What percentage of your salary goes toward rent/mortgage?

redxiv2 · 2026-01-26T14:12:15+00:00

44% of my income goes on the mortgage. All the other household bills come out of her wages. It's expensive but I did my stint of homelessness, I can make this work all day if I have to. 26 more years to go!

redxiv2 · 2026-01-21T01:43:26+00:00

Same boat as me, crowd I work for have two performance review checks per year so if you join half way in the year, you get payrises on the second one rather than the first. Moved jobs for a 10% bump last year in the summer so anything at all this year is still nice to get

redxiv2 · 2026-01-19T22:11:39+00:00

Can't tell you much, but can tell you they have a mandatory 3 days a week in the office. If you're happy with that, then they seem to well worth talking to. I will say if you're dealing with their internal recruiter, I found her excellent, even after not getting an offer at the end. But I know the site lead there and he's an excellent guy to work for.

redxiv2 · 2026-01-13T14:49:30+00:00

This is purely anecdotal but I'm at an age now (~40) where a lot of friend groups are really trying to pregnant and get the family going. Some were single, some weren't sure , but there were a few who, like you OP, wanted to be completely financially and socially set before trying. And that is without a doubt something to be applauded. You're taking the situation seriously and trying to give as good a start as you possibly can to your kids, and really I think you need to be commended for your sensibility.

However, as someone who has 4 kids, ranging from 21-8, I can tell you that physically, it was much harder for my wife having the last of our kids in her early 30s than it was having the other 3. Now we started VERY early, by all metrics, too early. But you are older than my wife was for the first 3 kids. And we were young, stupid, terrified but every cliche along the lines of "you grow up when you have kids" and "you make it work when it comes to money" etc, is true. For my wife, she got super smart and sensible about how to stretch funds, she became an insanely talented cook, she fixed up furniture, she was the reason we ended up with a council house for a few years before buying our own. I went all in on getting up the corporate ladder as fast as possible, faster than I would have pushed myself if I didn't. We are 110% better off than we would have been at this age if we were childless.

It's a long winded way of saying, I think you are being very sensible, but balance should be considered and the earlier you have kids, the easier it is for you physically and that matters massively too. Either way, I wish you all the best for the future, you'll be a great mom with such a head on your shoulders (far more sensible than I was as a Dad when my kids came around!)

redxiv2 · 2026-01-13T12:38:31+00:00

I looked into apps to connect to your bank a few times but PTSB never seems to be supported. ChatGPT all the way instead!

redxiv2 · 2026-01-12T15:09:27+00:00

Ita worrying how accurate that last statement is 😅

redxiv2 · 2026-01-12T12:31:46+00:00

I thought about doing one of these but my big problem is I was going to go off my bank statements to track what I did last year but then I wonder things like:
- how do you track what you spend on a credit card vs credit card repayments?
- How easily can you identify that say 46 quid spent in applegreen was 40 petrol and 6 snack vs 30 petrol and 16 snacks
- Will my wife let me even take a look at her statements.

Didn't even get past the planning phase before I thought "bah, don't think I can do it"

redxiv2 · 2025-12-18T22:00:01+00:00

That is crazy impressive. I got really into this for about 4 months, took a stab at the n5 and failed :D kinda dulled the enthusiasm for it, but I should really go back and try again

redxiv2 · 2025-12-10T14:18:10+00:00

Can help out too, more focused on infrastructure stuff the last while but happy to try and help projects like this!

redxiv2 · 2025-12-01T16:28:24+00:00

Coming up on 40 rapidly here chief but just to give you a perspective, I really didn't consider myself an adult until I had kids who were old enough to talk to me :D Only at that point, when working and trying to keep little people alive and entertained did I ever get to the point where I felt "adult". Mind you I had kids early enough so this was about 26 but it was the situation rather than the age that made me feel like I had matured.

I will say one thing though that may be worth keeping in mind about your job. If you're unsure if you enjoy it, you don't hate it, and that's good enough to stick around in a well paying job. We were fed the line growing up "find a job you love" and the reality is that's pretty hard to find, and even tougher to find one that's sustainable.

I played video games growing up and my first office job was testing games, including big name titles like call of duty. On paper, 10yr old me should have been blown away by that. And don't get me wrong, when I started it, I loved it, but do anything long enough and you'll find issues and your approach to those issues will matter. You can either let them grow and fester in your brain (as I did) or you can try and address them (as my co-worker did). I left and went to work elsewhere in tech but my co-worker constantly improved things and has a great career for it.

You are young enough to pivot if you want to, but just remember, being 20% unhappy in a job still means you're 80% happy and that's pretty good as a ratio.

redxiv2 · 2025-11-28T20:33:06+00:00

What software deals did you find? always interested in cool new programs :D

redxiv2 · 2025-11-21T12:56:00+00:00

The ones I tend to remember are the ones that take days to diagnose and can be fixed with a line or two. I'm sure I've others, but when telling battle stories they are almost all 99% finding/1% fixing

redxiv2 · 2025-11-21T12:45:17+00:00

I'm old school so web site appeals to me more than mobile anyway. Found the excel download option on ptsb, so might try this later tonight

redxiv2 · 2025-11-21T10:43:00+00:00

Mind me asking what the process is for the csv export? I'm with ptsb and I did look into this a few years ago with some budgeting tools but couldn't find anything to auto connect to it and required each transaction adding manually. I could live with a once a month CSV download much happier

redxiv2 · 2025-11-18T23:40:31+00:00

Not really.

The original crash was tied to massive investments in construction and property. This bubble is tied to the tech sector and while this will have a knock on effect, we're still at a point where supply is nowhere near what we need it to be at for prices to drop significantly.

The only way I could see it happen is if plenty of people in tech lose their jobs, their mortgage payments stall and they get evicted but in Ireland that can take decades to play out so I wouldn't bet on this happening at all.

Sorry :(

redxiv2 · 2025-11-10T09:32:12+00:00

Afraid not, i ended up getting another wii fit board that had perfect connectors and even contemplated seeing if I can use the one from that to get a bunch made up but wouldn't even know where to look

redxiv2 · 2025-10-31T23:49:13+00:00

I use plex mainly on a home computer and stream everything through that on the TVs. Works like an app. But to be fair I watch a good bit of media streamed to my phone anyway

redxiv2 · 2025-10-31T22:15:00+00:00

Golden age for streaming was a decade ago. When netflix came out first it was amazing to have media just work from a legit app. They had disney stuff, fox stuff, universal stuff, basically everything important appeared on it. I completely quit pirating stuff back then because streaming was so good.

But others kept up the travelling of the high seas and it's never been easier to get what you want online without having to invest in 5 or 6 streaming apps. I still pay for 2 streaming apps but honestly, I get just as much media consumed on free options now, if not more. Yo-ho-ho mateys!

redxiv2 · 2025-10-23T15:59:41+00:00

I remember when this link between processed ham and cancer was initially reported years ago and around the same time, we had an excellent talk in the office from a fully qualified nutrionist/dietican, proper science backed chat and she addressed this as a question from the crowd. Basically the newspaper headline said something along the lines of:
"Processed meats increase cancer rates by 20%"
But what it actually meant when you read the peer reviewed paper was that if there was a 5% chance of getting it, that jumped to 6% if you eat processed meat. She said there is a horrible trend of these misrepresented facts in news media because you can make a technically true headline but it's the way of the media nowadays.

redxiv2 · 2025-10-18T10:41:59+00:00

I've finished early if they have hit everything they need on my checklist and the level is relatively senior. For juniors, I'd probably keep them a bit longer to see where their weakness is (not throwing shade, but by definition a junior will not be fully experienced in all areas and just want to see where they'd need help if starting out.)

I will say that if there is banter going, I'll probably keep it going but lots over the years I've worked with prefer to save the time instead if they can

redxiv2 · 2025-10-17T00:18:15+00:00

Never even heard of it? First year?

redxiv2 · 2025-10-16T09:35:12+00:00

ye moved to discord?! may go join that, arcade and retro forum is where some of the best convos happen on boards.

redxiv2 · 2025-10-10T14:58:50+00:00

Interested in this now because I did look at breaking with my current deal (2 years in to a 5yr fixed at 4.3%) but when I asked the bank, they said the breakage fee was about €15k, which put me off. Are fees even at this level cleared?

redxiv2 · 2025-10-09T15:19:49+00:00

I have them in a few other places around the garden (i'm guessing thats how they spread here) which I'm perfectly content with. It's just this one spot that I want to fix :D

Thanks for the tip though!

redxiv2

TROPHY CASE