Converging Paths to Patchwork
Emma and Pete arrived in Ticino via very different routes. The paths of our separate international journeys converged in "Svizzera Interna" (as the Ticenese call it), first in Wädenswil, and Altendorf before we relocated to Ticino.
Emma was born in the London borough of Enfield but moved to Geneva at three months old. This was the first step in her grand tour which stretched to the UK (Staffordshire, London and Kent) with a year long soiree in Paris, then on to New York, returning to Geneva in 2015.
Pete is from Liverpool. The UK part of his tour started with a move to Devon in his late teens, followed by a stint in the West Midlands and Hampshire (from where he took a 12 month "udflugt" to North Jutland in Denmark). He returned to the Somerset in the UK on to Wiltshire. From there he lived in the provinces of Noord Holland and Utrecht in The Netherlands. In 2006 he worked for three months at a bank in Zürich and liked it so much he stayed.
We are a patchwork family; Pete's son, Luca was born in Amersfoort but has spent most of his life living in Kanton Zürich. Emma's twin girls, Lucy and Zara, followed Emma's travels from Kent to New York and back to Switzerland. Of the five of us, Pete is the only one that does not (yet) have a Swiss "red book", an issue he is very keen on fixing.
The 2020 Project(s)
Ironically, our 2020 Project started because of our far from brilliant pension situations and the desire to remain in Switzerland after retirement. We scraped together enough to buy a renovation project in the southern Swiss canton of Ticino. This became our 2020 Vision and "Our Place"!
It is a wild and crazy project and, if we are honest with ourselves we've taken on far too much, however, we are now past the point of no return. Progress on the project has been slower than we would have liked so we decided to move to Ticino to give us more opportunity to make progress.
In mid 2024 we moved to Lugano, another wild and crazy step. Emma was unemployed and Pete was expected to be in the office in Zürich three days per week.
It was at this point we adopted the slogan: "If it sounds crazy, it's not crazy enough!"
Lugano really is lovely. Every day in the city feels like a vacation. The problem is that it has also become "Our Place"! Now we have two places we want to be.
In 2025 Pete was made redundant. At 63 he is unlikely to work again. There are worse places in the world to be out of work.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, Emma inherited some money in 2025 and, with negative interest rates in Switzerland, we need to invest the money to prevent it evaporating.
Our solution was to buy an apartment in Lugano to offer as a vacation rental to generate some income and it provides us with a place in Lugano when it is not occupied. Quite an outcome for a couple who where uncertain where we would live a few years ago.
You can book the flat and follow our progress with the two properties on our 2020 Vision site below.
