An 18 year old yapping about his life choices

[Raf007]

Hello guys. My name is Rafael, I am 18 years old, I live in Switzerland and will finish my 3-year banking apprenticeship at Union Bancaire Privée in July. I was supposed to go to the Military in July, but I decided to postpone my service to February 2027, so that I have time to go full time on my business.

In Switzerland we have a big problem that people can’t afford to buy a house, because you have to put down at least 20% equity and your income must be 3x that of a hypothetical Amortisation and interest payments calculation. It’s not even on the actual payments you have to make, but on a hypothetical Interest rate of 5% although the interest rate currently is arround 1.5%. Also they add another 1% for Other costs. So that is why Switzerland has one of the lowest homeownership rates in Europe and probably also arround the world. Homeownership rate is at 36% currently here.

I want to fix that by bringing Homebuyers and Investors together so that the required downpayment equity is 10%. So investors would bridge that 10% gap with second ranked loans which are secured by the house. The investors name gets put into the land registry and therefore has a real security for his loan. Sounds like 2008? Well, no. We screen every homebuyer down to their bones and only take on homebuyers who have a stable career track record or can show that they are actually going to pay back the money. If they can’t, the house will be sold and the investor gets his money back. But ofcourse it’s not risk free, the house might be sold under its actual value. That is why the investors gets an interest of 4-7% on his loan, depending on the risk profile of the homebuyer. If you want more details of the timeline and everything feel free to reach out to me and I’ll send you the pitchdeck.

So after my apprenticeship ends I will go full time on my idea here. I kinda don’t know how I will explain this to my dad and that I basically threw away the safe option of just going directly to the military. I know I have to do it anyways (because it’s required in Switzerland) but I think this was the right decision, because I don’t think I would have had any time or energy left on the weekends during military service to work on my idea. I would have been gone for 10 months and I don’t know if my idea would have survived that. I am not fully confident yet that I made the right choice. But i guess only time will tell.

I might get a job somewhere at a restaurant if i need to, which would be quite the downgrade from working at a private bank, but yeah, i think that’s that. I have about 30k saved up on my bank and 20k in stocks. So I don’t need to get a job directly. I also still live at my parents so I don’t really have any big monthly expenses. To found a company in Switzerland you need to put down either 20k (GmbH) or 100k (AG). I think I will go for the AG because it’s the more respected and trusted option. This might help to increase investor confidence. Because the GmbH is usally looked at as kind of the option for the people who can’t afford the actual one. Sounds and is quite stupid, but that’s kinda what I heard from feedback from talking to people. I have two co-founders and one board member who is an advisor to us. He built another crowdfunding Plattform in Switzerland. One guy in my team also works at a bank (Raiffeisen) and another does IT. The Raiffeisen guy has done a lot of talking, but I have not seen him execute a lot. I wrote the pitchdeck and Businessplan basically entirely by myself. I went to networking events and sent emails to people I don’t know. I have not seen him do a lot of that. But he said he was going to do networking and stuff. At what point do I cut this guy out of my company? Do I need to give him a deadline to deliver actual results? But he is older than me 26 I think and he has experience with talking to bank clients. And I think he might be good at sales. And that might be usefull as I am only 18 years old and people usally don’t like trusting 18 year olds with 100 or 200k of their money.

Then the IT guy is a very hardworking dude. I asked him to build the website, told hime what I want and he basically instantly built it. But the thing is, for our business, the tech is not really the important part. It might be later on in the scaling phase that I need him, but to get the first homebuyer projects financed, I probably don’t need a lot of IT. I told him I would give him 10% of the company, and he wanted 20%. Now I’m am actually think of giving him 5% and maybe paying home like 2k for the work he did. He set up a simple website and the email account. I could have probably made the website by myself with Claude, but i didn’t know what Claude was back then.

At the moment the thing we need is an investor who says; yeah sounds like a cool project, if you bring me xyz homebuyer I would be willing to give him a loan of 100-200k. Does anyone have some thoughts on how to do this? I think spending money on tick-tock or facebook ads is just a waste of money.

My plan would be to go to further networking events and just talk to as many people as possible.

If you live in Switzerland and this idea sounds interesting to you or you just want to have a little chat, please feel free to reach out to me.

Yeah, I just hope I made the right choice with going full time on my business here.

 

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