This is really good advice for you, OP. Polyamory is potentially a very strong and fulfilling relationship structure, but it's a lot of work and it's not necessarily easy.
Most of the polyamorous people i know came into their relationships already down for polyamory. Opening up a monogamous relationship is risky, so it is a good idea to proceed in an informed and intentional manner.
There's a lot of ways relationships can go. A part of polyamory means finding what works for y'all. Who knows, maybe it'll end up as a monogamous situation where the new guy joins y'all platonically as chosen family.
To clarify, by polycule I mean the total chain of romantic relationships. Currently it's four of us living together, and two more living together as a couple where me and my chosen family member have been dating one of them for years. For most of it, the section living together was three of us, romantically a v but more than that we think of eachother as chosen family.
It definitely helps with financial stability insofar as there's a lot of buffer when someone is between jobs, but otherwise it's not all that different. Housing space needs scale with number of people in the family, after all. We're starting to look in to purchasing a house together, and to an extent the purchasing power of four working professionals helps there, but if we also want kids it means looking at big houses so again it kinda evens out. There's also an added layer of legal complexity that becomes necessary with home ownership - we don't have a ready made framework like marriage.
Edit: I realized I didn't answer your first question. It depends. Not as much as a traditional monogamous married family would - we mostly have separate bank accounts. But we share most of our expenses (even split for ease) and have income-scaled split of rent.
You should look into polyamory/consensual non-monogamy. What you're describing doesn't have to be seen as some sort of weird perverse thing doomed to failure and return to the status quo. It is a legitimate family structure.
I've been in a polyamorous family for almost a decade now. Most of it was three (the sort of v shape you describe) but also with a larger (currently six total) non-domestic polycule. I'm not the tip of the v but I love my metamours (word for partners' partners) as family.
It's viable. The trick is a gratuitous amount of candid conversation, and a dedication to the family.
I recently started migrating my email and went with mailbox.org. I opted for it based on it having a good balance of ethical/environmental stances, support for custom email domain (so email doesn't feel like vendor lock in in the future), and a business model focusing on paid service.
There were a lot of options but ultimately I just wanted something "good enough" rather than spending weeks on comparing. A part of that decision was realizing I didn't care about getting something with the best possible privacy - email is predominantly an insecure medium and things with E2EE work only if the recipient is in the same ecosystem, which is rare. In practice I'm not going to trust anything sensitive to email regardless, so I might as well prioritize picking something that looks like a decent and stable balance.
Mailbox.org has calendar but I haven't really played with it much. I'm realistically going to look in to look in to something self hosted since I will require more features than most email providers will offer, so I don't want to tether the two services. That was a part of the reasoning for Mailbox.org over something with more services - I wanted email, not something trying to be the next ecosystem - that's what I was trying to get away from!
The joke is it inverts the usual "what a week/but captain it's Wednesday" meme. Wednesday (the character) calls the captain Commodore (a title for someone in command of a group of ships, but lower rank than an admiral). The captain corrects Wednesday, saying he's just a captain.
Were you using a VPN at the time? I was under the impression that the issue is at standard anything involving ports just doesn't work with a VPN because it would be trying to get to the port on the VPN, which the VPN would rightly refuse unless you'd set it up to forward that port
Mullvad is great if privacy is your only metric, but it's not unique in that respect and no port forwarding is a serious limitation in this context. I've been looking into alternatives and AirVPN and OVPN both look reputable.
I think it's both? I'm assuming you get fewer seeds you can connect to as well.
Either way, seeding issues are leeching issues, in the grand scheme of things.
Edit: I only stress the seed side because I've found I get things plenty fast even with Mullvad, so not explaining the issue and just talking about down speed can make it seem unnecessary, when it is in fact critical to the health of the community.
Without port forwarding you can only connect to those who do have it set up. Doing so yourself allows you to be a better citizen of the internet and share with people who don't know what it is.
(Caveat: I am one of those people who don't understand it and am just parroting what was explained to me when I asked about this)
I guess you could say OP's wording was a bit rude (stylistically, not in substance, imo). Personally I'd go with a "No, sorry." or "Sorry, in a rush!" if on the move, and leave it at that as elaboration leaves the door open for them to pry. Either way the question is about whether it's rude to refuse, not whether the specific example was.
Personally, I'd rather assume OP is chatting/providing more context rather than fishing for sympathy. Many of the comments that say it is rude also say but not if it's a rando, which it was.
Sometimes people use that question rhetorically because it feels polite, viewing it as a small talk precursor to ease in to actually just saying what they want.
I don't like when people use it as such, because it is insincere, poor consent practice, and low-key manipulative due to the foot in the door phenomenon .
There are tons of legitimate reasons to not be comfortable with the question. Don't have time, bad headspace, don't feel comfortable... If they can't understand that, I try not to care what they think of me.
This is really good advice for you, OP. Polyamory is potentially a very strong and fulfilling relationship structure, but it's a lot of work and it's not necessarily easy.
Most of the polyamorous people i know came into their relationships already down for polyamory. Opening up a monogamous relationship is risky, so it is a good idea to proceed in an informed and intentional manner.
There's a lot of ways relationships can go. A part of polyamory means finding what works for y'all. Who knows, maybe it'll end up as a monogamous situation where the new guy joins y'all platonically as chosen family.