Wow I had thought the cost of living was high in Switzerland but I guess when you’re used to the Bay Area everything else seems cheap. In SF you’d pay like $5000 for that 2bd unless you go out pretty to the more remote, harder to commute from neighborhoods.
In any case, $154 is still not that significant, definitely not enough on its own to let you afford an extra bedroom to turn into an office, for instance.
I moved from SF to Zurich, so just to add another data point to corroborate this, you can live relatively cheaply here while I really couldn't in SF because housing doesn't really have a cheap (and adequately safe) alternative. Meanwhile, here the "everything else" is actually not very high if you limit or more carefully plan eating out, buy groceries with some consideration of cost (budget variants are often less than half the price of "standard" ones), etc.
Health insurance can be expensive while for many of the people on HN it would be included in employer benefits in SF, but it's still not that bad. Last time I checked, the average payment in Switzerland for adults was $250 USD or so.
Eating out is super expensive, even McDs is what...15 CHF for a meal these days? I actually managed to save a lot of my salary while living in Lausanne because everything was so expensive to buy.
A two bedroom 80 m^2 is Also equivalent to a 861 sqf apartment, which is kind of small by American standards.
For $5k in the city, I would think you could at least get 1200 sqf or better. Also, it is hard to rent in Switzerland...like...the prices aren’t your biggest problem in renting a place, finding a place to rent at all and getting accepted by the real estate company is a PITA and you’ll often wish you could just pay more money to skip all of it.
In Zurich 1500 would be a low rent, and 3000 would get you a 2 bedroom with view and quite spacious +80m^2