Irish Financial Independence & Personal Finance Podcast

Tuesday 9th December 2025

Another Investment Property, oh, go on!

This update might come as a bit of a surprise, but we went ‘sale agreed’ recently on another investment property - number five this time!

We last purchased a buy to let property in 2023 and I had promised my wife we wouldn’t purchase any more, however with me now working with a property manager, buying more property felt a lot more scalable. I get to do the fun parts - finding the property and putting the deal together - and will simply hand the keys over to my property manager once the deal closes and she will handle any renovation work, get the property rent ready, find a tenant and manage them on my behalf.

As I indicated last month, I had been working towards living off the rental income from our investment properties, but I had realised how naive I had been about this. With us no longer looking to draw down any major cashflow anytime soon, it became clear that we could take on another property and use leverage - in other words, purchase the property with a mortgage.

To complete this deal, it will require us to refinance our buy to let property in Shannon, that is currently mortgage free - but again, this is part of a plan to introduce leverage where we can to our property portfolio.

I haven’t spoken much about the power of leveraged property, but I need to. It has been a superpower for us, and something I haven’t really appreciated until looking back on the gains on our portfolio.

For example, as much as it has been a good year for the sharemarket, my real returns in percentage terms across our three pensions has been 7% year to date. Not bad you might think. However, compared to our three mortgaged properties, year to date returns have been 17%. Now, before you start thinking, but what about the tax - these returns are based on the after tax rental income and the adjustments to the valuations I made to these properties back in my June update - which account for the capital gains tax I would need to pay if these properties were sold - in other words, it is after tax returns!

I even sat down with Chat GPT, and asked it to crunch my returns over the last 5 years, accounting for my tax paid on my rental income, and it came to the following conclusion:

Pension Average Growth: 9.9% per year
Leveraged Property Average Growth: 16.7% per year

I am pointing this out, not because I am trying to promote buy to let property, but because I think it is important to highlight why we were able to hit our FI goal a lot faster than expected - I never truly realised the power that leveraged property brings.

As for our latest deal, we found a property with a 9% gross yield, in a decent housing estate in the outskirts of Limerick. A good bit of work is still needed to close the deal, but as I always do, I will keep you posted as this purchase goes through!

Our Full Expenses Revealed

Since April this year, we have been recording our full expenses based on our "financially free” lifestyle. Since hitting our FI number at the end of last year, we have been slowly allowing ourselves the freedom to spend more. I have noticed in the last couple of months, the emotion of spending is slowly slipping away - money is becoming more of a number on a screen than having any emotional tie to it.

But this has had unintended consequences - largely that our FI number now represents more of a frugal pre FI lifestyle, than our new carefree lifestyle. If anything, what we thought was our FI number was more of a ‘Lean FI’ number than an FI number. It covers our basic, frugal cost of living - a lifestyle that we had adopted on our way towards FI.

But with our original FI goal met, we have since expanded our lifestyle. 2025 was an opportunity for us to start living our best life - freed from the constraints of frugality and embracing a life of abundance.

This somewhat explains the difference between FI in theory and FI in practice. Yes, I could have stopped working at the end of 2024, lived off our rental income and continued to live a low-cost lifestyle that we had become accustomed to.

Instead, I choose to continue to work full time (with flexible hours and loads of time off) and instead embrace a more carefree spending approach. This was hard to adapt to early on, but we have found ourselves fully embracing this now, and enjoying the freedom that comes with not really needing to worry too much about money.

If you want to argue based on these numbers that we are no longer FI, I won’t disagree with you. With a bigger lifestyle, it is clear that our €800k portfolio wouldn’t cover us for very long if we continued to live this lifestyle - but I have come to the following conclusions:

1. If I were to lose my job today, we would simply reign in our spending and embrace more time freedom - less holidays and eating out, and more time freedom.
2. As I mentioned in my last update, we have realised that FI alone isn’t enough and that by not making withdrawals, our portfolio will grow faster than our lifestyle grows and will eventually catch up to cover our higher cost of living anyway.
3. We are in our max spending years. With three children, our costs over the next few years will be at our peak, but our long term annual spending will be far lower once our children start to become less financially dependent on us.

The point of this - none of this really changes anything fundamentally. Our lifestyle has expanded this year, but not by enough to have any concern, especially when considering a huge amount of our costs are related to holidays we have taken this year - a trip to Lanzarote and two trips to visit my sister and her family in London. Our core essential costs are still very manageable and a lot of our optional spending is going towards things such as: eating out, holidays and personal discretionary spending - all very much in line with exactly how we planned to spend this year.

In relation to our essential costs, this includes some larger medical expenses that we paid for this year related to my wife’s health, that in a non FI position, we may not have paid for directly (going public instead) - but instead we choose to go private to get more immediate service.

Our grocery spending has definitely grown a lot in the last 12 months, a mix of higher food prices, a growing family of three boys and us buying better quality food and eating healthier meals (I am down 7kg in weight since September, a reflection on the better quality food we have been eating).

This somewhat again highlights the difference between the theory of FI and in practice. I could simply not write about this, hide the fact that money feels difference once we reach a certain point and pretend we aren’t working and are “retired”, but I want to highlight that if you can do this, alongside work that you actually love, there is a better outcome than early retirement - a life of abundance, where work is optional and money can be carefree.

So here is our full average monthly spending breakdown over the last 8 months:

Portfolio Updates

I mentioned last month that I was going to stop recording my monthly portfolio breakdown. I have since decided that I will continue to record these, but I may make these updates “subscriber only” at one stage, so definitely subscribe to the newsletter if you haven’t already.

I think it is important that I share the next part of our journey - our financial journey towards financial freedom, the next step beyond financial independence.

With this in mind, I will continue to share our monthly portfolio updates, but will exclude the “lifetime” portfolio returns, as this is not so important any more.

I also made a fundamental change to how I handle tax. To date, our portfolio has returned gross returns and I have made any tax payments out of additional money I have usually saved separately. However, given I am not looking to take withdrawals at this stage from the portfolio, I figured while I will still show gross returns, I will take withdrawals only to pay various tax that comes due during the year. This will mean I no longer have to budget for this separately and will allow you to see the impact that tax does have on my portfolio.

I had a small tax bill come due in November, and this is now reflected on my November update.

November 2025 Portfolio Update

Stocks were down slightly in November, but it was another solid month for our rental properties. As mentioned above, we had a small tax bill due on our personal income due to the first rental property we own personally. We had overpaid tax on the property last year, but had a small amount to pay as part of our preliminary tax for this year. This is reflected as a withdrawal on the portfolio.

Just to note: with us going to New Zealand at the end of December, our next progress update will be late, likely not coming out until the end of January!

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	€13,764.66
Real Estate Capital Gains + Rental Income	€93,171.77
Interest on Cash Savings	€256.10
Capital Withdrawn	€-5,953.00
Closing Balance	€806,265.90
Portfolio Return	€107,192.53
% Return	15.33%

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