u/Only-Garbage-4229

My manager has hinted a few times about wanting to make me perm, and of course been up front that this would mean the salary is not comparable as a headline figure, but he will give me full details of the package.

A little bit, I'd like to have my cake and eat it, so I'd like to push through a 6-month extension, rebuild my finances a bit and then go perm after that.

He kind of sprung it on me in our last meeting, so I sort of indicated I'd be interested in staying long-term. But having rationally thought about it a bit more, I'm wondering how to delay the perm side of things.

Is it reasonable to come back and say "in the short term, due to my remortgage and things, a contract extension would be my better option, and we can look at going perm at the end of this extension, understanding the possibility that the roles may no longer be available come march/april"?

How would you phrase it?

I'm trying to develop an application for my mac, just a personal project. I'm using Matt Pocock grill me skill, followed by to tickets, so that each one should be a manageable piece.

Unfortunately though, the model just keeps spinning in circles trying to get things to compile and repeats the same mistakes. I don't know if that's a model issue, a harness issue (tried Pi and OpenCode) or just an idiot outside issue.

Just curious which tree I should bark up next?

I'll admit to being early and inexperienced in running these models locally. I'm mostly at work using Claude Code and paid subscriptions, but for my own personal projects, that'll get spendy and I can be patient.

However I am finding that quite often I just see a stream of:

Starting.

Wait, I'll do it in one turn.

Repeated over and over again, burning through tokens. Occasionally something will change but I have no way of knowing if it's doing something useful or not. I can just see the tokens generated ramping up but seemingly no useful work.

Is this some sort of bug?

All I asked was for it to take a temporary one god file project and refactor it to modular projects.

I'm utilising Claude Code due to familiarity and LM Studio due to simplicity (though more configuration than Ollama). And I was using the Skills from Matt Pocock to generate code.

I've neglected my garden a fair bit, but finally got out and started cleaning up. But I've noticed my rose bush is being absolutely eaten alive by what I thought were caterpillars, but googling it seems it's Rose Sawfly, or Rose slugs?

The RHS says to leave it be, but unfortunately it seems not many birds are coming to my garden to have a feast.

It looks a bit far gone, but if there's something easy I can do to cut the number of them down or that I can do to attract birds to my garden?

I'm trying to play Nintendo 64, Goldeneye on my Pi5 with a PS5 controller.

While it's all working, I'm really struggling with the controls and wondered if there are any mods/patches that let me control it with a more modern control style?

I have used Vanguard for all my investing for the best part of 10 years. It was low cost and dependable.

But I've needed a different SIPP provider for my new work pension place and settled on ii (did intend to use Scottish widows, but the sign up page was broken and calling their help line didn't get anywhere over a few weeks).

Now that I am paying a guaranteed ii monthly subscription, is it worth merging my investments onto the same platform?

I have £180k in my SIPP, £200k in my S&S ISA. Pretty much all of it is invested in FTSE global all cap, as recommended here.

So I'd plan to do the same on ii. Even with the transfer my cost would go to £15.99 on ii. My last quarterly bill from vanguard came out at £91.34, so I think I'd be roughly halving my costs, right?

I plan to use the account as:

SIPP - company pension (I'm a contractor) ISA - contribute £20k next tax year GIA - regular monthly contribution to ftse global all cap, ready to bed and ISA it for next year's ISA allowance

Good plan?

I am single, live on my own, mortgaged house and no dependants. I still have my health for now, but now that I have become a contractor, I wonder if having a level of insurance would be useful?

Seem to be getting quotes on the comaprison sites of between £35 - £50 a month for varying levels of cover, when it kicks in, how long it lasts, etc.

I'm Inside IR35 for 6 month contract (hopeful of extension of course).

Its not something I've ever considered before, so would be good to get some external opinion not from someone trying to sell me on it (the financial advisor my umbrella has offered)

Starting a new role as an inside ir35 contractor. I'm wanting to contribute handsomely to my pension, filling my full 60k contributions as much as I can.

Who to use as a SIPP provider? As vanguard my current sipp provider isn't suitable.

I have a Fossil Gen 5 that I loved, but the battery life on it is awful. It can barely make a day in all the lowest power settings and going for a run with it, it won't last 30 minutes.

I'd switched to a basic Forerunner 55, but I find the app market place quite limited. There's no C25K type apps, no run coaching etc.

I could go to a more expensive Garmin which may help with this, but I'd like a proper smart watch with fitness aspects, rather than the other way around.

Looking around I see there is the Pixel 4, the OnePlus 4, Samsung Watch 8. My current phone is a Xiaomi, so I'm not sure it's worth getting a Samsung watch if there are features cut off from me.

I'm looking for a watch that can:

• Track running
• Tracking swimming
• Track general gym stuff (step machine, rowing, free weights)

That last one is a nice to have, but not essential. But a battery life of a couple of days would be fine, I can charge easily, but sleep tracking would be interesting, though not essential. But it's got to actually last a full day.

What's the recommendations out there?

I am starting a new role as a contractor, and as part of the Umbrella perk, I am given the option to meet a fincancial adviser. After all the normal blurb of that they are authorised and regulated etc, it's come down to going through my current pensions, my financial situation in what I'm spending, what would happen if I was ill etc.

To setup a pension with their provider, would cost me £450, and they would monitor all my pensions through letters of authroity, advise if I should merge them or not and make sure the investments are sensible and if they should be changed.

I haven't had a final cost yet of what the ongoing fees are though, so that's something that I should find out end of this week.

I'm single, mortgage that is manageable and have always made sure to put heavily into my pensions, with a good 6 months of cash available for if I'm out of work/ill. I've so far managed everything on my own, with the words from this subreddit, so everything is in VWRP and long-term invested.

But when would it be worth getting proper financial advice? I'm mid-30s, so a good 25-30 years away from pension time.

I have held shares in a company on Trading212 for about 6 years. Since then I have a huge amount of returns and now that it is time for my remortgage I'm wondering if it's worth selling some/all to pay down the mortgage now that my rate is going to be 4-5 times more.

Before doing that though, I'd want to know how much tax might end up being paid on my profits if I were to sell some. I know that it's £3k worth of profit is tax free.

But the shares were bought in a number of stages, so it's not like I have one price that I bought at and one price that I sold at. I have X shares at £y, Z shares at £A and B shares at £C etc.

I'm about to start a new contract and have found that my Umbrella (and it seems most) don't support Vanguard as a SIPP provider.

Who is the go to recommended, for investing in a global equity tracker, like the Vanguard Global FTSE All Cap?

I'd prefer to be with one platform, so if I could transfer my ISA and my SIPP to one that'd be ideal, but not imperative if it ends up being just my SIPP.

I am trying to get a good understanding of where I am spending my money. I logged into the Lloyds bank account to get my credit card statements. It only allows me to download a CSV of the last 6 statements. To get anything older, I have to download each PDF statement, but then I can't really easily do much with that in a spreadsheet.

Is there a trick someone knows, or will I just need to spend a night manually doing this?