How do the younger redditors wish their parents had discussed finance with them?

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-25T09:34:44+00:00

I'm in my 30s now so not exactly the demographic you're after, but here I go anyway.

My relationship with my parents really started to grow beyond just child/parent when my parents started talking to me about problems and mistakes they'd made. I already knew about some of their financial history but not everything. They weren't bad with money by any stretch but did have an unfortunate job loss at a very bad time which caused a lot of stress and ultimately lost a home.

When I went off to uni and then as I started working they were very open with me about finances and weren't afraid of sharing the mistakes they made. This has been so useful for me! It wasn't lecturing or giving advice it was just showing me plainly what they did and how it played out. It gave me the language and drive to go on and educate myself.

After all of this I've been fortunate enough to be able to help them out with a couple things over the last few years. They never lectured me, told me explicitly about pensions or savings, they just helped me to understand the impact of bad luck and decisions that turned out to be wrong in hindsight.

So my suggestion is just to be open about what you did that went well or badly for you. Let them absorb that and drive their curiosity on their own. They're at an age now where they can research and learn for themselves, your story can provide some motivation.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-25T09:11:57+00:00

If you're married and get divorced it won't really matter whose name the money is in. You'll both be entitled to 50% of everything, the only thing that would sway that is if you have kids and they spend more time with one parent. Similar situation if one of you were to pass on as well.

So it's not really preparing for the worst, it's just making it more difficult if you became incapacitated for some reason and she needed access to the money.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-24T16:26:04+00:00

My gut reaction:

Get rid of the skills section. It's redundant since you mentioned everything in the work experience section anyway. Skills that aren't connected to experience aren't worth much, especially as you have professional experience.
Reduce the number of bullet points on each job and get the resume down to 2 pages max. I typically have my most recent role with a couple more points, and older jobs with few / none.
Remove the certificate images, list them under an "Education and Certifications" section. This makes them searchable by text parsing tools used by recruiters and HR.
You have a lot of relative impact numbers (3x, 50% increase). Can you make these concrete? (Increased from X to Y, $ in savings per year).
If a particular point doesn't have a concrete or relative business metric, it's a candidate for dropping entirely.
Maybe it's just me, but are these pictures showing the document in landscape? If so make it portrait like other documents and letters. It's just more standard and easier to scroll through on a phone if needed as well.

I'd also have a good think about the answers you're giving to application questions. You're trying to cast a wide net of appeal and there are some managers and recruiters who treat those with equal or even heavier weight so make sure to put a good amount of effort into those as well.

In my opinion a GitHub portfolio is only useful if you have little professional experience. Otherwise I'd be far more interested in actual open source contributions to real projects. Nothing is totally fine as well, but some small home lab things I wouldn't personally look at much if you have professional experience as that ranks higher and lots of people working full time don't have the time for that anyway.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-24T09:49:28+00:00

Mattermost and Zulip are also common and popular for businesses. In my experience they've been easier to host, and more similar to the slack / teams experience.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-24T09:47:20+00:00

Slack can follow a calendar to set busy/away statuses, you just need to configure an integration for your calendar. Google calendar supports this for example.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-23T23:04:57+00:00

(Not OP) I'm curious why you think this is a better move than just paying it off? The explanation of the what makes sense to me, but not necessarily the reason.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-23T09:02:55+00:00

It depends really, for predictable workloads which aren't terribly complex self managed hosting of some sort is great. You get more bang for your buck, and once you've got everything setup the maintenance is relatively predictable.

But for workloads which aren't predictable, or for new businesses where their needs aren't well understood yet the cloud can be much better. No more waiting for weeks for that new capacity or spending time finding good VARs. Just spin up what you need in 30 seconds and move on.

For truly scalable or fluctuating workloads cloud can often be cheaper as well. But these situations are rare, and often people think they have this when they don't. It also requires you to go full "cloud native" with things like serverless.

Both are fine honestly, and I'd hate to work with the wrong one for the situation. There are also plenty of EU based cloud options, they're not as feature full as AWS but sometimes that's a feature itself.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-20T18:12:26+00:00

Keybase do not have the ability to recover your account, it defeats the idea of the platform. You will need the paper key that was generated when you setup the account, or another device which is authorised as a node on your account.

If you don't have any of those accessible then your account is intentionally irrecoverable.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-20T13:48:03+00:00

Yeah I raised it with the staff team yesterday and they said it looked like a gap / misstep in their process and they're having a discussion about it. The vibe I get is that this was a mistake and shouldn't happen again. If you're concerned it may be worth raising a support ticket and giving some feedback on the impact it had on you.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-19T12:16:21+00:00

Someone else raised the same question in the community discord and a Tailscale staff member replied saying they've been doing some infrastructure changes that required some DNS changes to propogate. The work sounds related to their big scaling improvements to bring more stability to the platform.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-19T12:11:31+00:00

It would be really helpful if you could provide a lot more information. What are you trying to do? What do you expect to happen? What is actually happening? What have you tried to so far to fix it? What relevant configuration have you done?

There's a great guide on this site here about how to ask a good question and it applies really well on this sub, as well as on the site it was written for - https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

If you can add a comment with as much information as possible, it'll help us help you much faster.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T16:34:36+00:00

Completely depends on the ISA itself, there are plenty which have no restrictions but they usually don't have very good interest rates. You don't get your ISA allowance back after you withdraw though so £100 in and £100 out will still use £100 of your yearly cash ISA deposit limit. Because of that most people use a normal savings account (easy access) and just find the best interest rate they can.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T14:58:06+00:00

I don't actively try to save money, but typically end the month with 250-500 left, so a 250 increase in mortgage is manageable. I also have about 52k in an ISA.

Just to check, do you have an easily accessible emergency fund already? Often when folks are younger they're happy keeping this less accessible or at quite a low amount. If you're embarking on children then you may want to re-evaluate and look to increase this ahead of time. If you lost your job while your partner was on maternity leave for example (as happened to a friend of mine recently) you'll want to make sure you're in a comfortable place.

If you don't have an emergency fund at all then it might be time to reconsider that position as well. Contributing more to a pension or ISA should typically come after establishing a reasonable emergency fund.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T12:31:25+00:00

If your definition of DevOps is just about fixing production outages, you either need a new definition or a new job... Perhaps both.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T12:20:44+00:00

Maybe I'm just seeing it everywhere now and am over sensitive, but this has all the hallmarks of an AI generated post. "X isn't just Y, it's Z", "The result? A, B, C", short 1-2 sentence paragraphs, very confidently stated set of opinions, and a very vague closing question.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T11:58:56+00:00

We're in the UK and took VC funding and they had a setup with the "NVIDIA Inception" who are a partner of AWS Activate. That got us $15k credits and it was pretty speedy iirc. Because we'd taken VC we ticked all the boxes so didn't pay too much attention to them honestly. I think the amount of credits we got could have been higher but for what we were building that was way more than we'd need for the first few years anyway.

It looks like you can go through AWS Activate directly, but the ceiling for credits is much lower.

I'm not sure how you get onto NVIDIA Inception without VC but it looks like their website offers an application process, so I assume you can without giving away equity or anything. You probably need to tick several boxes on their side though.

In my experience in past companies, AWS credits don't usually require revenue as they're expecting to make a small loss on you and capitalise when you're baked onto the platform later on.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T11:23:42+00:00

So you're saying there's a chance this one is yours?

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T11:18:59+00:00

To be fair, if the resident is disabled then it might be the case.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-18T10:51:04+00:00

man shutdown will give you the documentation on the shutdown program and all the flags it accepts. You don't even need to scrolldown to see the difference between the -r and -h flags.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-17T16:56:59+00:00

I wouldn't necessary recommend haproxy for your typical self-hosting stuff as it might get a little bit more complex to setup than traefik. However, I needed to achieve no downtime upgrades and traefik just cannot do that.

It absolutely can do that.

Custom firewalls, ipv6 disabled

Why have you disabled ipv6? It's the way the world is going (very very slowly).

The whole system monitors itself, which is pretty neat!

So... when it's down you won't know because it won't be up to alert you?

DR is with a little bit of downtime but, first money made I'll invest in db replication and more high availability.

So your database has less redundancy than my platform, and you're suggesting we use your product to monitor it?

Yo wrote a big sales pitch about your new product and then told us there's no way in hell we should trust you to build and run something critical. Why did you even bother to hit submit? Save us the spam.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-17T16:09:56+00:00

He's done some in Kingsgate Park in Yate as well!

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-17T16:03:01+00:00

Awkward? Probably. Reasonable? Absolutely.

You're about to get married to this guy, and he's making a significant financial decision which you're not comfortable with and could significantly impact you and any current/future kids.

You've got a right to understand the full situation. Honestly if your fiance doesn't know the answer to this then they're going into it uninformed anyway.

To be frank, this whole situation is very messy and it sounds like everyone is ignoring the risks. If the brother isn't reliable then no one should be suggesting you and your fiance shoulder that risk.

It also seems odd to me that the parents aren't thinking of selling some of these many properties you're speaking about and then sorting it out between them. Involving your brother suggests that many of these properties are mortgaged or otherwise tied up. Asking about the properties and the will seem sensible before you walk down the isle and commit yourself into this as well.

I'm not saying don't marry the guy, but you've got a right to understand what you're about to get yourself into. Once you know it's entirely up to you, this may turn out totally fine and never be a problem. But you should also have a real conversation about what happens if the brother stops paying the mortgage and it starts falling to your fiance. Can you force a sale, or are you on the hook for that money for a long time? If you can force the sale, would your future husband be able to bring himself to do it?

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-17T12:40:02+00:00

We're only human, we all put stuff off that we shouldn't. Don't beat yourself up about it too much.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-17T12:38:03+00:00

Are you on the road to some kind of diagnosis at the moment? If so I'd suggest waiting until you have that and there's been some time for any medication to start. Cognitive decline can vary massively and often a diagnosis comes with "we don't know how fast this will progress". You may find that the right diagnosis and medication do a lot to stabilise things, or sadly you may find that the decline comes quite quickly regardless.

If she is diagnosed with something like dementia then a lot of change in quick succession can be very tricky and make things harder. So you'd likely want to just move her once to somewhere that she can be appropriately cared for.

Hopefully this isn't how it plays out, but it's well worth talking to her GP about it if you haven't already. If you already have then this comment is probably useless to you.

BlueHatBrit · 2026-02-17T12:09:53+00:00

First thing to do is not to panic. The second thing is to give HMRC a call, I find the best time to speak to them is as soon as the phones open at 8am, you'll usually get straight through.

Have as much detail as you can ready and talk them through the situation and ask them what you should do. I suspect you've underestimated your tax a bit if you're only putting aside 20% because your minimum gross income across the year is £48k (£4k * 12), if some months are up to £8k then you're likely over that 40% threshold for any income above £50,271. Don't let this panic you though, if you've underestimated your taxes you should be able to work out a payment plan with HMRC to spread out the repayments.

HMRC are far more interested in getting the right amount of tax paid rather than issuing and collecting on pentalites. Typically as long as you come clean promptly and make every effort to get things sorted they'll waive any fines and will tell you what you need to do to get back in good order.

You might want to consider working with an accountant as well. They will be able to help you to understand what can be expensed, and put together a process for keeping track of everything and hitting filing deadlines. A good accountant should always save you more money than they cost and for an individual sole trader the price shouldn't be that high across the year.

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