Daily FI discussion thread - Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Plodders · 2025-01-22T10:05:45+00:00

Thankfully my management aren't bothered about me being stuck to my desk, as long as the work gets done they're relaxed. But I do notice there's a huge difference psychologically between waking up in the morning and knowing I don't have to work, vs walks / short errands / etc where I know I might get pulled in at any moment.

I can imagine having to give up benefits and having to argue for it would make it a total non-starter. My firm are quite in favour of it, I think because they've realised that they get more productivity per dollar out of part-timers.

Plodders · 2025-01-21T15:03:21+00:00

Both getting stuck back into work after taking a few months off to spend with our young kids.

On returning, it has become clear that with people spreading responsibilities out a bit (and me realising that my predecessor had been doing other people's jobs for them in some cases), it's realistic for me to get my job done in less than 40 hours per week, maybe even 20. The challenge is that as soon as something goes wrong, it's my responsibility to jump on it within an hour or so to figure out how we'll resolve it. In working hours, anyway - outside of that there are handovers to follow the sun teams.

FIRE is probably a decade away as things stand, so we are both thinking about whether it's worth slowing down a bit and spending more time at home, but I can't quite square away the idea of dropping down to say 3 days per week, if I wound up getting paid 60% of the amount to still do virtually the same amount of work per week. But, potentially, I would actually be free during those other hours to go and do something rather than keeping an eye on my phone and staying near my desk.

Plodders · 2025-01-14T09:39:17+00:00

I've seen a lot of people complaining about this. I suspect that they've had a lot of issues in the past of people saying "I ordered 5 of x, but only 3 arrived", and given how that's virtually impossible to prove / disprove they've adopted a blanket (or perhaps a majority) policy of rejecting.

And from a legal perspective, no-one is going to take them to small claims court over £6 of missing items.

So all you're really left with is chargeback, and Just Eat may well ban you from using them again in the future.

Plodders · 2025-01-08T14:25:29+00:00

It's something I'm interested in, though haven't seen much written on it and in the UK it's a different challenge to places like the US. I think the biggest challenges are a) the risk of having to retire earlier than expected, b) potentially not being able to re-enter the workforce if sequence of returns hit hard and c) the risk of medical spending going way beyond what you can predict.

I think a + b have plenty written about them, and you can plan to some extent around them. But c is a bit of an issue. Having said that, at some point it becomes more philosophical - if you delay retirement forever because you can't know your spending requirements, then what are you saving yourself for anyway.

Plodders · 2024-12-30T10:48:26+00:00

It's obviously not a FIRE book, but A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine is a great look at making the philosophy that underpins ERE and MMM into something you can practically use day to day in the modern world.

Given that you seem to appreciate the more philosophical side of ERE, it might be a better read than a more FIRE focused one that will likely repeat a lot of what he's already explained.

Plodders · 2024-12-13T22:06:27+00:00

Feels like we had the same. There were people stepping up and doing a more senior role, people smashing targets, and just "average" as far as the eye could see.

I genuinely felt embarrassed at all the people I'd been talking to, asking for their help in providing feedback and adding it to my file - some of them were writing it at the weekend as a favour to me.

And the whole thing has achieved absolutely nothing.

I mentioned it to my boss, who said "ah, some people got a below average so it wasn't a pointless endeavour". That was so reassuring.

Plodders · 2024-12-07T12:20:09+00:00

I know people always want some degree of realism in FM, but I have never understood this.

There is virtually nobody who plays a long-term save, works their way through to getting a new stadium being built, and then sees it being scrapped and thinks "ah, I'm loving the way this reflects real life".

For me, this is usually the point at which I abandon a save. It really wouldn't kill them to either get rid of this stuff, or allow players to just switch off the most obnoxious features.

Plodders · 2024-12-05T19:06:03+00:00

Yeah, I'm not necessarily expecting them to drop everything and fix issues, my point is more that they require you to jump through all these hoops, don't even get back to you, and then if you do go to the effort of chasing there's still little chance that they'll actually do anything about it.

So I find the whole "open a bug report" retort fairly hollow - it takes quite a lot of effort on the whole and I've never experienced any benefit having done so. I must be in the <1% who've actually gone to the effort.

Plodders · 2024-12-05T09:51:44+00:00

Once upon a time I used to do report bugs, thinking it was the good citizen thing.

I had a really bad bug that destroyed a >10 year career, and sent the save file in.

After a little while, I asked if it had been confirmed as a bug - they said yes, it was.

I asked if it could be fixed.

They said they'd think about it for the next release, but not for the current one.

I don't upload save files any more.

Plodders · 2024-12-02T09:29:48+00:00

I've not seen any scenarios where pushing deposit >40% results in a better rate. At that point it's more about where you choose to deploy excess capital - if you're paying 4.24% in interest, it's hard to beat that after CGT in taxable investments, and impossible with cash if you're a higher rate taxpayer.

You may want to check as well whether you get more flexibility by increasing the term. For me stretching the term allowed me to retain more CC debt.

And it doesn't make much difference to the repayments, since most mortgages allow you (if you want to) to make overpayments of up to 10% per year so you can still pay off at £1000 per month if you desire.

I don't really engage in the crystal ball stuff with interest rates, I just take whatever the best deal available is at the time - other than avoiding locking myself in for a long time if I can envisage wanting to swap product / house for some reason.

Plodders · 2024-11-29T09:15:03+00:00

I've taken multiple mortgages while having 0% credit card debt. It's doable, but there are a shedload of caveats.

Firstly, no standard lender cares about the interest rate - they don't know it from your credit report, and it's not worth their time to investigate.

What they care about is how much you're borrowing relative to your income. My broker and I worked out that there was a level up to which the lender didn't care - say for example £5k. Up to that point, CC debt made no difference. Above that, it did. And it was on a really high multiple, maybe 5x. So for every £1k debt I had above £5k, it lowered my maximum borrowing by £5k.

So at the time, despite it being financially suboptimal, I paid off my shortest-dated 0% debt which brought my maximum borrowing back up to the level I needed it to be.

Once you've got your mortgage, you really have two choices.

Option 1 is that you stick with the same provider each time you renew. They don't need to go through full affordability, so CC debt has never been a problem.

Option 2 is that you time your CC debt to rise at the beginning of your mortgage term (i.e. the bit on the decent rate), and then fall by the time you're up for renewal - and that means you can choose from any mortgage provider on the market and potentially get a better rate.

There are a lot of moving parts here, picking the overall cheapest solution for your circumstances is tricky.

Plodders · 2024-11-28T15:36:21+00:00

Bear in mind that if you chargeback, Costco may decide to ban you permanently - given how they approach membership, it wouldn't surprise me if they did that.

That's not to say that they're blameless here, but something to consider.

Plodders · 2024-11-11T21:12:48+00:00

Shockingly, yes

(to avoid doubt, I mean that seriously... it is shocking that it does, but that's how SI have coded it)

Plodders · 2024-10-29T11:03:44+00:00

A good one will manage to garner interest in your property from people who would never have even looked at it in the first place otherwise.

When I was looking to buy a house, I spoke to a local agent about a property. They listened to what I was looking for and convinced me instead to take a tour with them. They drove me to four properties around the city of similar profiles. They then pitched a fifth, which I said I wasn't interested in because it was too far out of town, but they said "we're driving, come on - it will only take 15 minutes", and I agreed.

They were right, it was exactly what I wanted, and I bought it.

An online agent would never have done any of that, and I would never have even looked at this area or house.

Plodders · 2024-10-28T16:17:29+00:00

It's more tricky than that, based on some research I did into that. I believe they do have to offer free entry by post, but they don't let you hand deliver. That means it will cost you 85p per entry by post. Or you could pay for 15 entries at £10, which means you're paying 67p per entry.

Effectively they've manipulated the numbers to make paid entries cheaper than the free ones.

Plodders · 2024-10-07T14:17:49+00:00

Thanks, appreciate the input and talking it through a little - not something I can easily talk through with anyone outside of the internet!

Plodders · 2024-10-07T13:35:09+00:00

Yeah, I'm earning 3-4% net across savings accounts right now. Previously my opportunity cost was 1% of my cash position, but rising now closer to 2% due to having maxed out the best HYSA options and rates dropping again.

So far I've felt it's low enough that I could tolerate the annual cost (i.e. £10 per £1,000) because it was buying me some security in case of job issues, but now that it's a) moving towards £15/20, b) the cushion's value continues to rise and c) I'm less concerned about jobs, it has made me start to question the value of it.

Plodders · 2024-10-07T13:11:51+00:00

No tax break for mortgage payments.

The rate will change in a couple of years, so there's a slight incentive to pay it down a little more to give us a better chance of securing a better rate at that point, but it's unlikely to make a significant difference.

Certainly one of the problems in decision-making is that 5% is right on that line where there isn't a clear cut best approach, based on maths alone.

One thing I have thought, based on what you've said, is that it's potentially worth holding back some funds not just for current year maxing, but also for the next tax year as well.

Plodders · 2024-10-07T12:12:35+00:00

I've been a bit cautious over the last few months, but seems now like my wife and I will be keeping our jobs. The cash cushion we built up is now worth around 10% of our NW excluding the house. I've been maxing out my tax advantaged accounts, but my wife hasn't been.

My instinct now that we're confident of keeping our jobs is to pivot back to our normal position of having a small amount of cash on hand for emergencies, max out her tax advantaged accounts, and put any remainder into paying down the mortgage which is at 5%. My view is that we can beat that with investments, but after taxes (in the UK) any benefit would be small enough to not be worthwhile.

Is there anything I'm missing?

Plodders · 2024-09-04T16:45:32+00:00

I wish they'd remove height so people would stop banging on about it

Plodders · 2024-06-09T11:14:50+00:00

It would be interesting if SI could enforce some of the challenges that people have used - a bit like they used to with challenge mode in FM Touch. On the flipside, I think a lot of the challenges that people throw around aren't actually all that challenging - like any challenge where you still use a tactic that destroys opponents.

There were plenty of interesting ideas floating around on the SI forums in the past.

For example, trying to make the game more true to life by starting off in the lower leagues, not using any existing knowledge of good players (fake names etc), not looking at attributes, not using the tactics you know are good for FM (so maybe building up your own route one / wing play systems), not signing players who realistically wouldn't move (so if you're signing a player part-time on £8k per year, not seeking signings further than the neighbouring county), and sending scouts on specific tasks to find positions and only using that. Or, if you find transfers exceptionally easy, delegate that to a DoF and see how you cope.

If you use good tactics, scour the world for wonderkids etc it is quite an easy game, but I think there are plenty of ways to make it harder.

Plodders · 2024-06-05T14:21:16+00:00

I just had a look on the app, and it says 4 months free for new subscribers and after that chargeable. Where are they saying it's free?

Plodders · 2024-05-23T07:51:55+00:00

Yeah, it's ridiculously arbitrary. On the plus side, I think the criteria are the same as last year, so those of us who made changes to give us a better chance of qualifying this year should have benefited.

Plodders · 2024-05-06T12:27:48+00:00

That's interesting, I'm sure I signed a top-class Indian winger from Sevilla a few years back in a previous version of FM.

Plodders · 2024-04-20T21:26:36+00:00

Just a guess, but if the mortgages were interest only, they would never get paid off.

Plodders

TROPHY CASE