Hans Steiner — Pension · Tax · Cross-border
Pension · Tax · Cross-border
Financial Planner IAF with a Federal Diploma of Higher Education — the designation issued by Switzerland’s professional body for financial planners — and more than twenty years in insurance, pension and tax.
Works in German, English and French.
His signature sentence: the cap is a ceiling, not a target. He says "less than the cap" and "not this year" more often than people expect.
Free · 45 minutes
What Hans reviews
The desk, precisely.
What a move does to a pension
Accumulated rights rarely travel cleanly. What can be withdrawn, what must stay, what a treaty protects and what it quietly taxes — mapped before the move, because half of these decisions close the day you leave.
Cross-border tax patterns
Dual-jurisdiction households, one earner taxed here and one there, arrival-year transitions and exit windows. The treaties branch into a small number of patterns, and knowing which one you are in decides the order of operations.
Insurance wearing a pension costume
When life cover bundled into a savings structure fills a real gap, and when clean savings plus separate term cover is better. The honest answer depends on the household, not the brochure.
The sequencing problem
Withdrawal order, timing against residence, and how a decision made in your thirties shapes what is still available in your fifties. Architecture built during accumulation, not improvised at retirement.
How Hans works
The discipline behind the desk.
Hans is the answer to the question underneath the insurance one: what does a move do to everything you have already built? Cross-border pension work has been his desk for two decades — long enough that the reform cycles and treaty patterns of those years sit as lived context rather than briefing notes.
The IAF curriculum runs across pension architecture, tax optimisation and cross-border situations, which is exactly the terrain internationally mobile households bring: a pension accumulated in one country, a household in a second, a plan that involves a third. His work is mapping the household to that architecture — not picking products.
If your review turns up a pension problem wearing an insurance costume — and cross-border moves produce those reliably — it goes to Hans.
Away from the desk he is usually on a bike, somewhere in the Swiss mountains — which, for a man whose working vocabulary is ceilings and long climbs, is at least consistent.
Bring the pension statements, the income picture and the next five-to-ten-year plan. Hans’s reviews run architecture first: what you have, what the move does to it, and the sequence that protects it — before any product enters the conversation.
“The cap is a ceiling, not a target. I say ‘less than the cap’ or ‘not this year’ more often than people expect — and that’s where the architecture-first conversation actually saves money over a working life.”— Hans Steiner, as published on expat-savvy.ch
The Swiss desk
Where this discipline was built.
Hans also runs a desk at the Swiss practice, expat-savvy.ch — advising internationals inside one of the strictest insurance markets in the world since 2017. Languages there and here: German, English and French. On this site Hans advises internationally; where cover is placed, it is placed through SIP's licences — the arrangement set out on the about page.
The rest of the team
Robert Kolar — Health insurance · Nicole Bohne — Life · Protection · Planning · About the practice
Ready for a calm conversation about cover?
A first review is free — 45 minutes, in English, wherever in the world you happen to be. We'll listen first. Then you'll hear exactly what we would arrange if the situation were ours. What you do with that is yours to decide.
Book a reviewOr write to hello@expatsavvy.com — we reply within the working day.