Personal details
Age: 39
Spouse’s/Partner's age: 36
Number and age of children:
Two children, 4.5 years & 9 months
Income and expenditure
Annual gross income from employment or profession:
Now 124k basic, 15k bonus.
(Long term incentive worth about €28k due in May 2027 but not paying much mind to this)
Company pays health care for the four of us as well
Annual gross income of spouse: 16k (will probably increase a bit next year)
Monthly take-home pay: Between 6k & 7k (my ~5k after pension contributions, plus partners 1.2k)
Type of employment: both private
In general are you:
Saving
Summary of Assets and Liabilities
Personal Retirement Bond: €241k
New Company DC Pension: €7k
Wife’s PRSA: ~€3k
Cash of €118k
Company shares : Small amount of residual shares from previous company say €5-8k
Family home mortgage information
Family home value: €400k approx.
Mortgage on family home: €235k approx.
Monthly repayment is ~€1.1k
Other borrowings – car loans/personal loans etc
None
Do you pay off your full credit card balance each month?
Pay off in full
Buy to let properties
None
Other savings and investments:
None
Do you have a pension scheme?
~7k in new DC scheme. Work put in 8% so long as I put in 2%. I put in 16% AVCs to take me up to the max. I realise that I can contribute 25% from next year but also that this is capped at a wage of €115k.
Partner has a small PRSA with a couple of grand in it that she's still not contributing to currently. Once things settle down after baby #2’s arrival several months ago, we will revisit this. No company help from her side.
Other information which might be relevant
Life insurance:
New company life assurance:
Death in service benefit - four times basic salary
Income protection cover - 66.67% of basic salary less the state illness benefits
Now have private insurance in addition:
Mortgage protection
€250,000 Life Cover over 5 years with Aviva (joint life first death, €29.25 per month)
Guaranteed Term Protection
Dual Life Cover policy with Aviva for €300,000 Life Cover and €100,000 Stand Alone Serious Illness Cover over 25 years (€136.29 per month).
What specific question do you have or what issues are of concern to you?
I wanted to update this and see if there are any glaring issues. Since my first post I was made redundant in my old company which netted me c. €120k. I was lucky enough to find a position doing the same job with better pay. The downside is the new company is a start-up so the share benefits aren’t there at the moment, but the package is generous and I’m happy with it.
I think I might be overtaxed at the moment as every payslip says Tax Status: Week 1 which I think implies emergency tax. I will probably also be due some tax back when my tax return is done as my wife didn’t work most of the year and is only working part time currently.
I’m pretty pleased to see that my DC pension has more than doubled in the 3.5 years since I first posted. I have moved the fund from my old company into a personal retirement bond.
New company DC pension will again be going into Global Equity Fund 100%.
I’m happily married thanks to the romantic urging of
@Steven Barrett . We now have two kids, a boy and a girl and don’t intend to expand the squad any further.
I’m aware that having this big wedge on deposit is not good in the long term. We have taken some advice in light of the recent changes to circumstances and are contemplating knocking something around €50k off the mortgage when the fixed term ends in the first half of next year. We are also contemplating overpaying by €1k per month on an ongoing basis (will need to find a mortgage product that will enable this, seems the PTSB setup might be a runner here).
My calculations suggest that this would see our mortgage cleared by 2034, which would be pretty great but may be overly optimistic in practice.
At current rate of pension contributions and 5% annual growth my pension would land somewhere between €900k & €1M by the time I’m 50. €1.3-€1.4M at 55.
We’re still not doing anything specific for the kids’ future college expenses.
My boy is 4.5 years old now so will be about 21 when I’m 55.
The dream is still to be in a position to leave professional/high stakes employment as early as possible. Same as most people I would be happy to continue to work in my 50s but if I was in a position to do something low stakes for pocket money while continuing to let my pension accumulate that would be nice. I suppose all going well and I’m still doing something like what I’m doing now when I’m 50 I will probably be comfortable enough to not mind sticking with it. I moved into a management role in the last few years and found it cripplingly stressful for quite a while but not so much recently. This may be a temporary result of a lighter workload and may get worse again when pressure inevitably increases later, but hopefully it’s partly due to some personal growth as well.
I guess this is as much of a progress report as anything else, although I would welcome any comments or suggestions as to where our focus should be, where we may go/be going wrong, things I haven’t thought about.
