Just exploring and listening

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • This was the primary reason for me leaving the church, but I had begun my whole “deconstruction” journey years earlier. Between losing my belief and losing my religion, I was there to be a good influence on the true believers. I eventually realised it was useless to do so, that these people who I once considered friends were actually just horrible people. I’m embarrassed how long I really ignored some toxic beliefs and actions just because the people committing them were doing so “for sincerely held beliefs”. Trump and Covid were the real catalysts just because the way and the speed of their “mask off” transition made it obvious even to a socially inept person like me that they were just bad people.


  • I’m not a financial advisor, so nobody copy this, but we removed all our money from the US over the last few years in preparation. We dont have stocks any more, and our last bit of US money is due to be transferred when our tax return is paid out. I’m cautiously optimistic things will hold until then 🤞

    We’ve put most of our money short term into New Zealand banks, specifically term deposits at a few locations, as the financial system here is well insulated at least compared to most countries. Long term we will vary our investment more but we don’t have many options until we are permanent residents (another couple years). It’s a moderate low risk growth, and we are okay with the downsides of it being inaccessible since we have several staggered.

    Here term deposits are likely to be frozen short term in the event of a crash by the Open Banking Resolution system, but our everyday funds will be more accessible. Now for a huge market crash, most bets are off, but being in this little island nation, I feel a lot more secure in the fact that society will pull together rather than eat each other. That’s the true benefit of being here: the culture.






  • Not the person you’re responding to but I did the same thing for in part the same reasons.

    We had significant fiscal privilege in that we were old enough and willing to go into debt enough early in our lives to purchase a house before things got stupid, and each time we moved we sold the house for a profit. We are renting again in our new country (New Zealand) until we build back up and get at least permanent residency (can’t buy a house here unless you’re a PR). Buying a home was the most stressful and most impactful thing financially, but that’s not feasible now for most people.

    We got lucky enough, and purposefully saved for escape for 10 years by living with things that weren’t comfortable (concrete floors for years rather than replace water damage, going above and beyond to keep electricity and gas prices low even at the cost of comfort, working too much to put money into savings and neglecting family, no eating out and limiting grocery budget for last two years, pulling out ALL investments like 401k to make the final push and starting from scratch in our new home, etc.).

    I can tell you it was all worth it. Live below your means (while increasing your means incrementally), beans and rice rather than packaged foods (balanced with how much your time is worth), make every sacrifice with a clear goal in mind. Like I said, it takes years, and you’re operating at a disadvantage just because we did this starting 12-13 years ago when prices were significantly different, and average wages haven’t compensated. We have kids, so the other benefits were things like the child tax credit increase in 2021, which gave us unexpected increases.

    I’ve seen people do all this just to have to go back to the US because they didn’t scope out their landing enough: make sure you know how much you need to survive in your new country, know the cost of visas, limits on what you can earn in your job, know what jobs you can even fill based on visa and qualification restrictions… and then plan for having 5-10% more in total liquidity than you think you need. Things change, accidents happen… in our case our kid had to have emergency surgery the week before our flight, that same day our car died so we couldn’t sell it for as much as we wanted, and a year after arriving they increased the cost of visa renewal by over 100%. Luckily we had planned for things going haywire so we were still able to escape.

    It’s not easy. I wish you all the luck in the world. Sorry for the novel and basically saying “be born earlier and get lucky” 👀








  • You could make a case that based on his other comments and stochastic terrorist language that what he said was dangerous, but those claiming that this specific instance was a threat either didn’t listen closely to what he said (you don’t give someone facing a firing squad a rifle of their own), or just listen to those media reports who are purposefully spreading disinformation.

    He has made plenty of statements that are prosecutable, people don’t need to grasp at straws.

    To answer the question, yeah if you said the same thing Trump did about Cheney, you’d be fine. It wasn’t a threat. He said give her a rifle and put her on the front lines if she’s so eager to have a war, see how she feels then.

    That’s said, Vote. Vote for Harris. While Trump didn’t advocate for putting Cheney in front of a firing squad here, he has asked his military personnel to kill citizens and next time he won’t have someone that will stop him.