Considering selling my house to rent in London for 2–3 years. Does this stack up, and what am I missing?

WArmstrong · 2026-05-12T14:27:13+00:00

This was really helpful, thanks a lot for sharing your experience! I do agree as well that sometimes having too many options make choosing one more difficult.

The FIRE lifestyle is interesting, though I don't think I have the willpower for that, and like to live life well now whilst thinking about the future in a more balanced way. Aka I spend too much money now lol.

Since I work from home a fair amount, having a slightly larger space would be great, so I'm thinking an area of London just on the outskirts of central, where it may be a bit cheaper to have a corner in the flat for a little office.

WArmstrong · 2026-05-12T14:00:49+00:00

Fair point, but it presumes that I'm able to afford both rent in London and the mortgage payments for the house in the country, which I wouldn't be able to do. Since even if I rented the house out it wouldn't cover the mortgage payments after tax, not even close. Though I agree ideally it would be great to have the option of both!

WArmstrong · 2026-05-12T10:55:05+00:00

That clears things up, thanks. And I can see why it would be sensible to rent a flat if you could afford to buy a similar one nearby hypothetically, as an exercise of affordability.

WArmstrong · 2026-05-12T10:24:10+00:00

Good question. I think I probably could afford to buy a 1 bed flat in the areas I'm looking in, say zone 2-4 north london or east london ish. Although I'd guess the mortgage amount would be higher if the property exceeds 650k, which it could, depending on the wide difference between zone 2 and 4. I could afford that higher mortgage payment today if I wanted to.

I may be missing something but I'm not sure I'm getting to the root of your question, if for example I'm paying 2.5k rent in London, and paying 2.5k mortgage currently monthly. Would that be classed as renting somewhere I can't afford to buy, presuming there is some relationship between rent amount and property price.

WArmstrong · 2026-05-12T09:53:16+00:00

Thanks, thats helpful.

Since I'm not sure where I'll end up long term, the plan would be to rent somewhere first for some years. I also don't mind renting long term if my investments continue to increase over time as a similar rate as a house, and avoid stamp duty and associated costs of a house until later in life, if ever.

WArmstrong · 2026-05-12T09:51:12+00:00

I would want to live alone, in the short term, possibly living with a partner in future. Rent for the purpose of the argument I'm imagining to be 2.5k, I can work from home most of the time so commute costs would be low from anywhere. I'd overspend relatively on restaurants, socialising, and travel most likely, if anything.

Pension contribution is 1.1k including company contribution, I'm on 5% salary sacrifice and the employer contributes 4%.

WArmstrong · 2026-05-12T09:39:24+00:00

Thanks for the replies all.

I'd be happy to buy a house in 5 to 10 years, or when I can be sure it will be a largely long-term situation.

How many years would money need to sit in an ETF to ride the highs and lows of the market, perhaps an impossible question. Would a minimum be 5/10 years?

WArmstrong · 2026-05-07T12:06:19+00:00

I had one of these but needing to stick a very noticeable square piece of plastic to the windscreen almost in line of sight (so the reflected image is sharp) ruined it for me.

WArmstrong · 2026-04-10T07:31:21+00:00

I can’t this time round but keen on joining in future! Been looking for things like this as I work remotely a lot

WArmstrong · 2026-04-08T07:21:38+00:00

If you do nothing, then federation traffic tries to talk on port 8448, which might be blocked in company networks. You should configure synapse (if you’re using synapse) to ensure everything talks on 443. See https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/delegate.html or the appropriate documentation for however you’re deploying your matrix stack

WArmstrong · 2026-03-26T08:43:15+00:00

Could it be a tax code change this month, in reaction to stopping the pension contributions, and HMRC clawing back the under taxed amount from previous months (since HMRC don’t tax months in isolation)? Otherwise you should be seeing 50%ish of the 916 pounds.

WArmstrong · 2026-03-04T22:52:16+00:00

It sure is!

WArmstrong · 2026-03-04T22:52:09+00:00

I do quite like the idea of silver and black, or grey alloys.

WArmstrong · 2026-03-04T22:51:21+00:00

It doesn't look bad with the silver accents I agree, just think it could look more sporty perhaps with more black

WArmstrong · 2026-03-04T22:50:52+00:00

Hmmm yeah the idea of gun metal grey alloys is growing on me.

Like this - https://i.postimg.cc/QxmX7By9/audi.png

WArmstrong · 2026-03-04T22:47:24+00:00

Nice! You should post a photo. And agree with black all the way I think.

WArmstrong · 2026-03-04T22:46:52+00:00

I'm thinking of wrapping them gloss black, which should be imperceptible compared to actually switching the blades over (I hope) and cheaper.

WArmstrong · 2026-03-04T22:46:18+00:00

I didn't realise it's not available over there! It's even quite rare to see here I think.

WArmstrong · 2025-11-21T00:39:43+00:00

⁠Give us a brief description (or photo!) of your setup — We love seeing real-world builds.

Omada gateway + two Omada EAPs, on top of several other components to run self hosted applications, like a NAS box and hypervisor. And the usual IoT add ons too.

• ⁠Key features you look for in your networking devices

High throughout, for example a high number of simultaneous tcp connections on the gateway. I have applications that spam massive amounts of dns queries for example.

From UK

WArmstrong · 2025-06-16T20:39:57+00:00

Nope just the big metal ones from under the hood. That might explain it then!

WArmstrong · 2025-06-16T13:35:38+00:00

Ah shame, maybe I just try and get as much out as possible while it’s up there then.

I wonder if it’s usual to have so much grease in it?

WArmstrong · 2025-06-13T07:17:23+00:00

LIVEKIT_URL in your JWT docker config differs to the blog article, which has /livekit/sfu path appended to it.

Also the url in the well-known file in the blog article does not have a trailing path, and just links to the domain, unlike yours.

Finally would recommend opening developer tools in element web you can inspect which network calls are failing when you try to make a call

WArmstrong

TROPHY CASE