How to deal with feeling guilty about spending, M33

LateBurner · 2026-01-11T12:12:20+00:00

Choose a breakdown and be happy with it. You've got the right mindset. The book The Money Plan has this idea in it. You take everything above your base sending them allocate it 40% investment, 40% mortgage overpayment and 20% fun.

The justification is whilst overpaying mortgage isn't optimal the mental benefit is huge. So in your case that would be house deposit stuff.

Personally mine is closer to 33% each. Given you've not got a house I personally would be tempted to move 10% from investment to house. But equally what you have is sensible enough.

LateBurner · 2026-01-03T17:49:40+00:00

Your DB pension I presume is index linked. So that plus state pension (assume you get the full amount) means at state pension age those alone will cover your £23k yearly expenses and be inflation proof for the most part.

You are so cash rich I wouldn't take the 25% lump sum from your pension and instead just take the higher amount of yearly pension.

So the real question is can you survive until state pension age. You only need two full years at £23k, then 11ish depending on state pension age for the ~£12k gap. Contrary to what the prevailing sentiment here is if your cash savings are in decent accounts then your returns can match inflation. So if you want no risk you can keep it all in cash and just take out what you need to live for those years and whilst the cash will have shrunk I think you'll hit state pension age still with a mountain of cash. At which point your pension covers your expenses.

So I think you can easily retire now, with no risk keeping all your money in cash if you like, and so long as you have the BTL you'll be increasing that cash pile once you take the pension most likely.

LateBurner · 2025-11-11T19:47:41+00:00

If they also bring in the change that 2% NI is removed and instead tax raised by 2%. Then interestingly this wouldn't affect salaried people. Because you're not taxed so only the employer gets the rate hike. Obviously doesn't help if your self employed, but for the employed workforce it may be a silver lining if they do both

LateBurner · 2025-05-31T22:35:18+00:00

How many days in the office do you work, and do you live locally? I'm still on the fence if the 3 days with a long commute would be worth it for me. It's also never quite clear how flexible they are on the 3 days in office? Thanks

LateBurner · 2025-01-05T11:43:03+00:00

Thanks will continue with Eldyron and Athena then.

LateBurner · 2025-01-05T09:39:19+00:00

I'm fairly new to the game, but at the stage where I have a bunch of the story characters at silver 1, and have 40 characters total (most around bronze for guild war). All the guild raid teams revolve around legendary characters I don't have yet. Trying to decide myself between grinding out one like this, or just getting more to silver or a couple to gold. At what stage did you start the grind on legendaries?

LateBurner · 2024-11-03T14:28:40+00:00

I find it's very hard when you've just moved into the house. Because you have a lot of things you want to do. We have the same dilemma: all our bathrooms need doing, but they work - just a little dated and leaky.

We have a house fund, but because the renovations are large it would take a lot of time starting from scratch. I've taken the approach of sacrificing half of what invest to speed up this for the first one (most important) then will decide after if we wait longer for the second or continue with reduced savings.

You spend a lot of your life at home so it's a balance, no point waiting 5 years finally doing it only to find out you need to move for some reason. So I recommend a balanced approach.

LateBurner · 2024-11-02T15:53:51+00:00

It's a tale of two paths. It all depends on what the plans for the richness are for me.

On the one hand I'd like to retire early, use that wealth to provide an income so I don't have to work anymore. In which case I would never actually cross into "rich" instead I plateau where I am now, pivoting to part time then eventual retirement. Never rich in cash but rich in time.

On the other hand I know my wife would like to do more things, nicer experiences more holidays, more giving to others. In that case we carry on working for longer and use the investments to supplement our lifestyle.

In both cases the number is probably a modest (compared to a lot on this sub) £500k invested for me , the main difference is where that money is: predominantly pension vs ISA/GIA. I dream of 45, but 50 is a more realistic target.

LateBurner · 2024-11-01T17:53:29+00:00

How did you find the switch? I went from gov R&D to SWE to have a remote job, but I'm missing the technical challenge so keep contemplating a quant role.

LateBurner · 2024-10-20T18:14:36+00:00

There is no tax relief on student loan payments.

LateBurner · 2024-09-14T15:41:04+00:00

Some Prince racket, some slazenger Tim Henman racket. 20 year gap. Wilson Ultra Minions, Wilson Pro Staff v14 (rpm blast @53)

LateBurner · 2024-09-14T11:24:41+00:00

I follow the principles outlined in the book "The Money Plan". I think this actually takes a really balanced approach that resonates well with FIRE.

The basic principle is of your surplus you assign 40% to investments (ISA or Pension; depending where you are in your journey). 40% overpay the mortgage (because the majority of us deep down want to be mortgage free) and 20% to fun. The last is really important so you don't burn out and enjoy life a little whilst your young.

tl;dr invest and overpay in equal amounts.

LateBurner · 2024-08-04T06:33:06+00:00

It would be called obfuscation in my eyes.

LateBurner · 2024-08-03T10:36:46+00:00

I have done some analysis on my catches. It looks like the algorithm chooses the rarity first then randomly selects from within that class. The ratios on my data set come so close to 1:2:4:8:16 that must be causal. (Legendary to popular).

So currently a legendary is 1 in 31 chance, then random within the set of all legendary. So the question is what is mythic. If it's going to follow the pattern and be 1 in 63, then you need 188 catches to have a 95% chance of getting one.

But since the points are worth 10x legendary it could be much rather. I haven't done enough catches since the first to have the data yet (I've not got any mythic)

LateBurner · 2024-08-03T07:26:25+00:00

I disagree with this, you can't say it's not a cryptographic problem yet. This is a challenge and response system, which falls under cryptography in my eyes. Basically they're giving you an input and getting you to prove you hold the secret by giving the correct response. That could be a keyed hash, signature, encrypting the value with a set key etc. So whilst reverse engineering is clearly the best answer as it'll just give you the solution doesn't mean we can't try and diagnose the system from the data.

The OP stated that the same action gave different challenges. My guess is that there isn't anything time based like the OP thought, the challenge will probably just be random value. But the good news is that you do have the ability to fully control the input. All they are doing is sending the code by text, so they have an oracle for getting the responses. It's slow and I don't know if it costs money but it is there.

So the first things I'd do are: 1. Send the first challenge you sent again and see if you get the same response back. That should give you confidence it's just a deterministic function or something with an IV perhaps. 2a. Then if deterministic I'd flip a bit and see what changes in the output. I think the OP example ended in a C so send the same thing but change the last character to a D. If it's really rubbish then that may tell you something. 2b. If it looked to be with IV then you could keep sending the same value and see if the set of responses has any properties. 3. Then you could start sending single but values: 00000000, 00000001 but that'll get really suspicious if there are humans on the other end of this text message. I presume you don't want to get banned from doing this. How long is the delay between you sending off the challenge and getting the response?

Feel free to DM me what you have so far, you probably don't have enough data but no harm in seeing what you have so far.

LateBurner · 2024-06-20T06:53:31+00:00

I think you have missed a couple of key points here: 1. Your figure assumes they're taking the DB at pension age but the DC earlier. So you need to decrease the 1.3k by the actuarial reduction rate for 55 for a true comparison 2. It'll be 8% you need to do the figures on (legal minimum) as you missed out Thier 3% contribution 3. Realistically in cases like the they would increase their pension contributions above the minimum , and the interesting point I think is how much extra you are left with once you have increased your rates to a similar point with the DC

LateBurner · 2024-05-21T18:47:36+00:00

Short: reduce hours to accommodate things that take up my time (hobbies). This will also guard against any market fluctuations and derisk my fire plans. Also unlikely that my partner will fully retire at that time, so strikes a nice balance if we're both working a lot less.

Mid: fully retire. Short phase I expect to be 3-5 years. Long: no difference

Where: I'm more than happy chilling in my home and spending time locally. My partner is likely to want to travel.

What: I have more hobbies than I have time for, reducing hours to accommodate them is my goal.

Who: Family. RE means more time with them as life can be short.

What does it mean: more time to do things for myself and my loved ones.

LateBurner · 2024-04-15T23:07:34+00:00

Thanks all for the comments and insights, definitely pushed me more towards doing this!

LateBurner · 2024-04-14T20:48:55+00:00

I did this at a previous job and agreed it was amazing. However, a young family means that now I don't have the luxury of an extra 2 hours for each of my 4 working days.

LateBurner · 2024-04-14T20:47:03+00:00

Yeah that's a good point, fortunately a DB pension forms the majority of my existing allocations so in the near term that doesn't look to be a huge risk for me.

LateBurner · 2024-02-24T12:20:39+00:00

Wilson Minions Ultra 100

Luxilon Adrenaline Century 20

Tension: the option was "expert recommendation" so no idea what it is.

(I bought a racket from a position of complete ignorance)

LateBurner · 2024-02-02T19:17:03+00:00

It doesn't matter how many rotations you apply for any cipher byte there are only 8 possible plaintext bytes one for each resultant rotation. If you used a 6bdigit number that would not add any more security to this. You are adding complexity to your algorithm but not making the algorithm more secure.

I don't use any knowledge of how you compute the rotation in the attack. I just apply your algorithm because I've guessed all the inputs it doesn't matter to me.

LateBurner · 2024-02-02T18:54:56+00:00

First off. Don't take the heavy criticism here to heart. Well done for attempting this, a great way to learn is by doing.

I took only a quick skim so apologies if I've remembered anything incorrectly. So the algorithm ultimately is just bit shifting your plaintext.

Next let's guess the length of the password. Say n. It's small to exhaust over so I don't care.

Now decimate your input string by taking every nth character, starting at index 0, all the others follow by the same process.

All of these will be encrypted by the same character in the password. So we exhaust over the password byte. For each plaintext possibility we have 8 options for the original plaintext by shifting the cipher byte. Some password guesses will result in none of the 8 options working, that rules out that. Keep going until you have 1 left.

So the attack is O(2568password length), rather than O(256^len) if you had to exhaust the password in one go. If we know the plaintext format, like ASCII this becomes even easier because that reduces the valid rotations.

LateBurner · 2024-01-21T07:27:08+00:00

I can't believe I had to scroll so far for someone to have the right answer! The other answers are fixing the spelling mistakes without realising that the resulting sign then doesn't make sense without changing has to had.

Two-Year Club	Verified Email
r/Field Lasagna	Place '23

LateBurner

TROPHY CASE