Irish Financial Independence & Personal Finance Podcast

Monday 6th July 2026

The day that never comes

In May 2025, Metallica announced tickets to a two night Dublin show. It had been a lifetime dream of mine to see Metallica in concern, with my older son also a huge fan of anything heavy metal (Metallica is on the softer side for him), and my youngest also a huge fan, I booked seated tickets for the two day gig.

Over a year later, the day came and what a weekend! We drove up and down both nights. My nine year old slept in the car on the way home, and was even such a trooper that he went to school Monday morning after getting it at 1am after the Sunday night gig.

As I said to the boys on the way up, this is a weekend you will remember forever! And as an additional bonus, as we walked into the gig on the second night, one of the roadies stopped my youngest, gave him a high five and handed him one of James Hetfield's guilter picks! Magic.

Seasonal Work Update

Over the years, I have been slowly increasing the amount of time off I take during the summer months. With us buying a holiday home last year, our plan had been to spend the whole of July and most of August down in West Clare. Getting out of the humidity of Limerick and enjoying some coastal weather.

This has been easier said than done. I have found that trying to pack up your life for two months isn’t as easy as I expected, as there are naturally various appointments in your usual home that you need to attend. So in practice, this has resulted in us spending most of our time in West Clare, with some of the summer being back up in Limerick as needed.

Work wise, I had hoped to schedule off most of July and August to take a full two month break. This unfortunately seems unlikely however, for two reasons.

Firstly, even though I signalled with work early that I would be taking the break, work is busy at the moment and there is an October deadline with a work project that I am struggling to manage. Work deadlines in my usually relaxed government contract usually aren’t an issue, but it turns out that trying to take eight weeks off work has a way of changing that. This has been a bit of a lesson for me, and something I feel like I need to plan a little bit better with my work team in the future.

Secondly, with us going sale agreed on property number eight last month, this naturally lends to cause a little bit of financial pressure. It is one of the biggest downsides of property – the lending and closing aspect. There are always significant costs from purchase to getting the property rent ready, and as much as the majority of the deposit and legal costs are covered by our refinance, it never seems to be enough to cover the full costs.

This has created a bit of pressure to cover two months of not working (keep in mind, I am only paid for days I work) and trying to cover the purchase of this new property – so I could definitely do with working here and there this summer to help offset some of these costs.

I have negotiated the initial two and a half weeks off in July anyway and will go from there to see how much time I end up being able to take off – but this is definitely something I want to prepare for a bit better in future years. Between ensuring my work team can cope for me being away for a few weeks and thinking more about my path to finance when purchasing investment property, it is important that I remember the biggest thing at this stage of our FIRE journey is time freedom – and having to work more than I really want to isn’t something I should be doing at this stage of my journey.

This is another example of the difference between the theory and practice of FIRE. In my head, FIRE was going to give me summer’s off like I had when I was a kid. In practice, there is a level of compromise that is needed along the way.

Property revaluations

Every six months we revalue our buy to let properties based on updates in the property market. This process has become more complex over the years as I tried to put in place a more accurate breakdown of our investment portfolio.

We go through the following steps to work out the total equity we have invested in property:

1. Work out a rough price if we were to sell the properties today, assuming they were vacant. We compare prices to what has sold in the area, check current listings on Daft and use any written valuations that we might have gotten recently on a property.

2. Find out the current mortgage balances for each balance as of the last day of the month, and subtract this from the valuation price.

3. Adjust for any selling costs – typically the estimated auctioneer and legal costs if we were to sell, as well as any costs associated with getting the property ready to sell, e.g. painting the property.

4. We calculate what capital gains tax would be due give or tax if we were to sell the properties and deduct this from the valuations.

Therefore, our estimated market valuation, less the mortgage balance, less any estimated selling costs, less any capital gains tax which would be due on the sale of the property, gives us our property equity.

I have gotten better at calculating this figure over the last couple of years, and this time used AI to help me calculate the possible capital gains tax figure for each property. I had forgotten in previous updates to account for the legal costs associated with buying each property (which for a commercial mortgage can be significant). These legal costs are deducible against the capital gains tax, e.g.:

Calculate the capital gain, subtract any deductible costs (in this case legal costs) and take 33% of this to calculate your capital gain.

Therefore, our property equity based on the five buy to let properties we currently own looks something like this:

Hitting €900,000 Portfolio Valuation

The big news in June, is that with the revaluation of our investment properties, our portfolio crossed the €900k mark for the first time. I crossed the €800k mark back in October last year and here is our 100k breakdown over the life of the portfolio:

What continues to be crazy, is that since we crossed the 700k benchmark, we stopped making contributions to the portfolio, yet our portfolio is still growing at a great pace.

June 2026 Portfolio Update

It was largely business as usual in June. Our new rental property has a few teething issues, but they were all dealt with by our property manager. The rental income was down due to some costs to fix a few minor things, but all was all handled by her directly.

Stocks were slightly up during June and are at a record high at the moment.

We are still waiting for contracts and for the Loan Offer to come through for buying our sixth buy to let property, so no real action on this just yet.

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.

2026 Year to Date Growth Report
Opening Balance	€846,030.49
New Contributions	€640.00
Equities Capital Gains + Dividends	€25,311.28
Real Estate Capital Gains + Rental Income	€50,582.63
Interest on Cash Savings	€21.77
Closing Balance	€922,586.17
Portfolio Return	€75,915.68
% Return	8.97%

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