This post is an update of our recent workation in Portugal including the planning, what it cost and how it went. Planning Why/When Firstly, I’ll cover off why and when we decided to travel. When we were moving from Ireland to Canada last summer, I wanted to have a trip planned back to Ireland within the year to take the sting out of saying goodbye to the life we built there over the last 9 years. Knowing we’d be back in a few months made it easier. We also wanted to trial slow travel, where you stay for a longer period than a typical vacation in any one location before moving on to the next. T ..read more

Happy New Year dear readers. I hope you all had a wonderful time over the break. Today’s post outlines our family of 3’s annual spend for 2023. It is worth noting that half the year was spent in Ireland and the other half was spent in Canada. Total spend in 2023 came to: €63,547 This is almost double last year‘s spend. The increase was largely due to our move to Canada. Not included in this figure are the costs/proceeds from the sale of our house in Ireland, the sale of our investments, our income tax refund (8k), or the cost of our new car in Canada- offset by the sale of our car in Ireland ..read more

What started as a 3-month mini-retirement trial got extended into a 16-month semi-retirement trial. This post will cover what we got up to in our time off along with some interesting realisations. The time off has given us some insight into what it would be like to retire early. We enjoyed the time so much that we have now structured our investments in a way that we hope will allow us to do this regularly, at least while our son is still small. While this time off was initially meant for me to focus on my health, there were a lot of other things we got to learn and experience that we wouldn’t ..read more

As I mentioned in my last post, the Money Hacker family moved from Ireland to Canada in June 2023. At that time we had assets in both Canada and Ireland. This post will go through how we decided to centralise and invest our money in Canada and what we invested in. Asset shift Before we moved back, our assets were split per the below chart: Our home made up the majority of our equity (66%), then our Canada ETFs and Irish stocks (Mr. MH’s old work scheme) made up 11% each and our Irish ETF portfolio made up 7%. We kept a cash buffer to cover a few months of living expenses, making up 3% and our ..read more

There have been some big changes in the Money Hacker household over the last 12 months. Aside from my journey back to mental wellness, we’ve had some exciting changes too. This post will cover the What, When, Why, and How’s of what’s been going on. What We moved back to Canada! We sold all our assets (house, car, furniture and Irish investments) and moved all our money to Canada. We are now renting a two-bedroom house in the countryside and have invested all our money in ETFs (exchange-traded funds). We are test-running semi-retirement, seeing how our portfolio performs to see how much or how ..read more

“Hello from the other siiide” ~Adele Well hello there, it’s been a while. For those who are new to the blog, I’ve been struggling with burnout and depression, brought on not by work but instead by a compounding of life events, the pandemic and an undiagnosed condition which I will unveil below. I’ve been on a long journey to recovery and in this post, I hope to “summarise” how I got to the other side. I’m now happy to report that I am back to my former self, better even. I am content, happy and can experience joy again. Coming from where I was, this is no small statement. I still have work to ..read more

This post outlines our family’s annual spend for 2022. This is for a family of 3 in Cork, Ireland. For longer time followers, I know it’s been a while – I will be posting some big life updates soon so stay tuned. In the meantime, see below the details of our spending from last year. Total spend in 2022 came to: €34,907 This is just over 3,100€ less than last year which is under my predicted 36k! Not included in this figure are investments (5k). Also excluded is the tax refund we got from last year’s overpayments (2.7k) and any other income offsets. Expense tracking and reporting in this arti ..read more

My news feed has been flooded with articles on ways to save money this winter on energy costs. I was curious how much extra money I was likely going to need to budget for based on my own energy usage so I created a calculator which I’m making available for free! I normally would put this on my paid member’s area but I think this one is too important not to share more widely given how many people will be impacted. If you use it and are feeling generous, feel free to “buy me a hot chocolate” in the Paypal donation link in the sidebar. When I plugged my own figures in as well as the Electric Irel ..read more

My family of three is nearing the end of our three-month mini-retirement. Both Mr. MH and myself were off work for the summer. We spent two months in Canada and one here at home in Ireland. This post goes into how we managed it, what it cost and how it went. I contemplated not writing this post, as in the wake of the cost of living crisis, it feels a bit insensitive. But after some thought, I think different people will be at different points of their journey at different times and it’s ok to show what can be achieved along the path to financial independence should you choose to follow it. St ..read more

With the cost of living rising, it can feel like holidays may be out of reach, but with a little outside the box thinking, travel both within Ireland and abroad can soon become more affordable with sites like HomeExchange – think of the movie “The Holiday”. The idea is that you put your home up on the site, set the places and dates you’d like to go somewhere and find homes/families you’d like to swap with. If you can’t find anyone to swap with at the same time, in what they call a reciprocal exchange, the site also offers a reverse lookup feature for multi-directional swaps where you can searc ..read more