Irish Financial Independence & Personal Finance Podcast

Friday 4th July 2025

The Guilt of FIRE

This is going to sound silly, but these days I often have a sense of guilt. Life is good, we are living a blessed life. Full of fun and laughter and being able to do things on our own terms and at our own pace. I have started getting better at saying no to opportunities, especially if that opportunity results in me needing to travel or be somewhere not on my own schedule.

Yet there is a constant guilt that tends to be consistently there. My decision to not leave my 9-5 job after hitting FI has had an unintended consequence. I want to work on my own terms, yet full time work doesn’t always allow it to be that simple. Even though my full time job gives me so much flexibility, there is still a sense that I am letting people down if I’m not there during the standard working hours.

I recently joined the gym with my wife, and twice a week we attend gym classes during the middle of the day. It is a wonderful thing to be able to do while the kids are at school. The gym is quiet, and bar a few regulars, there is a great sense of freedom being able to exercise outside of the usual peak times.

But I still have a dread that something is going to go wrong while I am away from my desk. Like there will be some sort of emergency that I am going to miss while I am at the gym. Perhaps there is a last minute meeting added while I am away from my desk, or some IT emergency happens which needs me to help solve a major issue.

I tend to like to work my own hours, which can involve starting early, or working late. It is a mixture of both, depending on my day and how I am feeling. I am finding the constraints of the 9-5 getting difficult to cope with. This isn’t a fault of the work system - it is a fault of my new found time freedom getting in the way of what society expects work to be.

I am due to take some significant time off over the summer, so I am excited about how having two months of no 9-5 job is going to be like. I am hoping it will solve some of the guilt I feel on a day to day basis when it comes to working a full time job.

As much as I like the majority of my job, I feel like it is now only a matter of time until things are going to need to change. I want to continue exploring ways that I can make the job work on my own terms - fully. It is ultimately the routine which I find difficult. I want full time freedom, complete control of my day. I want to be able to structure work fully around my lifestyle, not the other way around. I want to be able to take time off in the middle of the day to go to the gym, or take a long lunch break with my wife, without needing to feel guilty that I am using the flexibility I have rightfully earned. Likewise, I want to be able to say “nope, I won’t work today”, without feeling guilty about letting my work colleagues down.

It has become clear that work is going to change for me over the next six months. I want to have the freedom to be able to move away from the regular 9-5 hours. To work less, to be “on call” less, to feel the need to be at my desk just in case a Teams message comes on that requires an instant answer. This way of working was ideal when grinding. When I was focused solely on the pay cheque, the 9-5 routine was a fantastic thing - it gave me a countdown to when the work day was over, when I could stop worrying about being “on call”. When I worked two jobs at a time, 5pm was the time of the day where I could stop worrying about one project and move my focus to the next. Later it became the time when I could shut down the laptop and switch to my time freedom which only existed outside of 9-5 hours.

But these days, I have the freedom to choose how I spend my whole day, and this whole 9-5 thing is getting in the way!

I mentioned last month about how I had realised we had household renovations to do, which was likely going to make it difficult for me to move to part time work next year. I sat down with my wife during June, and explained to her about how I was feeling. How I am feeling trapped by my 9-5, by the routine meetings, but the fact that I felt I was still working full time when I should be working 100% on my own terms. She made it clear to me that the renovations can wait - that me finding a solution to this guilt, to this feeling of being stuck in the 9-5 routine is more important than a freshly tiled bathroom.

I have mentioned this before, but work in 2025 is far better than it was when I was grinding and making monthly contributions. When I am at a FIRE Meet Up group, and someone hears I am only working 175 days a year, they can’t understand what I have to complain about. They say things like “forget the guilt, just work there as long as you can”. I think deep down, I feel like I hit my FI number and nothing fundamentally changed. I was so relieved to not have to make contributions anymore - I started to scale back on some of the extra jobs I was doing. I started to let go of clients and reduce my workload where I could.

But ultimately, nothing really changed. Those clients who I tried to reduce my workload still contact me. They still ask me to do that “one more job” for me. I read the email, put it into a “to-do” list and wonder when I will ever have the motivation or time to handle their request. I have too many other non-work things which are going to come before their request - family time, time with my wife, golf, exercise and a gym workout. More guilt to add to my ever growing list of frustrations.

I then start to ask myself the bigger questions. Could I just retire? I reflect on this a lot, and have written about this over the last few months. Early retirement is a myth, no one really retires early. Retirement in the FIRE context just means leaving your 9-5, moving onto a different way of earning money.

So if retirement isn’t on the cards then what is? I still like so many elements about work. There is still so much I have to offer, and my ability to solve hard programming tasks is still good - I still have it! But I need it to be fully on my own terms, not around a 9-5 routine, and in a way where I can dictate the terms. I need to find my own guilt free way to work, around working hours that I fully control.

I don’t know what this will look like yet, but I am working on it. No doubt I will keep you updated as I try to figure out this next chapter of what life will be without the need to hang onto a 9-5 job.

June 2025 Portfolio Update

Every six months we update the valuations on our four investment properties. The Irish property market has been running hot over the last 12 months, with the most recent Daft report reporting a 12% increase in Irish property prices over the last 12 months.

I have always tried to value our properties conservatively and account for any related costs if we were to sell our properties today.

Here is a breakdown of the updated valuations on our four investment properties.

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	€-7,098.19
Real Estate Capital Gains + Rental Income	€77,967.61
Interest on Cash Savings	€235.58
Closing Balance	€776,131.37
Portfolio Return	€71,105.00
% Return	10.09%

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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