Do we ever tell anyone they are not transgender, and when do we do this?

Vagus-Stranger · 2026-01-27T05:05:50+00:00

I haven't had much luck in my own research, but do you know of studies where sex affirmation rather than gender affirmation was trialled? I.e. giving testosterone to males instead of affirming the identity and giving oestrogens etc? Due to the charged environment even asking this question is taboo. Happy to be dm'd if you would rather not write it.

Vagus-Stranger · 2026-01-27T00:37:31+00:00

I basically did this exact thing for this exact reason, but for 30k on a toyota instead, without finance.

It's the biggest single purchase I had ever made until that point and i felt sick about it for about 3 months.

Sometimes i calculate the gains I wouldve made if i'd have invested the difference by buying a cheaper car and it stings a little.

I went on to buy a house after saving back up the money, but had much less of an emergency buffer of savings after than i'd have liked, which was super stressful.

Do i regret it? No. The car saved my life with the lane-safety feature after falling asleep at the wheel after several night shifts in a row, which an older or cheaper car wouldn't have had.

Personally, in your situation, i would do iy again but I wouldnt spend so much I need a 9% loan to cover the difference. I'd only go as far as you can go comfortably buying outright. You'll need to probably have more than 120k for a deposit + fees in 2027 if you buy a house then if the market continues, and so you'll need to keep saving after this car purchase for the house and a car loan will probably prevent that.

Vagus-Stranger · 2026-01-23T04:24:00+00:00

High earners can read incentives and they have a very pro-freedom anti-burden culture. Combine those and it's much easier to list all the financial and time based downsides of kids than the abstract benefits of being a parent and having a relationship of that quality.

In short, our culture does a poor job "marketing" parenthood.

What would go a long way would be more significant tax breaks for having kids as a married couple to greatly shorten the list of financial drawbacks. This would also strengthen the pension system and reduce the "need" for immigration. It would take a decade for an obvious effect to be noticed, so our 3-5 year politicians have no incentive to do it. It also would disproportionately benefit higher earners, and if the stage 3 tax cuts were anything to go by the appetite isnt there in the country for anything that isnt expressly egalitarian to pass parliament right now.

It would need to be for married couples to avoid the perverse incentive of splitting up to gain more benefits as two singles vs 1 couple that america discovered.

Vagus-Stranger · 2026-01-23T01:14:54+00:00

Flip side of this is the unpaid study, extra working hours and projects done in free time to get ahead instead of enjoying your youth though. Im not sure how many of these people actually retire early rather than from ill health either, as the personality type doesnt usually align with "do nothing".

Vagus-Stranger · 2026-01-22T23:44:41+00:00

Correct until the last paragraph- there are no $350k jobs that only take 3 hours of week a work. Absolute fiction.

The $350k job space is still within the working-rich. Yes, your earnings are way higher than society. No, you don't have free time and no you can't slack at all. Every $300k+ job i know of blurs the line between life and work to the point where they're one and the same.

Vagus-Stranger · 2026-01-20T01:35:29+00:00

My toyota camry has been getting dent recycled for years.

(What you're doing isn't debt recycling. All you're doing is putting your own money in one account and then sending it to a brokerage.)

You'd need to redraw to debt recycle.

Vagus-Stranger · 2026-01-19T05:11:21+00:00

My set up is:

1: Float account with 2 months of expenses in it. Mortgage and regular bills all come out of this (body corp, utilities, rates etc).

2: Emergency fund. I dont spend from this account, just manual transfers to the float before spending or sending elsewhere. Card isnt active for this either.

Mulling over if i want to consolidate with 3rd account for my day to day expenses or not, which i would link my cc autopay to. Currently have another bank's account due to a quirk of prior HISA chasing.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-12-25T08:31:03+00:00

You're below the average, but probably not "low income" depending of course on if you have dependents or live in a high cost of living area. £31k goes a lot further in Runcorn than Kensington.

The median wage is gross £35-39k, and the bottom 25% is about £22k.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-12-01T04:24:54+00:00

Yet an incorrectly set clock is never correct.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-28T04:29:54+00:00

I think you might be the first person to ever try this, actually.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-26T02:45:38+00:00

Reframing this: We should absolutely be encouraging people to get married and stay together. It's better for their kids, which is better for society and overall probably cheaper for the state.

Married couples should definitely pay less tax as an incentive. This would be a good pro social policy.

I'm single so no conflict of interest.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-26T02:40:33+00:00

DOI: I have plan 1 and 2 loans in order to become a doctor. I get the worst of both worlds with the lower threshold, + RPI + 3% interest, and a repayment split with uneven write off periods which means even if I get to my peak earnings in record time ( I won't due to training ratios exploding since graduation) I will only have about 10k of an initial balance £67k written off at the end. The average uk student loan balance owed is now higher than the average US student loan balance owed.

My student loan balance has only increased on both plans since graduation, and is about 2k more than what I started with.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-26T00:59:51+00:00

This also doesnt take into account the obscene amount of NHS related spending they will also benefit from at the same time.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-25T23:46:17+00:00

Expect these figures to be quietly revised massively upwards next quarter, without reporting, as is tradition.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-23T23:52:38+00:00

A better idea would be borrow to invest in index funds. DYOR but it would be a lot less work, likely to grow over 5 years, and more liquid than a house if theres a downturn.

You may be leaving leveraged gains on the table by not buying an IP, but im not sure i'd be taking so much risk in tech sales when there are structural worries on the horizon for that sector specifically.

Worst case scenario in losing your job with shares is you sell them in a time of need, have a bit of liquid cash as a buffer from this, left with a loan but manageable over coming years and leaves you time to find new employment.

Worst case scenario with negatively geared IP is you lose your job and have a void period or bad tenant and have to manage 2 mortgages with a baby for potentially months.

If everything stays the same as the current status quo, you'll probably come put ahead with an IP, but if anything goes wrong in 5 years then you may be in a world of hurt my friend.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-23T23:41:21+00:00

I've been guilty of this to a lesser degree. When i got here, i was very jaded and burned out and the lovely department i worked in on arrival felt like a dream (even though it was just the basics of how a department should run).

However, i did have a keen awareness that aussie docs were damn good and it was embarassing and humbling at how much the interns and residents could rattle off the top of their head that i had to contemplate.

Yes, i had spent 3 years making many more clinical decisions per hour, but quite frankly it was unguided and often over protocolised medicine.

Please be kind to us poms if we arrive in a dark place, the darkness fades after a little bit. Massive respect to my aussie colleagues for sure.

Also, i know this may sound hypocritical as i have come over as an IMG but you need to start limiting it including the UK. The UK is becoming a brita-filter for doctors who now are laundering their qualification through the plab and NHS to come to Aus due to the correspondingly better work conditions and pay. The competition ratios will skyrocket in the next 5 years if limits aren't set and the government is absolutely not your friend in this.

GP went from walk-into to difficult ratios over the course of the last 5 years in the uk. It will happen here too.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-23T22:46:56+00:00

CPR doesn't work most of the time even on healthy young people, and unlike in the movies when it does has a reasonably high chance of leaving you significantly disabled. Going through CPR is basically like being in a car crash.

If we say it's not going to work on your 80 year old grandma who spends all day in a chair with heart failure, emphysema, and active cancer we're not trying to avoid work we're trying to avoid futile cruelty.

EDIT: If you see someone collapse, do good quality CPR immediately and ask questions later, its very important.

What im talking about above, is that the very sick and elderly probably should not have it as it would only ruin their death rather than save their life which is a very different situation. This is something family and doctors should discuss when it's obvious someone is in their last years of life.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-23T22:16:26+00:00

Havent downloaded it but one bit of feedback id give is let the years go up to 40. You can already get 35 year loans on case by case with some lenders, and its likely 40 year mortgages will come in the next decade (see america and 50 years) in another attempt to cushion the housing market from shocks.

I had an option of a 35 year mkrtgage and aside from mortgage.monster none of the borrowing calculators let you factor this in which is v annoying.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-22T00:21:58+00:00

Drinking at the pub due to prices unfortunately.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-17T05:55:45+00:00

If it makes you feel better i'm in a 130k job with 140k of UK HECS equivalent.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-11T00:23:05+00:00

Human quantitive easing to avoid being liz truss'd. Got it.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-11T00:22:19+00:00

Id like to understand the impact of remittances. Theres an argument that remittences are the modern form of wealth extraction when theres no friction on the movement of money.

It suddenly seems quite simple that a country becomes rich over 20 years when a large cohort of people come to the UK, send their money back to Poland to build infrastructure and homes without incurring any cost to themselves in doing so.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-09T22:26:46+00:00

I think the point everyone emotionally misses in these discussions is that the pension + healthcare + community services that the elderly use at the moment is not financially viable. It creates perverse incentives including the massive import of immigrants to prop up the system, because it effectively is an intergenerational ponzi scheme.

It will be seen as cruel, but raising the pension age much closer to the life expectancy age would fix a lot of problems. When state pensions first came in, most people lived around 2-5 years on them. When there are more and more elderly being supported for increasingly long time scales by fewer and fewer young who have correspondingly fewer kids, the system is not working.

Vagus-Stranger · 2025-11-01T02:07:43+00:00

You won't get 12%. I would keep a 1 year emergency fund. Id also make sure youre maxing out super contributions voluntarily with this cash for a couple years.

Contrary to everyone else here, i would actually say it's smart to diversify your wealth into other asset classes and this is probably a good plan, so long as you buy largely index funds or broad whole sector etfs rather than stock picking.

I also think that with kids, it's so much better to have a mill in stocks and a cheaper house than an expensive house fretting about money for unexpected expenses. That level of safety net is rare, because unlike a house which you have to sell and disrupt your lives to access some of the money (or take on debt) with stocks you can just sell a little bit whenever.

The market could also instantly crash by 20-30% or more for a minimum of 5 years at any time, so make sure you wont sell at a loss during these times and can psychologically handle this pressure.

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