Hi! I'm swiss, born and raised, and as a child I always thought I was living a very rich life until I discovered my family actually classify as poor (2 adult, 4 children, single income ~90k). Switzerland is expensive if you let it be, but the trick is living frugally is not so difficult and in most places it's widely and socially accepted. No strange looks if you bike everyday or bring your lunch.
I've lived 6 years in Zurich and it was a fantastic city to live in. Rent in city itself were high, but you could easily, and I repeat easily live at 15 minutes travel time (train) and rent go down a little bit. If you don't mind living with other people, sharing a room in a flat, then the rent can be as low as 500 chf. It's a very widespread tradition and is a lot of fun! In 5 years I've lived with czech,polen, germans, mexicans, croatian, russen, italian, other swiss, ucrainian, us american...lot of different meals with different tradition at home, Zurich is truly international and I felt like traveling without ever leaving the city.
Helath insurance is tricky. Temporary foreigner can look for some sepcial helath insurance that costs way less, or so did many exchange students I know. If not, I would say it goes from 190 chf a month (minimum insured up to 600.- (including a suite in the hospital :D )
Grocery are cheap, truly. In Zurich you can find many different ethnic stores (chinese, africans, east-european) and they import directly at large quantities and are usually quite cheap. But even the largest superstore are not so expensive. Alcohol in stores is ridicously cheap, you can buy and drink wherever you want , on the street, public places, parks you don't have to hide or anything.
Going out is really expensive, bar, pub, night club, restaurant usually charges a lot. Fast food is ridicously expensive (McDonalds, Ehtinc takeaways). There are underground clubs where you pay like 15-20 chf entry and the beer is 5 chf, so still manageable. Not fancy, but funny.
That's way since we are so liberal with alcohol cosumption, we would end up buying beer from stores and hang out around a public barbecue/fireplace in a public park/near the lake. Cheap and rewardful. At night parks and street are incredibly safe. Women could walk around naked and 99% of the time nothing happens.
Public transportation is amazing, for the city of zurich the year pass costs 600 chf. With that kind of offer is stupid cheap, you can even make a bike pass and tranport the bike on train/buses and you are truly independent.
Winters are cold, but not extreme, fall and spring are frisk and rainy, summer quite nice, temperate and sunny (usually). Lot of lakes, rivers, mountains.
I would recommend doing it, because being in Zurich/Geneva means being in the heart of Europe. There are lot of cheap flights for every eruopean corner, there are dozen of nationality and different people, you constantly hear dozen of different languages every day. It's quite cool.
But dealing whit "real" swiss can be quite tricky. We seems cold, when in truth we just respect private space of other people very highly and tend not to start conversations or mingle in someone else's private stuff. For instance if you start at a new job probably nobody is going to invite you around or doing stuff. Everyone's assume the others are fully capable of finding something to do on their own. Is up to you to ask and organize something, make something happen, and then swiss people open up and can be a lot of fun.
Well those are my 2 cents, hope you manage to come here!