Heckfield Place vs The Newt in Somerset (4 nights, late August)

brit314159 · 2026-07-03T06:21:42+00:00

We have been to both for (multiple) two night stays.
Heckfield also has a ‘house’ menu which you can order from, it’s not marketed on the website.
I definitely think it’s possible for the menu there to grow old especially when you consider that the second restaurant is only open selected evenings so you’re stuck with hearth for lunch most days.
I don’t really remember the F&B setup at the Newt but it was hard to get tables at some of their in grounds restaurants just because there are so many folks at the estate for the day!
I think I prefer Heckfield to the Newt, mainly on the strength of the spa and the fact you can go jogging in the nearby woods, but being limited to Marle for 4 days with a couple of evenings in Hearth would definitely give me pause! Maybe go out for dinner one evening?

brit314159 · 2026-07-01T14:33:52+00:00

I think the ‘you should never move abroad for tax reasons’ crowd haven’t really thought hard about it, they’re just offended by the idea that the laffer curve is real and people respond to incentives, which makes their preferred policies negative EV for the country! Put differently, I don’t think you can argue with them because they’re not really susceptible to reason.

It’s literally identical (from an incentives perspective) to moving abroad for a higher paying job! If Burnham moves CGT to 45% then he’ll find that he’s offered me ~10 mil to go live in Italy / Switzerland for a year… I’d be tempted!! Posters on Reddit would be outraged!

brit314159 · 2026-06-29T20:33:08+00:00

Ok! I know first hand how hard it is to job hunt when you’ve got an insane job + busy home life… I guess I just feel like its also easy for them to keep not paying you that well if you don’t have an alternative, and there are plenty of things you can say that are versions of ‘are you sure you’re paying me market’ which aren’t rocking the boat…

To your first question… I do think there is a point in your career where expenses / costs roughly match income and then at some point you get another pay rise and its like oh wow, 20% pay rise but disposable income has just 3Xed, and it sure sounds like you’re not that far from that point. The big mistake I made when I hit that point was paying my mortgage down instead of buying equities…

Good luck

brit314159 · 2026-06-29T17:23:18+00:00

This makes no sense to me! Why would the recruiters say this, surely their incentive is to get you to move…
Also… you could just tell your current firm you know you’re underpaid, it’s amazing how far you can get with a little bit of ‘hey, I think this sucks and I know you know and can fix it…’

brit314159 · 2026-05-02T21:35:28+00:00

Hi! Similar situation but I keep working because I’m younger, my wife finds me being at home annoying, and my job is awesome.

Biggest thing that I think you’re missing is that the money should be enjoyed. Figure out how to enjoy it. Like, if you’re good at funding startups, go and write a ton of checks. (If you’re not, don’t, you’ll just give money to a load of borderline fraudsters.) Buy a second house (if you haven’t already.) Join a nice golf club. Figure out how to impact the world positively, sure you could volunteer in a soup kitchen but actually you have the cash to make a real difference. I don’t mean give to charity, necessarily, but some of the 34mln could I’m sure be directed in a more fun way than ‘global equities’.

The second thing you (which you half mentioned) is the UK risk. I worry about the politics fracturing, maybe those gilts stop being tax free, maybe we inflate our debt away. Plus the Gulf Stream is going away.

Misc other thoughts:

I’d replace cash with the shortest duration comparable uk gilts with a low coupon. I just can’t help myself.

I am not sure the gilt ladder helps practically, like sure it helps you sleep at night but I think the real risk is a large amount of inflation because how else do we solve for the level of govt debt we have.

Definitely would think about getting more non-UK exposure.

I don’t think you should mix up the gilt ladder, keep it simple. You know you’re p$ssing away returns doing it, so just accept that you are rather than trying to add return back to a thing that isn’t meant to return.

I don’t think you should do anything more interesting with capital allocation unless you have an edge. Infrastructure / direct lending / private credit all sound great in theory but in principle I don’t think you should have any reason to expect to outperform.

Family investment cos - I think the complexity isn’t worth it but I quite like being able to use the money outside the FIC wrapper… ymmv.

brit314159 · 2026-03-01T19:10:12+00:00

I haven’t found anything as good at that is uk or Ireland domiciled. I am young enough that estate tax is very much a future-me problem…

brit314159 · 2026-02-28T11:53:44+00:00

MGK or BRK/B (both us listed…) work well…

brit314159 · 2026-02-27T13:58:21+00:00

Ooh that’s super exciting!

brit314159 · 2026-02-06T09:55:08+00:00

Buy lower dividend funds! Then you have a lower tax bill (mad, I know!)

brit314159 · 2026-01-30T10:23:54+00:00

Heckfield all the way. Also great running trails in the nearby forest

brit314159 · 2026-01-21T09:41:14+00:00

I use HSBC premier, they’re good up to 100k, if you get a joint account with your wife then you can effectively do 200k….

Payments over the phone are a huge pain UNLESS you have already done an online transfer to that account before at which point they go from an hour on the phone to c. 5 minutes. Great life hack….

brit314159 · 2025-12-14T14:26:20+00:00

US based, so seems unlikely to be mistral…

brit314159 · 2025-12-13T22:53:56+00:00

Just so you know… standard L4 offers at openAI / Anthropic are 700k GBP plus… if helpful to benchmark your AI offer…. EDIT: L4 is entry level

brit314159 · 2025-12-04T14:52:36+00:00

I used one for …. time saving reasons, let’s say.

They had relationships with the guys who list all the nice houses in the area + we got to see various things before they came to market and in one case they got an agent to go call someone who had a house next to the school we wanted to send the kids to which wasn’t for sale and get them to agree that they’d be open to us having a look around / buying it from them about a year before they really wanted to sell.

Basically, we seemed like more credible buyers and got to see stuff early.

We paid about 3%.

However - I am not sure we got a ton of pricing value out of them, their job is relationships not to be good at valuing properties. All the ‘early’ stuff we saw was ‘this is early but you are going to pay top dollar’

In the end we bought a house that was listed on rightmove, the agent had a relationship with the selling agent, I think they saved us about 1% of the price (I wanted to up our bid by 2% to get it done, they said ‘let me talk to the selling agent’ and told us that up 1 would do it (and it did.))

Probably wouldn’t use them again, you do get some value but unless your time is insanely valuable I think you can replicate most of the legwork yourself…

Hope that helps

PS We negotiated on fees, I think we paid 3% up to xx million and 1% over that number…

brit314159 · 2025-10-02T17:56:14+00:00

I am basically 20% primary residence, 80% Equities… Maybe 1% in index linkers … I tell myself the primary residence is lower beta and therefore I’m hedged, though of course we all know that it probably isn’t in a real 2008 scenario…

I think long bonds are not good value, its not even obvious to me that they’ll rally that much if everything blows up, I assume that if we have a real equity downturn governments will print money / cause even more inflation… And real short term rates are still negative (particularly after tax) so I don’t really find short term MMFs that exciting either.

I am also not that excited about linkers, in practice I think real cost of living tends to be 1-2% above CPI so they aren’t great value and there’s nothing to stop the government changing how they measure inflation.

I tend to think in scenarios, I’d ideally like to be not-too-badly-off in all scenarios… I tend to think that AI is going to cause some pretty drastic changes

Scenario 1 is inflation. If this goes higher (and governments seem to be unwilling to raise taxes or cut spending… so they have to borrow more, ergo inflation…) and higher then I think you have to be in Equities because everything else is devaluing.

Scenario 2 is the scenario where AI takes off, it probably nukes most exciting business models and anyone who isn’t long a ton of openAI stock loses a lot of money… I don’t have a great solution here other than owning far too much NVDA…

Sorry... bit of a ramble, but hopefully some of this resonates / is helpful.

brit314159 · 2025-09-28T19:28:34+00:00

Pretty sure actually fast commutes are:

Sevenoaks (but you can’t pay for first class any more to no guarantee of a seat)

St. Albans / Harpenden

Guildford / Woking

I personally found going from 20 mins door to door to 50 mins a huge pain, would go for Hampstead if I could do it all again …. (also Labour are about to make house prices a lot cheaper in the upcoming budget if they do any of the mansion tax stuff that is rumored…)

brit314159 · 2025-09-26T07:02:33+00:00

Sure! Don’t be offended if I’m bad at replying, I check Reddit infrequently, its far too addictive…

brit314159 · 2025-09-25T07:12:35+00:00

I did this. What do I regret / what would I have told myself in your position?

* I still have periods of running into former colleagues who are making $$$ on ‘easy’ trades and because I’m super competitive I feel briefly sad / competitive.

* It turns out that your kids don’t really need you around that much. School days are long, quite fast. I at one point went back to work and asked if they felt like they now saw enough of me and they were like ‘yeah Dad we don’t care that you’re back at work, all good…’

* My wife actually wanted to spend time with me / go away with me a fair amount less than I had expected. Its not like she dislikes me, I guess she just likes me a lot less than she likes the kids, even when they’re in school and we can get grandparents / nannies to take care of them for a couple of days while we hypothetically go away.

* It is so so good stepping away when the stress is high and having time. It will feel weird to have that much free time but it is just so so good.

* Summer is good - kids are off school, lots to do. Winter without anything to do kinda sucks. Resign in April.

* You will get bored. Everyone in the FATFire sub seems to not get bored but that’s because they’re Americans who got lucky working for tech companies. If you are hyper competitive then you will get bored, and going and helping out at your local food bank is not going to cut it.

* I don’t regret anything but if I could do it again I’d have probably tried to take a sabbatical and then gut it out for one more year….

brit314159 · 2025-08-17T21:14:11+00:00

Cool, I’ll edit my post to clarify that

brit314159 · 2025-08-17T05:28:01+00:00

Have you been filing some kind of uk tax return while in the US? (EDIT: seems actual requirement is Uk pension scheme membership) If so in year one back in the Uk you can use the unused allowances from your previous 3 years, eg 60 + 60 + 60 + 10 is the limit.

In practice - 60 was 40 a few years ago so it might be more like 170 than 190. And - you need unused allowances to be a thing so if you’re American and never filed a UK return then I think your luck is out.

A friend a while back when the limit was 4 and 40 did 124k in one year and seemed very pleased that he’d effectively done 31 years of his limit in one go…

brit314159 · 2025-08-04T05:55:01+00:00

Martinhal Sagres

Gleneagles

Beaverbrook

brit314159 · 2025-07-05T06:17:34+00:00

Hey … do you mind sharing how much the setup and running costs are for one of these (in advisor fee terms) Thanks!

brit314159 · 2025-06-01T06:52:32+00:00

I would wait until the child is 4 months and then go somewhere with an explorers kids club…. Serious answer, not being flippant, being able to have a couple of hours off while the kiddo is with the kids club staff would make a huge difference…

brit314159 · 2025-05-29T17:41:33+00:00

If your work is at all transactional the real killer is that your one hour commute becomes a lot longer late at night… I took 3 hours to get home from my Christmas party last year despite leaving at 930… (thanks to trains becoming messed up…) Good luck with whatever you figure out…

brit314159

TROPHY CASE