Irish Financial Independence & Personal Finance Podcast

Sunday 4th May 2025

Life Lessons from a Sun Holiday

In August last year, we booked a sun holiday. We were off to Lanzarote for a week over the 2025 Easter break. We came back a couple of days ago.

We had a wonderful time, got plenty of sun, got to experience a cheaper, slower pace of life, and got to spend loads of quality time with my wife and kids. Over the week, there were several key thoughts I had that related to both money and life in Ireland.

1. Life is expensive in Ireland

We hired a car for a couple of days on our holiday and I filled up with petrol for 99c per litre! We regularly saw adverts for pints for €2 and dined at a really nice buffet restaurant for €17 per adult and €8.50 for the kids most nights.

The average yearly wage in Lanzarote is around €23,000 per year, so it is no surprise that there is a lower cost of living there, but when we are paying 70c a litre more for petrol, or 3x more for a pint, it does come as a surprise when one sees prices that much lower!

2. Even Cheap Package Holidays Add Up

We got a good deal on our holiday through TUI. We paid a little over €500 per person, for flights, airport transfers and accommodation. We took the self catering option, staying at a large resort in Playa Blanca. The resort we were at was fantastic, with 10 pools, water slides and an easy 15 minute walk to a safe beach, with crystal clear water. Most days, we had the pools to ourselves, or shared with only a handful of other guests.

We were glad that we didn’t opt for the all inclusive package, as I simply don’t think we would have needed to eat that much food! There was an Aldi next door to the resort, so I would walk down there each day to purchase food for breakfast and lunch, and we mainly ate at the buffet restaurant which was well priced. We cooked ourselves using the kitchenette in our room twice.

However, even with a low cost of living, and cheap eating out, the costs still added up. We hired a seven seater car for two days that cost €170, and between eating out, a bit of shopping and everything else, we spent far more than we would have compared to living day to day in Ireland. There are also a lot of hidden costs that aren’t always budgeted, such as the cost of putting our two cats in a cat kennel for a week and food at the airport.

3. A Fresh Perspective

Perhaps the most important realisation is that we realised that our life in Ireland is good. Time away can make the small problems that we have in our daily lives seem trivial. When coming back from holiday, it gives us a new perspective. For example, I realised that time with my family should always be my most important focus, and we shouldn’t need to rely on a specific holiday to make this a priority.

I also got to reflect on the weather in Ireland. Yes, we get a lot of rain, but I always appreciate the rare sunny days we do get. I have often fantasized about moving to a tropical sunny island, like Lanzarote, but it became clear after a week, that while having the sun every day is great, it is also like so many things in life - it becomes a novelty. We actually found towards the end of the holiday, we were spending less time swimming and more time just enjoying time together - eating out together, playing games, throwing a ball around or just going for a walk - all things we could do in Ireland, regardless of the weather.

We created a lot of memory dividends during our holiday and memories that will last a lifetime. What we also found interesting, is that when we got home, and asked our kids what their favorite parts of the holiday was and surprisingly, it had nothing to do with where we were. They loved time together, sleeping in, taking life at a slower pace and us as parents not rushing them out the door or constantly trying to keep the house clean. It wasn’t the beach, or pool or hot weather that they loved, but just spending quality time together.

Our big realisation therefore, was that while a sun holiday is great, it isn’t something we need to do as often as I expected. It had been three years since our last sun holiday, and if we only take one every year or two, then this is totally OK for our family.

We actually came to the conclusion that our best holidays are visiting extended family - such as our big trip to New Zealand later this year or visiting my sister and her kids in London. We actually got home and booked flights to visit my sister in London in August based on feedback from our kids - they felt that seeing their cousins was more fun than a resort full of water slides - funny how kids often have better perspective than adults.

Our Spending Revealed

As mentioned last month, we stopped budgeting in April, and instead just tracked our expenses into various categories. It was an interesting experiment and highlighted some interesting things about our spending. Here is a quick summary:

1. Our basic living costs are low. Years of us optimising our basic living expenses has certainly paid off. We spent a little under €2,900 on our essential spending in April. This highlights that we could live on €40,000 per year if we needed to - just without any of the non essential luxuries.
2. Our basic bills - electricity, heating, insurance, security, TV etc, came in at around €250 per month.
3. Our grocery spending was higher than we had budgeted. I hadn’t tracked our grocery budget for a while, but I have always budgeted €900 per month for groceries - around €30 per day. Our actual spending was around €36 per day. The higher cost is likely caused from 3 things:
   1. Grocery inflation - grocery prices have been rising over the last 12 months
   2. Our kids are growing and now eat more food than they used to
   3. We gave ourselves the license to spend more on quality food. Without the need to budget, we started buying more quality food overall.

Outside of our essential spending, we ended up spending a lot on discretionary spending in April. These were largely one off costs however, and won’t impact on our bottom line in the long term. These were largely due to:

1. Our Lanzarote holiday - we ate out most nights, hired a car and enjoyed ourselves. We shopped and had fun. It was nice to live carefree for a few days.
2. My wife had some medical issues during April. For example, she chipped a tooth one morning accidentally. Without hesitation, I called our dentist and booked her in the next day. It cost €120 to fix her tooth. She felt so much more confident because of this. I later asked her mother what she would have done when she was my wife’s age and that happened, and she said they could never afford the dentist when they were raising kids. This is again the power of FI - health is wealth afterall.
3. My wife also had another medical issue during April. In the past, we would have gone to the GP and waited to be referred to a specialist. Instead, this time around, I contacted a specialist directly and booked and paid for a consultation directly. Between the consultation, and the medication, the total cost was €360, but we saved months of waiting and got to the root of the problem straight away. This is another example of life in our post FI world, where the power of me still working allows us to deal with issues like this without needing to put the money as the first priority - money has become a bit of an afterthought - the priority was to deal with the medical issue first hand.

I will continue to provide future updates on our spending in our post FI world, and while I won’t share all the numbers (as this is likely overkill), I will break it down like I have done this month, and just share various snapshots into our spending where I can.

April 2025 Portfolio Update

Stocks are starting to feel like 2022 all over again. This time around, my overexposure to US Stocks is really starting to hurt. Hindsight is 20:20, but the pensions I have which have more global indexes are performing much better than pension accounts which are largely US focused. I am not panicking however, but rather just riding out the storm.

My Davy PRSA fell below €50,000 during April, which meant the fee charged doubled from 1% or 2%, as Davy charge a 2% fee on balances below €50,000. I actually took the opportunity to purchase some more stocks, and purchased around €2,500 worth of a Vanguard Global Index Fund. I will continue to do this if the balance falls below €50,000 again - a little bit of a change in my overall plan, but I think given the discount that is available for stocks right now, it makes sense.

This will mean that our cash cushion we were saving will now grow at a slower pace, but I think one of the big advantages of having a bit of emergency cash is for exactly these sorts of opportunities. Effectively, in April I took the cashflow that we generated from our rental income and purchased stocks with that profit - this certainly isn’t a bad Coast FI strategy!

Ironically, because of the global uncertainty, and with the ECB cutting interest rates again in April, we are starting to see these interest rate reductions being passed on. The interest rates on our invest properties have fallen from around 7.75% at the peak, to around 5.75 - 6% now. So it has had an immediate positive impact on the cashflow we receive from our rental properties as the monthly mortgage repayments continue to fall. In many ways, this highlights how having a mix of property and stocks can be a powerful strategy, as while one investment falls, the other improves, allowing me to take the profits from one investment and purchase more of the declining investment while it is on sale.

Compare this to 2023 - 24, when I wasn’t buying stocks as shares were not on sale, but instead paid off a mortgage on one of our investment properties, because the interest rate on the mortgage was so high.

Flexibility in one’s investment approach is what FIRE is all about, and even though this might now delay when we will start making withdrawals from the portfolio, I couldn’t help but feel this was a great opportunity to buy stocks on sale. The key change for me in 2025 has been moving away from needing to make monthly contributions to the portfolio, and for now, I am happy to stay in the coasting / consolidation phase, while the portfolio is down overall, knowing I will only benefit from this patience long term.

Lastly, the ceiling was repaired on the rental property which had the leak which I mentioned last month. It cost €400 to repair the ceiling - overall the leak cost around €900 to fix. While I was out in the house, I also realised that the power shower we replaced last year wasn’t working very well, so I will need to look into replacing that again likely during May.

Here are the overall portfolio numbers:

Monthly Portfolio Growth Report

Portfolio Breakdown

The table below shows the breakdown of my portfolio into the various asset classes:

2025 Year to Date Returns

Here is a summary of my year to date returns for 2025.

2025 Year to Date Growth Report
Opening Balance	€705,026.37
New Contributions	€0.00
Equities Capital Gains + Dividends	€-20,842.56
Real Estate Capital Gains + Rental Income	€13,558.60
Interest on Cash Savings	€221.72
Closing Balance	€697,964.13
Portfolio Return	€-7,062.24
% Return	-1.00%

Lifetime Portfolio Returns

Here are my returns since I started in 2018.

* In 2020, some of the new contributions came in the form of an equity release, as we turned our primary residence into a buy to let and purchased a new home to live.

** In 2018 & 2019 I made several bad investments in peer to peer lending, forex trading and unregulated investments, which resulted in losses overall.

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