Irish Financial Independence & Personal Finance Podcast

Thursday 22nd January 2026

2025 - A Year in Review

My December update is later than normal, as we enjoyed three weeks in New Zealand and only got back in mid January. I will provide a full New Zealand trip update in my January update due in a week or two.

2025 has been another great year for the portfolio. 2025 was the year that we stopped making contributions to the portfolio and simply let the portfolio coast in the background. This didn’t seem to stop the portfolio from growing!

Stocks were up again in 2025, but the real story of the growth in our portfolio was once again Irish property.

I mentioned this last month, but leveraged property has been the secret to our success when it comes to portfolio performance.

Twice a year (June & December), we revalue our buy to let properties, so as it was the end of the year, this process was done again. I have had questions in the past about how we calculate this, so I want to break this down in more detail this time around, to show how our property equity is calculated.

In the past, I didn’t always break out the full calculations as clearly as I could have. This time, I’m showing gross valuations, with any capital gains tax liability listed separately.

If you’ve been following these valuation updates every six months, you may notice what looks like a jump in the valuation figures. This is simply because earlier updates showed net valuations (after capital gains tax). Going forward, I’ll present the gross value and the tax impact separately to make the numbers easier to understand.

I mentioned last month that we purchased another investment property. As part of this process, we are refinancing another property that we are mortgage free on and as a result, we had to pay for a valuation report. We went ‘sale agreed’ on the property in mid 2022 for €165,000. The valuation came back today for €295,000.

All of our properties have seen significant growth in valuations over the last three years. While this is largely paper gains, this growth is why our portfolio has risen in value so quickly over the last three years.

I am going to break down how we calculate the equity on each property, but before I do, I need to talk about capital gains. We own one property in our own name personally, and three (soon to be four) properties within our company structure. We treat capital gains differently for each.

For the property in our own name, we have owned that since 2013, and it became a rental property five years ago. Because we did live in the property, in the event we sold that property, we will be entitled to some relief on the capital gains tax. In other words, we won’t need to pay capital gains tax at the full rate of 33%. For example, assume we lived there half the time, and rented it out half the time, then the actual rate of capital gains would be 16.5%. There is a calculation to work this out, and our accountant will take care of it in the event we were to sell, but I just want to point out that the capital gains tax would be lower on this property than on the investment properties we own in our company.

As for the investment properties owned in our company, they are effectively double taxed. This is one of the downfalls of buying investment property within a company structure - but as I have mentioned in the past, the reason we did buy within a company, was that we felt it was better to do this, than take the 55% tax hit (our top tax rate) and buy personally. Effectively, rather than paying income tax first (at 55%), then paying capital gains tax on the profit, we are paying capital gains tax first, and then paying tax when we distribute that profit as income (ideally at the lower income tax rate of around 17% instead of 55%).

As a result, capital gains tax is calculated at 33%, and then if I were to take that profit out of the company (in the form of wages), I would then be subject to paying tax on that at my personal tax rate.

Obviously not an ideal scenario, but it is what it is, and I will account for all of this when giving a breakdown.

Finally, I also include “Selling costs” if we were to sell the properties today - which includes the auctioneer fees, solicitor fees and estimated costs for minor repairs etc related to selling the property (painting etc). This is why this cost differs depending on the property and the level of work required.

Here is a breakdown of our four investment properties and how we calculated the equity in each property:

Hopefully this helps give a better breakdown of how we value our property equity within our four investment properties. We do this every six months and update the portfolio valuations accordingly.

December 2025 Portfolio Update

Stocks were down slightly in December, however our property was once again up, climbing €40,000 between rental income and updated valuations.

2025 has been another great year for the portfolio - the portfolio climbed from €705,026.37 to €846,030.49 in the twelve months - all without me adding a single cent!

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	€13,387.50
Real Estate Capital Gains + Rental Income	€133,310.90
Interest on Cash Savings	€258.72
Capital Withdrawn	€-5,953.00
Closing Balance	€846,030.49
Portfolio Return	€146,957.12
% Return	21.02%

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