Retiring at 42 in Ireland

Michael Houghton's last day on a software contract is 12 March 2027. He is 42, has three children, six investment properties in Ireland and a pension he can't touch until 55. He has published his portfolio every month since 2021 on The Irish FIRE Podcast, so this is a plan you can check line by line. We put it into the Fire Planner with him and ran it against 500 simulated markets and every start year since 1872. Open his plan and change any number as you read.

How he got here

Michael started in 2018 with about €36,000 invested, most of it in high-risk investments. By the start of 2022 the portfolio was around €220,000. He added €120,000 that year at a savings rate of about 75% and ended it at €343,000. The family home became the first rental in December 2020. Mortgaged buy-to-lets followed, and he says he would only buy another at a 12% yield.

In 2024 he set the FI number at €750,000 and crossed €700,000 in December after revaluing the properties. In May 2025 the portfolio produced €40,000 a year, which was the point. A bigger portfolio is worth little if it costs another decade of work, as he argues on the episode about retiring at 42. He moved the family from Limerick to West Clare along the way. The figures above are from his monthly progress posts.

At 30 September 2026 the portfolio stood at €938,971:

The negative cash is a personal loan taken in September to cover repairs and part of the deposit on the newest property, a house in Limerick that needs about €20,000 of work before it rents. Four of the six properties are rented today. The first one he ever let is empty and going on the market, his first sale.

The plan as he gave it

Michael sent us his numbers in euros. We put them in as he gave them, with one structural change: his equities sit in a pension, so the plan locks them until 55 and draws on property first.

Two notes on the pensions. At 2026 rates the State Pension (Contributory) pays €299.30 a week from 66, about €15,600 a year, and €313.40 a week if you defer to 67, about €16,300. Michael's €15,000 from 67 is the cautious version of that. His wife's line is a copy of his until he tells us her figure.

The answer

Retiring in March 2027, the money lasts to age 100 on all three of the planner's models: average returns, 500 of 500 Monte Carlo simulations, and 96 of 96 historical start years. The planner says he could spend up to €7,300 a month and still get to 100. At €5,000 a month he ends with about €6.3 million in today's money, which is a polite way of saying he is retiring with room to spare.

The reason is in the first table. Rent covers €36,000 of the €60,000 the family spends a year. The portfolio only has to find €24,000 a year, a 2.6% draw on €939,000. The 4% rule would allow about €37,600.

The bridge from 43 to 55

This is the interesting part of his plan, and the part most calculators get wrong. The pension is off limits for twelve years. With cash at zero, the €24,000 gap each year has to come from property. That is exactly what Michael plans: sell a property every five years or so, as tenants leave, and let the proceeds carry the family to 55. His six properties hold about €120,000 of equity each on average, so one sale covers about five years of the gap. The planner draws the same €24,000 a year from property equity and leaves the pension alone until 2039.

Meanwhile the pension compounds untouched. At the plan's 7% it is around €545,000 in future money by 55, at which point he has a second engine, and from 67 two state pensions on top. The property does the first twelve years, the pension the next twelve, the state the rest. Each leg is independent of the others.

Where it cracks

Michael's property line grows 7% a year, every year, with no swings. That is his number, and it is the strongest assumption in the plan. We changed one line at a time:

Only the last row moves the verdict, and even that one survives 93% of simulated markets. The plan holds up against any single thing going wrong. Two things going wrong at once is where he would want to notice early, and he has the lever: on the worst row, the planner's "Spend 10% less" chip, €4,500 a month, doubles the money left at 100 to €1.7 million.

What the planner leaves out for Ireland

The Fire Planner computes US taxes when you ask it to and treats every other country's income as take-home. For Michael that means:

• Rent is entered net of tax and costs. His €3,000 a month is already after both.
• Capital gains tax on property sales, 31% in Ireland for disposals from 7 October 2026, is not deducted when the planner draws on property equity. A €120,000 sale with a large gain nets less than €120,000. He can add the tax as a one-time money-out event on each sale year.
• Property is one lump of equity drawn in €24,000 slices. Real sales are lumpy and take months, and four of six are rented today. A cash buffer between sales matters more than the model shows.
• The buy-to-let mortgages are inside the equity figure. Rates above 6% are a cost the net rent already carries, and paying them down raises the net rent over time.
• Deemed disposal on ETFs does not apply here because his index funds sit inside the pension.
• The backtest replays the S&P 500 from each start year. It is the longest clean record there is, and the pension's index funds are global, so it is a fair proxy for that line and not for the property.

What his plan shows

Michael never reached €1 million and says he might never. He stopped at the number that paid the bills: a portfolio producing €40,000 a year against a family that spends €60,000 with €36,000 of it coming from rent. His FI number is small because the income is real, and the pension he can't touch is what makes the second half of retirement work. He plans to spend the portfolio down, and he budgets for the odd bit of freelance work if markets are bad early.

That is a plan built on cash flow, and it is the kind of plan the 25x rule cannot see. Open his plan, change the rent to yours, swap the properties for whatever you own, and see whether your own version lasts.

Michael Houghton hosts The Irish FIRE Podcast and publishes his portfolio every month at firepodcast.ie/progress. His last day of full-time work is 12 March 2027. The plan above uses his published figures at 30 September 2026 and the numbers he gave us; the spouse pension is a placeholder he will correct.