Irish Financial Independence & Personal Finance Podcast

Friday 6th March 2026

What happens when you forget to retire?

I have said it before, and I will likely say it again, but FIRE really isn’t about early retirement. It is about doing the things you are currently doing, but just better.

This might mean working a job you enjoy, rather than one you are at just for the money. Or spending money unemotionally, because you know you have enough and it doesn’t really move the needle.

It is funny when I look back, that there was once a time where I feared my FIRE plan because I was worried grocery inflation was too high, or my private health insurance bill was going to rise too much next year, which might not allow me to retire early.

Here is the reality - on reflection, none of these costs really matter anymore, because we choose the FI aspect, but not the early retirement aspect.

This is what FI brings you. Not a 24/7 holiday, not frugality and penny pinching and budgeting, but the ability to forget about the small stuff. The slight price changes in your weekly supermarket shop, or a sudden rise at the petrol pump. It is a great feeling not to have to sweat the small stuff.

Yet behind the scenes, we are still growing our investment portfolio, we just no longer need to contribute to it.

We aren’t looking to retire, as we already feel retired, even if I am still working.

My work colleagues think I am weird when I tell them that Monday is my favourite day of the week! But it is true. There is something about a fresh new week that makes me feel good about life. For me, FIRE is about being able to appreciate each and every day, without financial stress.

When we were chasing FIRE, I genuinely thought we would leave the 9-5, but as we got closer, we realised that the work wasn’t the problem - it was the fact that we had to do the work just to pay the bills.

Once the work became optional, I was quickly able to make changes to my work routine that I didn’t like, remove parts of the job that I didn’t want to do, and embrace things like flexi time and take days off as I saw fit.

It turns out that FIRE was never really about retiring early - it was about getting to a point where you could retire early if you wanted to - but understanding that the life you had built was so good, you wouldn’t choose to retire anyway.

Buying more investment properties

We are still closing on our fifth investment property and hope to close within the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, someone in the Limerick FI Whats App Group mentioned a new lender who works specifically with SPV companies.

We typically purchase investment properties within our company structure, just because it was initially more tax efficient for us to put deposits together by leaving money in my web development company, rather than taking the tax hit and losing half to tax by taking the profit out of the company as wages.

Up until now, there was only one lender in town that did this sort of lending - ICS. ICS have always been good to us, but they are also painfully slow. It would take months to close on a deal, so when I heard a new lender was in town, I got excited about it.

We have three properties within our company structure that we purchased three years ago. All three have gained considerable equity over the last three years, and it started to make sense to refinance these properties to have less equity tied up in them. As part of our latest deal, we are refinancing the property we were mortgage free on.

But as it was, after a discussion with this new lender, they mentioned that we could also purchase another investment property and release equity from another property. So we have been looking, and I have been a little like a dog with a bone - absolutely going mad trying to see if I could find a deal.

In a space of two weeks, I reached out to 30 different properties. I would typically do this by going through Daft, with quite a large catchment area in terms of locations I am looking at. I was also open to apartments, town houses, 2 bed, 3 bed, semi-D etc. I was flexible on property type.

What I was ultimately interested in was the yield. The yearly rent divided by the property price. This was my big metric.

And do you know what was interesting? There were deals out there! It surprised me, but there was. Even in a crazy, seller friendly market, I was able to find many deals that hit the metric I was looking for.

For us to get financing, we typically need to find property that has a minimum 8% yield, but there were plenty of properties that were hitting this metric. We then had to filter out those that were ex-rentals, as they didn’t have the ability for us to reset the market rent, so we would look to purchase owner-occupied properties.

So of the 30 I contacted, it was a case where around five were sale agreed already, another 10 were ex rentals, and another 10 were way above asking price and were no longer good yields, or there were too many buyers and I just wasn’t interested.

3 properties I viewed, and they were just terrible. They failed my “would I live here” test, which is the first question I like to answer when I look at a property - if I were looking to buy this property for myself, rather than for a rental property - would I actually live here.

If the answer is no, I move on regardless of the numbers!

This isn’t to say the property needs to be a certain size, or be at a certain location, but it at least needs to have a nice feeling about it, be in a nice neighbourhood and be somewhat clean and liveable.

That left around 3 properties that I was able to bid on.

The way property is bought and sold in Ireland is pretty bad for the buyers. Let’s be honest, this whole endless auction style approach really is terrible. I hate bidding wars! I hate them. Infact, I have never won a single one that I have been in - and trust me, I have been in many!

I hate them so much, that I now avoid them. Honestly, they don’t need to be part of your buying process. Instead, I typically just make my best offer one time. I have one bid, and one bid only.

Depending on the situation, sometimes I might make an initial lower offer, a holding offer if you like, to come back with my one final offer at a later stage.

One of the properties we put an offer on, was a solid 2 bedroom apartment in Castletroy - walking distance from my house! I have known the auctioneer for many years, and we got on great. I could tell he was excited to potentially be working with me on a deal. The asking price was €250,000, current offer €230,000. I knew the €230k was an unrealistic offer - no real threat there. The auctioneer made it clear the vendor was looking for €250k. I knew market rent there was at least €2,000 euro per month - we are talking just under a 10% yield. The apartment hadn’t been rented in the last two years, so everything was pointing to a green light.

I emailed over a strong offer the next morning, €250k, full asking price, attaching our AIP. And was confident I would be ‘sale agreed’ within 24 hours.

My phone buzzed the next morning, and I expected to see the good news. But alias “Hi Michael, just to let you know, the underbidder doesn’t appear to be interested in bidding again, however a new offer has come in from a first time buyer who viewed the property last week, they have offered €252,000. Please let me know what your next action is.”

Honestly, this might surprise you. It tells you a lot about how I approach buying property. I walked away! As I mentioned earlier, I have never won a bidding war, and I was in no mood to enter into one now. All I was going to do was squeeze my yield. I would have seen it go from near 10%, to 9, to 8, and where next? I know I eventually give up, with the price €30k higher, and the first time buyer then stretched to the limit.

I kindly sent the auctioneer a note back, to say I had offered my best offer, and to come back to me if the sale falls through with the first time buyer.

And you know what - they do fall through - a lot more than you will think. An auctioneer from Sherry Fitz, Ireland’s largest estate agents, told me recently that a sale will fall through between 20 to 25% of the time. Anywhere from 1 in 4 sales fall through. So yes, while I could enter a bidding war and try to win it, statistically, I am far better off just being second - knowing that there is a 20 to 25% chance that the auctioneer will come back to me a few weeks later, letting me know that my offer might now be good.

I love the process of looking at property and trying to find a good deal. It doesn’t really matter if the property market is up or down, there is always an opportunity out there somewhere.

For now, we aren’t yet ‘sale agreed’ on a new property, but as always, watch this space and I will provide more details when the time comes!

February 2026 Portfolio Update

It was another solid month for the portfolio, with our rental income doing it’s normal thing, and stocks up fractionally.

My nearly nine year old son had a bit of extra money and asked us to “invest it in our houses”, so I had a contribution of €140 from him this month. Our kids have invested money in the portfolio over the years, and I track their amounts separately in excel. Their total makes up a tiny percentage of the overall portfolio, but it is nice to have them involved. They ask for the new valuations every six months when I calculate them.

Finally, with us signing contracts on our fifth investment property, I have started moving some money from cash to our property equity. The deal is largely no cash down due to the refinancing of an existing property, but we do still have to pay the legal fees and stamp duty. I will need to also do a few upgrades and repairs before the property can be rented out.

Let’s break down the numbers:

Monthly Portfolio Growth Report

Portfolio Breakdown

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

2026 Year to Date Returns

Here is a summary of my year to date returns for 2026.

2025 Year to Date Growth Report
Opening Balance	€846,030.49
New Contributions	€140.00
Equities Capital Gains + Dividends	€1,986.47
Real Estate Rental Income	€7,556.80
Interest on Cash Savings	€5.25
Closing Balance	€855,719.01
Portfolio Return	€9,548.52
% Return	1.13%

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