Irish Financial Independence & Personal Finance Podcast

Friday 7th November 2025

Why Financial Independence isn't enough?

I recently spoke about this on a podcast episode, but thought I would expand on this a little more in this month’s update. Bottomline - I have decided to stop taking withdrawals from my portfolio! Yes, I know, I only lasted two months, but something didn’t feel right.

I am still working full time, so there really was no need for me to take withdrawals, but this actually wasn’t the reason I stopped taking them. I realised that financial independence alone isn’t enough. It is a great place to be, don’t get me wrong, however it only covers our basic, frugal based cost of living.

I want to expand the life that my family and I have - but not at the expense of needing to work harder. I have found the balance that I need and I am very happy with where my life is right now. I still work full time, but take a load of time off during the year. I took five weeks off over the summer, and have another five weeks coming up at the end of the year as we take our well overdue trip to New Zealand.

My day to day work has also changed considerably. I have finally started to give up extra freelance work - some clients I have had for over 20 years. It has been a transition for me to learn to say no. I work from home, my wife doesn’t work, so we make time together during the day, go to the gym mid morning twice a week and I have started to fully adopt flex time. I have a great work-life balance, and so the incentive to work less at this stage just isn’t there.

I have concluded that financial independence is really only step one along one’s financial journey. This might seem a sobering prospect if you are in the early stages of your FIRE journey, however have faith - compounding ends up doing far more of the heavy lifting as you progress.

I feel in many ways, my path hasn’t been too dissimilar to that of Pete Adeney (AKA Mr Money Mustache). Pete saved up around $800,000 USD and “retired” back in the naughties, planning to live off $32,000 per year. He did leave his full time job in software development, however he didn’t stop working. He started his own building company, eventually moved into carpentry, before becoming a blogger and making a ton of money from that.

For me, I haven’t left my software development role yet. My role is a government contract, working from home with full flexibility and 10+ weeks off a year - I’m not exactly in a hurry to give it up!

Letting go of the guilt of too much work

My email inbox has been haunting me! I have my main government contract that I love, however partly out of fear, and partly out of loyalty, I have hung only around 5 freelance clients - some which I have had for 20 years.

One of those clients recently sold his business. The new owner is a giant company, and suddenly the small client of 5 people that I worked 20 years for, isn’t the same. I lost interest in working for them when this happened.

But equally, my desire and time for freelancing work is no longer there. I have a enjoyable job already that I do for the love of the work, but I don’t want to work any longer than I need to. The freelancing work was great when I was grinding - I could earn an extra few thousand euro a month from the additional work - but now that we no longer are focused so much on the money, the incentive for this work simply isn’t there.

And so my inbox is full of unread emails from these clients, some with dates going back as far as 2023! I feel a horrible guilt when looking at my inbox!

So no more! I put up a LinkedIn post asking my network if anyone was looking for work, with the idea of bringing in another developer to take over the work. Within 30 minutes, I had five developers reach out - two I had worked with personally who were both looking for work.

This will sound strange, but I then felt a sense of guilt for holding onto these clients when I knew deep down I no longer wanted to do the work. I was letting them down, and then equally, I was holding onto work when I didn’t need it, and someone else needed it far more than I did.

It has been a liberty feeling finally seeing the clients start to work with other developers and I guess see me “retire” as a freelance software developer after a 21 year career!

Hitting €800,000 Portfolio Valuation

The big news on the portfolio side is that the portfolio crossed the magic €800,000 mark in October. It has been another great year for the portfolio, with positive stock returns and leveraged property once again powering ahead - a massive rise of over €100,000 even with me withdrawing €5,000 during the year.

This completes my 10 year FIRE goal which I set for myself back in January 2023. I can also update my €100k growth chart as follows:

€800k Breakdown Over Time

When I hit the €700k milestone back in December 2024, I presented a breakdown of how long each €100k had taken me. Here is my final breakdown from €100k through to €800k

The unique thing about this last 100k, is that I crossed the €800k mark without a single contribution - this is one giant FIRE snowball.

10 Years to FIRE Update

Here is the full and final breakdown of me trying to achieve FIRE within 10 years, based on one of my initial goals of a portfolio of €800,000. I have ended up hitting the goal in a little under 8 years, including my final year of no additional contributions.

Year	Forecast (5% Return)	Actual Results
2018	€63,236	€41,252.14
2019	€129,707	€62,544.93
2020	€199,580	€125,549.27
2021	€273,027	€221,789.02
2022	€350,231	€342,734.85
2023	€431,386	€498,900.39
2024	€516,693	€705,026.37
2025	€606,364	€804,187.45 (October 2025)
2026	€700,622
2027	€800,000

This will be the last month that I give a detailed breakdown of my portfolio. I don’t know yet if I will report on the exact number moving forward, I am looking forward to a bit of privacy when it comes to our exact portfolio number, and as I mentioned a couple of months back, I feel it has reached a point where it is big enough that wherever I were to report moving forward wouldn’t really change how I feel about where my life is right now anyhow.

October 2025 Portfolio Update

All ran smoothly in October. Stocks were well up again and all was quiet regarding our buy to let investment properties. We saw a solid 1.5% return on the portfolio during October and this has seen us cross over the €800k mark.

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	€15,012.58
Real Estate Capital Gains + Rental Income	€88,895.87
Interest on Cash Savings	€252.63
Capital Withdrawn	€-5,000.00
Closing Balance	€804,187.45
Portfolio Return	€104,161.08
% Return	14.88%

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.

*** Between August & September 2025 we started partly living of the portfolio, withdrawing €2,500 per month from the portfolio.

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