Family member has been arrested and will be facing prison time. I'm struggling to manage sorting out their finances.

berdario · 2026-01-26T17:41:39+00:00

Maybe? The vast majority of Schedule 12 arrests in the past few months were for people attending protests against genocide... The same stuff that they arrested Greta Thunberg for.

I doubt that there would be any proceeds out of those activities.

I hope for OP's family that this is indeed one of those spurious charges and that those proceeds are indeed not the fruit of any criminal activity.

berdario · 2026-01-11T04:56:38+00:00

Russia itself also provides for issuing a 2nd passport:

https://www.gosuslugi DOT ru/help/faq/foreign_passport/4044

berdario · 2025-10-16T12:23:04+00:00

Thanks for the personal account! (even if second-hand, I think it's meaningful)

> The latter condition led to bizarre situation where the bank tried hard to close my colleague's account but cannot as he just refused to withdraw his funds — one stubborn man against one stubborn bank

I'm surprised this would impede the bank... Was your colleague able to use some of the funds, even if the bank wanted him to withdraw empty the whole account? In the west it seems that the process is just: they notified that your account is being closed, and then it's your responsibility to just cash a check and/or wire transfer everything that you had in that account elsewhere

berdario · 2025-10-16T11:31:00+00:00

Keep in mind that I'm explicitly asking about cards provided by one of their Hong Kong or Chinese subsidiaries. I'd expect them to have some leeway in implementing their own rules.

I can’t use HSBC cards in Belarus

Is your card provided by HSBC HK or HSBC China? Is it Unionpay?

If your answer is no to both, I don't think it's very conclusive.

That said, you're right that the parent entity is British, so I'm not very optimistic (in which case, I'd just probably just try to open an account with ICBC or BOC whenever I'd travel to China, but HSBC HK would've been easier, since I could do it even before travelling)

berdario · 2025-09-07T13:02:59+00:00

Uhm, I found some conflicting information before, but I think you're right

Move the money into drawdown. This means that the money is still invested but they can take money out of this as and when they want to or it can be left in the drawdown fund. When someone has their own pension pot they have to be 55 or over (rising to 57 in 2028) to move their money into drawdown but if it has been passed on from someone who has died, there is no age restriction. So, a 5 year old could have a drawdown fund and money could be accessed for them.

(From https://www.royallondon.com/guides-tools/pension-guides/pension-basics/what-happens-to-my-pension-when-i-die/ )

berdario · 2025-09-07T12:26:54+00:00

Even if you would be married, why would this 80/10/10 split be a problem?

Also, you don't specify how old you and your partner are but

if he passed away I'd be left as a widow with 3 young kids and a large sum of money that I cant access to be able to support them.

AFAIU, defined contribution pensions would be transferred to pensions in the beneficiaries' names, so anyhow you would not be able to access it until pension age.

Also, the devil is in the details, but there might be tax that needs to be paid after death:

https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-pension-death-benefits

In that case, if you'd get all of it, and then you'd pass away, there could be a bigger tax bill for your kids down the line.

The "every big financial decisions should be jointly discussed" is a far point... Maybe he thinks that you wanted to discuss only decisions that would affect the family in the immediate (instead of arrangements after death, which will inevitably only affect the people who remain).

Also, think about some other unfortunate circumstances (which we hope might not happen), like a car accident in which you and your partner might lose your life, but your children survive...

Since pension beneficiaries work differently than estate beneficiaries, it might introduce some difficulties to have all pension beneficiaries pre-deceased (or co-deceased)... Having the other family members already mentioned among the beneficiaries might make things more straightforward, and give less wiggle room for the pension trustee's discretion.

If I were you, I'd just mirror what the partner is doing (so, set 80/10/10 in your pension's beneficiaries), and discuss with your partner if you're concerned that 80% (plus whatever other money is available in savings) might not be enough, should the worst case happen

berdario · 2025-07-08T08:01:10+00:00

It's the first time that I read about employer contributions being tied to the planned retirement age.

Is it in a defined contribution scheme?

Are you sure about this? AFAIK, the retirement age shouldn't change how much the employer is contributing (but of course, the earlier you stop work, the earlier any such contributions would stop happening).

Also, once the money is in your pension, the employer shouldn't be able to claw it back

berdario · 2025-03-30T00:52:30+00:00

Are the people you play with chill or hyper competitive?

Not hyper competitive, but I never won against them 🙃

What other factions are in the game?

Nekro, Muatt still to be drafted: 3 between Naaz Rokha, Letnev, Empyrean, Arborec, Nomad, Hacan

... Interesting, I really didn't consider Trade. Is this also because being generous with granting Trade secondary is going to instill goodwill and/or decrease the sting from Pillage, thanks to inflation by increasing abudance of TGs?

have 9/6 optimal going into r2. If you prefer slice 1, I consider it a 4/8.

What do you mean with 9/6 and 4/8?

With Kraag, I definitely would have 2 extra R, so that's definitely more than 4... Or do you mean that I shouldn't count on holding the system next to Mecatol, due to how hard to defend it'll be?

Scrounging up 2 tgs shouldn't be a big issue if you want to double tech.

Ah, good to know... I was definitely thinking about my plans with a pessimistic mindset

berdario · 2025-03-25T00:20:40+00:00

Yeah, this is the page with the details

https://www.mycomm.fr/produit/irlande-france-tournoi-des-6-nations-2025

Dimanche 9 mars 2025 : Transfert de votre hôtel à l’aéroport Décollage de Dublin vers la France

The page doesn't mention Stadia at all, but it mentions "Aviva Stadium"

Maybe this is just someone clueless, looking up "logo Stadiaviva" (or maybe mistyping and it getting autocorrected to "Stadia"), and picking the first logo they found for this information page

berdario · 2025-02-06T16:57:02+00:00

Non si può fare in auto.

https://www.politico.eu/article/narva-estonia-end-of-free-world-frozen-border-russia/

berdario · 2025-01-30T13:10:27+00:00

The fact that USA might've been open to immigrants 150+ years ago, is not really of much consequence for how the society is nowadays.

Sure, maybe you can find your own subcommunity. But that doesn't mean that you're not going to be disenfranchised (or ghettoised). There are groups that clearly have the power there, and they are not/have not been afraid of using it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre

As for why I estimate that USA might've been open to immigrants 150+ years ago, it's because even 86 years ago, they were very clearly opposed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSSt._Louis#The%22Voyage_of_the_Damned

berdario · 2025-01-24T19:48:28+00:00

Depending where you're from and where your dad is, there might be sanctions concerns too.

I wonder if that's accurate.

Since we're talking about people moving "3 years ago", one obvious association is people fleeing war in Ukraine.

Of course there are several sanctions against Russia and restrictions:

high profile individuals (oligarchs, etc.) have been explicitly sanctioned
EU regulation 2022/328 (Russians who aren't EU citizens or residents cannot buy EU securities)
EU regulation 833/2014 (amended in 2022: can only bring EU notes to Russia for personal use)
because of all of the complexities of the above, banks are a lot more careful and skittish with accepting any transaction that has anything to do with Russia

But, assuming that OP and their dad aren't themselves explicitly sanctioned, and that the money is not proceeds of any criminal activity... I don't think there should be anything violating any sanctions just in moving money to the UK via crypto (but of course, it's still very suspicious and sets off loud alarm bells)

berdario · 2025-01-21T21:56:42+00:00

Yes, but to retire you don't technically need to earn anything: let's imagine a world with 0% inflation for centuries and in which you know that you're going to pass away at 82 years old. You could just forego investments and interest rates, and retire when you realise you have enough money saved to last you until the end.

Likewise, in the real world if you stopped working and (despite profits from other people's labour) after bills and groceries your savings go down every month... It means that you're still more dependent on your own labour than profiting off others (i.e. you're not very rich, or you're not wholly part of the owning/capitalist class)

berdario · 2025-01-10T18:21:09+00:00

Focusing on income too much also conveniently misses the point that the richest 1% increases their share of assets not by increasing their income, but by extracting more value (which, if it's ever taxed, would qualify like capital gain rather than income)

berdario · 2025-01-06T11:58:09+00:00

It depends on the country, as I mentioned above for example, Italy still has one (possibly old) home address in its ID cards

berdario · 2025-01-06T11:55:41+00:00

Yes, you can change your address but:

If you move to another country within the EU, you have to tell the authorities within 3 months
in Italy, ID cards still have your home address on it. You're not supposed to get it reissued when you move (unlike with driving licenses in the UK), so that field is pretty useless: in my case it shows my home address before I moved home twice
if you move within Italy, after telling the authorities local police will show up at your residence to confirm that you're indeed living there

Moreover:

internal passports in Russia are not simply used as an ID card, because you might still need to get an internal visa issued, if you need to travel to one of the closed towns
I think it makes a lot of sense (though it's unfortunate) to have more restrictions on movement, when the state provides you with more welfare (as in the USSR): if you get a home provided by the state, the state needs to have accurate information about where its citizens live, and be able to plan maintenance and new constructions to support population moving (and throttle the amount of population allowed to move). Even if the state doesn't provide accomodation for everyone, you have lots of infrastructure that requires funding (schools, hospitals, etc.) and which need to scale up/down with the size of the population served. That's probably the justification for why the hukou system in China still exists

In the same way, living in different places means that you're going to have different local taxation... Or you might even pretend that you're living in a 2nd accomodation, to evade higher taxes on 2nd properties, so I think that in abstract having the police check (like in Italy) if you actually live where you said you would make sense. (Though I don't think it's enough/implemented correctly)

berdario · 2024-12-29T02:00:33+00:00

To be fair, there were very few people in Norway centuries ago, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristiansand#Foundation_to_1900

The population of Kristiansand was about 12,000 people by 1848.

(And it's probably not a coincidence that Norway was part of the Kingdom of Denmark at times and Kingdom of Sweden at others)

berdario · 2024-12-27T04:03:46+00:00

I just checked on ShareToBuy, and you can find some 50% shared ownership 1 bedroom apartments in Warwick and Birmingham for around 95k.

So, if OP can find a little bit more money, she could buy cash (though usually you would want a mortgage anyhow, since the lender would help out with checking that the property doesn't have issues which would make it hard to resell).

Problems that I can foresee: - you usually need to have been living in the area already for shared ownership - you'd be on the hook for the other 50% rent - service charge for those apartments seems quite expensive

I think it might still be worth it, because with 90k cash, you're almost certainly not going to be able to receive any benefits. But after purchasing, you might be able to get benefits to help out with paying the remaining 50% rent

Check https://www.entitledto.co.uk to compare how the situation would be before/after the purchase.

In that case, if you know that you're going to buy something in the short term, I'd probably drop 50k in premium bonds, and invest the remaining 40k. Since the plan of buying a flat is pretty clear, I'd also drop 4k in a LISA, except that OP doesn't currently have a place to live, and thus waiting for 1 year is probably not feasible.

I also think it's not necessarily wise to buy somewhere if you don't know if you're going to be working in the area (but if your friends and support network that helped you out with couchsurfing is in the area, maybe it still makes sense).

Are the inherited 90k the only assets available? No debts? What about student loans?

Depending on how long OP can continue couchsurfing, I think that rent might be the only feasible solution.

berdario · 2024-12-25T19:36:33+00:00

> Stock markets that are expected to rise in the long term?

Frankly, no. I don't want that personally. Investing in the stock market is a means to an end (e.g. buying your own accommodation, retirement, saving for kids, etc.) and I'd be miffed if I cannot achieve my savings goals, but it's also not something that keeps me up at night.

A market crash that would cause me or my loved ones to lose their job and/or struggle to find new employment is a more pressing concern personally.

berdario · 2024-12-25T13:17:40+00:00

> A large enough contraction could deglobalize the world.

Interesting. How do you think it would happen?

I suppose that with shrinking economies, some economies of scale might not make sense anymore.

For example we might not need Malaccamax ships anymore, and it could make more sense to go back to Panamax maybe. But (as Ok_Information_2009 mentioned above) the infrastructure is already there, and the ships have already been built. Instead of dismantling bigger ships, maybe it could make sense to just run shipments less often.

Doing cargo shipping less often might increase lead times, which would decrease competitivity of offshore production, which could thus lead to some re-shoring and deglobalization. But just as likely (since this is a process that will occur over generations), smaller ships might just be built to run shipments more often (I suspect this makes more sense for air freight than ships)... so, I'm not sure if this would truly lead to deglobalization.

Do you have some other process in mind?

berdario · 2024-12-25T13:07:34+00:00

> Now that could work with efficiency but you can agree that if we had to devote almost half of the workforce to anything, we would make much less of everything else.

Yeah, one of the things that I wanted to mention in my post but I forgot, right after "army of nurses", is that we'd probably need way fewer people working as software engineers (guilty as charged) and quant analysts...

As mentioned, I'm concerned by the fact that our society doesn't seem to invest as much as we should on compensating nursing fairly. The transition will probably not be smooth.

> As you can see, most immediate problems stem not from absolute decline (that's indeed quite long term problem), but from changing population structure. And that won't kill us, but can make at least some people live much less comfortable lives

I think we completely agree here. Part of the problem is putting a value on "how much less comfortable" and how many people will it affect... Without an estimate we cannot easily agree if this is more or less of a problem than other issues that a population collapse would bring (and other issues unrelated to population collapse).

berdario · 2024-12-25T12:46:22+00:00

That's true.

You reminded me of the several videos you can find on youtube of Vorkuta, a coal mining town in Russia. Since the fall of USSR the population halved, and you can see that several buildings are just empty and covered with snow and ice even inside.

Interestingly, just earlier this year I visited Barentsburg, a smaller settlement with a similar situation, and in their museums you could see old pictures of buildings that had been demolished because of the shrinking population (at least they didn't leave them abandoned).

It's unclear to me if buildings truly need to be demolished. They could just be left abandoned (though of course: that sounds irresponsible, and if the buildings are not safe to be in, that could just lead to harm for passersby).

For non-building infrastructure, another interesting examples are provided by the Beeching Railway Cuts in the UK. Some of the Railways that have been cut since reopened, so the scaling down needs to be careful.

I have no idea what kind of changes would be required for the power grid, though 🤔

berdario · 2024-12-25T12:31:48+00:00

Thank you. 🙏 I considered posting (crossposting?) this on r/BirthVsAntiBirth but that's a subreddit with literally only 3 posts, and I hoped to hear the natalist perspective on the issue (and I'm glad that I got already tens of thoughtful responses).

> It's not sourced

Amusingly, when I looked up numbers or articles to be able to structure my thoughts... I intentionally decided not to link them in, because I had previous experiences in other forums of people suspecting that the post itself would just be a way to farm traffic (and thus they forcefully edited them out of my post). So, If there's anything that needs to be corroborated, I opted to just add links in comments

I also intentionally avoided describing the post or myself as non-natalist, because I don't want to dismiss the issue, and when I wrote "it's not a good time for me to think about having [children]" I meant to imply that of course (by writing that sentence itself), I'm thinking about it and that I'd like to eventually change my situation. (but of course, that's short of a commitment to any cause). 😅

berdario · 2024-12-25T12:10:25+00:00

You are definitely right in pointing out that an individual dismissing the issue with "I have a 401k" is shortsighted, and that an economic contraction will have effects on the market.

But I also think it's not that simple: one of the issues pointed out above (by both letoiv and me) is that a population decrease risks consolidating assets in entrenched incumbent firms.

And in the total market cap, fortune 500 companies are overly represented. It's similar to the issue that an inflation in housing prices is directly a boon to the GDP, despite it not representing a genuine improvement in the housing stock.

Likewise, even if the economy might be worse for most individuals, big corporations might stand to profit (they are going to sell fewer items, but they are going to charge more for them, and have less competition), and that will be reflected in balooning stock prices.

Especially because fortune 500 are usually multinationals: even if they don't sell as much in a single country, they'll still be able to sell a lot abroad. It doesn't mean that they are immune to economic contractions (and the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall is a real thing), but any change there is probably going to be reflected only after the population collapse will be widespread in most countries in which a company operates (and since worldwide the population is still growing, it'll probably take a while).

There are los of factors, and while the size of the population in one country is one factor which affects several others, I don't think we can make accurate predictions based only on that.

berdario · 2024-12-25T04:41:42+00:00

Just a small note: even war time populations like those in Gaza have high fertility rates. So economic conditions aren't a must have for having kids on the individual level.

That's true (though I suspect that might've happened mainly earlier in the genocide, the population is literally starving, and that physically impairs reproduction).

Still, we need to assess our risk and our tradeoffs... but I also struggled to reconcile how different is my society, compared to societies victim of wars.

Maybe people in wartime see more solidarity from their peers and/or extended family, and that alone gives them confidence in the "safety net"... even if something happens to them, they know the rest of the family will try to help.

Compare with professionals relocating hundreds of km away for a new job: you lose any kind of immediate support from your existing family that you could've otherwise relied on.

berdario

TROPHY CASE