A childhood on the border
I was born in 1977 in Freiburg im Breisgau, close to the Swiss border, and Switzerland was a backdrop to my childhood. We went to the Basel Zoo, marvelled at the Swiss Museum of Transport in Lucerne and walked through the Roman ruins of Augusta Raurica. Every family holiday to Italy meant crossing the Alps. My father's company was based near Frick in Aargau, so that canton became familiar ground too.
Zurich itself stayed a blank. I first got to know it as an airport: during a brief spell living in Berlin, I flew out of Zurich a few times on a Crossair turboprop to Tempelhof. Back then, flying still felt like an event.
May 1999: Konradstrasse
On a Tuesday in May 1999 I started my first proper job, at PwC in Zurich, in an office on Konradstrasse, a few steps from the main station. It was the day I began speaking English at work. And it was the day Mike C walked in.
Mike was British, about twenty years older than me, in English suits and Grenson shoes. We were given a two-desk office where you could still smoke indoors. I lit a Benson & Hedges. He nodded and said: "Good man." That was the beginning of everything.
Over long lunches he told stories of London, France and New York. One day I confided my secret ambition: I wanted to live in London. I had no idea how I would find work or where I would live. Mike just smiled and made it sound simple: how to work in London as a freelancer, where to live ("West is best") and which paper to read, the Telegraph, never the Guardian. It was not encouragement. It was a map.
2000: Freienbach on Lake Zurich
For the first months we still lived on the German side, in Waldshut-Tiengen, about 45 minutes from Zurich. In 2000 I moved to Switzerland with my young family, not to Zurich itself but to Freienbach in the canton of Schwyz: one of the lowest-tax municipalities in the country and half an hour from the main station by S-Bahn. How one meeting with my German tax adviser tipped the balance is in Sebastian's move to Switzerland.
We rented a house in Freienbach for three years. What stays with me is not the tax rate but the view: every morning, the first thing I saw when I got out of bed was Lake Zurich. At dawn it lay there like polished steel, at midday it glittered in the sun, on grey afternoons it turned a deep turquoise, and in the evening it caught the sunset. I still miss that view.
The house came with a secret. When we first viewed it, the previous tenants were hastily taking apart a large installation in the basement: high-intensity lamps, ventilation, a tangle of wiring. The whole house reeked of cannabis. We were taking over from a crew of illegal growers, and the house had to be professionally cleaned and redecorated before we could move in. Even orderly Switzerland has its hidden currents.
October 2001: Swissair grounded
A few years after those Crossair flights, its parent company went under. In early October 2001 Swissair collapsed, one of the most spectacular corporate failures in modern history. We had booked and paid for a family trip to Fátima in Portugal, and overnight the airline ceased to exist. The pilgrimage became a road trip to Salzburg. An early lesson in how fragile even the most solid-looking institutions can be.
2003: On to London
Four years after my first day on Konradstrasse, the dream was no longer a dream. In May 2003 I moved to London to join Allianz, at a new marine and aviation insurance firm in the City, with Mike's map in my head. Switzerland was the first country I lived in, and it taught me something I still tell every client: a move only becomes real when the tax plan turns into flat hunting, paperwork and everyday life.
Back in Zurich, this time at the microphone
Today I come back as a speaker. At the Switzerland seminar in Zurich, the room is full of entrepreneurs planning exactly the step I took in 2000. In the summer of 2025 I brought two of my children along. They helped at registration and passed the microphone around during the Q&A. I wanted them to see what their father does for a living, and where he started.
So we walked to Konradstrasse together. To a passer-by it is just a street with small restaurants; to me it is a time capsule. It is remarkable how little Zurich has changed: the same shops, the same facades. The one difference is that in hotels and smart shops you now often need English. Before we left, they both bought a Swatch, the affordable Swiss icon of my own youth. A circle closed.
The whole story
Switzerland was the first of six countries I have lived in. England, the USA, Malta, Ireland and Scotland came after. How the road ran from Zurich via London and Miami to Texas, and how I now divide my time between Austin and London, I tell on sebsauerborn.com.
Why entrepreneurs book him
Sebastian has made the move to Switzerland himself, with a family, a lease and a B permit. Since 2006 he has advised entrepreneurs, freelancers and families on moving their residence and structuring across borders. For a Swiss move he concentrates on what happens before you go: exit taxation, tax residence, the choice of canton and municipality, and the order in which permit, lease and first tax year have to fit together.
He is the founder and voice of Perspektive Ausland and speaks regularly at the Switzerland seminar in Zurich. He runs the consultation himself.
Header photo: Freienbach on Lake Zurich, seen from Ufenau island. Photo: Roland zh, Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 3.0.