Interesting to see how things have progressed for you. Others have already made solid points about exploring early access to your pension and ensuring your asset allocation is aligned with your objectives.
What stands out most for me is the lifestyle element. You and your partner have already stepped back from the standard five-day week. You are contracting. Both of you appear to hold senior, well-paid roles with enough leverage to secure four-day arrangements and ongoing contract work. So at 55, is the option of additional fractional or part-time work worth considering? I would be cautious about building a plan around the assumption that you must accumulate a very large cash buffer to bridge 5 to 10+ years, when the practical likelihood may be quite different. That approach could push you toward financially suboptimal decisions from a returns perspective - for example, holding back from maximising AVCs out of concern about reducing immediate liquidity.
Another issue that stands out is your intention to allocate more than €100,000 to private schooling. You will, naturally, want to balance financial decisions with what you regard as best for your family, but commitments of that scale only reinforce the case for putting your substantial cash reserves to work in pursuit of higher returns. Once those schooling costs begin - and the fees are only the starting point for the broader set of teenage and private-school expenses - it becomes increasingly difficult to contribute AVCs up to your age-related limits, which rise significantly over the coming years.
Finally, there is a clear tension between your preference for security and your ambition to retire early. In practice, early retirement requires accepting a degree of risk. You have benefited significantly from share sales and property disposals and now hold substantial cash. There are ways to deploy that capital to improve long-term returns, with the associated increase in volatility. The discussion around your rental property and the various options available illustrates this clearly: maintaining safety and certainty with the asset as is, or accepting change and risk in pursuit of higher returns.
You should undertake some financial modelling to compare the projected growth of equities within a pension structure versus an ETF and the associated tax consequences, as well as to assess the outcomes of exiting the rental property. While the future is inherently uncertain and requires sensitivity analysis, there are clear theoretical front-runners when the objective is to reach a defined financial target within a defined timeframe. Modelling can help clarify the level of assets required, the time needed to reach that level, and how those projections change if you extend the horizon or alter contributions across different investment types, while acknowledging that actual future returns may differ.
You can afford early retirement, but you can’t afford to do everything at once. Right now you want low risk, high liquidity, private schooling, a rental, and early retirement. You also appear to be underestimating the tax impact of your current choices and the importance of sequencing when different pots can be accessed. You need to decide which priorities actually matter. With a focused strategy and a clear understanding of how your assets will be drawn down, you will get there; without that, you will drift into your 60s still working.