Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I love the way setting a thermostat to 63 is classed as an experiment! That's 17.2 celcius, a temperature which our inadequate heating system struggles to heat our poorly insulated rented home up to even when it's been on since 4am. It's normally around 15 (59F) when I first come downstairs in the m...

Yes, a private sale is a good idea, especially in areas where there are shortages of property and you get bidding wars. The local dog walker who talks to everyone actually told us about a house on our street that he thought the owner wanted to sell. There have been leaflet drops around here trying t...

I really enjoyed reading it, thanks for sharing.

Advertised housing will by its nature sell for roughly the market rate - if it was way underpriced then somebody would outbid you. In my experience it has to come through social capital. The cheap niche housing that springs to mind from people I know has been for example: 1) living in something non-...

It was my understanding that if you get covid, you can still contract it, get sick, and be contagious. What the vaccine does is reduce your chance of ending up on a ventilator..... Sanity check please? In the early days of the AZN/Oxford vaccine development, I remember reading that none of the monk...

Also the EU is democratic, I know that because I voted in EU elections. I should have said this was a perception. I too have voted in EU elections for the European Parliament, but European legislation is put forward by the European Commission which is not directly elected. The European Parliament d...

I don't agree with most of the other advice in this topic or your conclusions. If you just want to bake bread and avoid the bullshit as you mention in your first post, why not start the same business as my friend, but with maybe some slightly smarter low effort marketing and a CRM? I still don't und...

The current argument of "Look at the mortality rate now. That's acceptable, let's open everything up." is just factually wrong. It would be like abolishing all automotive safety measures because the fatalities per mile driven are so low. Nice analogy. And that's before we get onto the fac...

I was caught off totally by surprise that the Tory's won and gained majority: Opinion polls usually underestimate the Tory/Conservative vote share. There is a concept called "Shy Tories" where their supporters keep quiet about their voting intentions. This is partly because of the vilific...

I have a friend who started a bread business. She did it in her house using a domestic oven. She makes sourdough loaves and sells them in her local area. It's an affluent area so it has been possible to charge a premium - this is the reason for doing it at home, as premises are prohibitively expensi...

I did wonder if the "coincidence" was that such a big deal was being made of a new strain just before Christmas, a time when millions of households would be mixing. It's certainly a convenient reason to change the rules at the last minute - "when the facts change, I change my mind&quo...

Yeah a bit of annoyance spilled over in the last paragraph. They've just made it illegal for the mother-in-law to visit, lol.

The rest of my post is scientifically interesting though!

Statement from the UK's Chief Medical Officer today about the new CV strain which has been spreading in southeast England: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/statement-from-chief-medical-officer-professor-chris-whitty-about-new-strain-of-covid-19 The UK has informed the WHO that the new strain is s...

The UK government has announced that a new strain has emerged in southern England and has already infected at least 1,000 people. The mutation is in the spike protein which is the target of the main three vaccines. It is too early to say how serious a development this is. Edit: link to a primary so...

I’ve always been puzzled about the "I’ve gone back to work" posts in the FIRE sphere (referring to the two links above, not OP). They often sound confused (Jacob excluded). What did those people think they’d do once "retired"? Stay home and twiddle their thumbs for half a centur...

These two posts from very different FIRE bloggers in the UK spring to mind:

https://sexhealthmoneydeath.com/2016/08 ... -returned/

http://www.retirementinvestingtoday.com ... ul-fi.html

I have a bit of sympathy for the thrust of @J_'s point as we do indeed have a large and unhealthy population in Western countries. That's due to a mix of stuff like having kids grow up in overly sterile environments, unhealthy diets and lifestyles, and of course finding ways of keeping more people a...

The UK government has announced that a new strain has emerged in southern England and has already infected at least 1,000 people. The mutation is in the spike protein which is the target of the main three vaccines. It is too early to say how serious a development this is. Edit: link to a primary sou...

We have a combined washer/dryer machine. It looks like a regular (front loading) washing machine but has an optional drying cycle which takes almost all the water out of the clothes and sends it down the same outpipe. The reason we have this is that in the UK it can be very difficult to dry clothes ...

Yep you might well be right for the US. We actually have the same hot + cold feed in our rental house (in the UK), it's just that the washing machine was about 20 years old and all modern ones in the UK have cold feed only, so the hot feed was redundant. Obviously for a shower it works differently b...