the allocation. I want to know what's held together in real life for people who can't just work off a bad call anymore.