Preamble: This year, my money mindset shifted significantly from one of scarcity to one of abundance. Even when I was off work, we had money coming in, largely from a tax rebate, but it helped to shift my mindset that we probably need a lot less than we think. At the same time, most of the FIRE bloggers I follow who have been FI for a while, have more money than they retired with, some have more than they will ever spend in their lifetime while others are actively trying to spend more and be less frugal. Having read this, in combination with the fact that our portfolio has reached a point where no matter what approach we decide to take, we will reach full financial independence within the next 4-12 years, I thought, let’s try to enjoy the journey more, spend what we want when we want (without spending more than I earn), and see what that comes out as.

Turns out, a lot more than I anticipated!

Total spend in 2024 came to:

CAD$86,600 or €58,400

While this is $7.6k (€5.1k) less than last year, it’s $23k (€15k) more than I had estimated I’d spend in last year‘s post. The increase was largely due to our second trip to Ireland/Madeira within the same 12-month period. 2023 was higher because we moved continents but we had expected that to be very much an anomaly.

This is the benefit of doing expenses. It gives you a chance to look back and see how it sits with you and highlights areas that you could try to do better in.

Not included in this figure are taxes related to income.

Overall Spend

Here is a summary of the main categories by annual and average monthly spend in both Euro and Canadian Dollar.

EURO

CAD

Food

Food costs are 16% or 3,100$ (€2k) higher than last year.

I changed how I categorised food slightly this year, in that I combined the food/drink sub-category from travel into the main food category as I wanted to more easily see total food spend. This is partially also because we don’t really take vacations anymore and when we travel I’m still working so it’s more of an everyday spend rather than vacation spend. Even accounting for this change, we spent $3k (€2k) more on the grocery category than last year.

Our grocery category came to $18k (€12k) and includes everything you’d buy at the grocery store including alcohol, toiletries, cleaning products and the odd non-food items like small tools, toys, clothes etc. Though I do try to separate those into categories as best I can.

Grocery spend was about 3k (€2k) more than last year and we spent 1k (670€) more on restaurants, mainly because we ate in a restaurant almost every night while we were in Madeira. On the upside we spent 400$ (270€) less on take-aways.

We’re not sure what the main source of the increase in groceries is. It’s likely a combination of more food bought while travelling, more food being bought at more expensive shops due to quality and convenience issues, food being more expensive in general and eating fewer vegetarian meals.

We were doing most of our weekly shop at Walmart (generally cheaper and if you order online and have the honey app in your browser you can often find coupons that give you 15-20$ off each order) but the quality of the fruit and veg was getting progressively worse, despite us or maybe because of us, selecting organic as much as possible. It’s also a 35 minute drive compared to a 25 minute drive to the more expensive shop. The food in Canada is far less fresh (and less tasty) than Ireland, due to the distance it has to travel and has far fewer regulations than the EU on what can go into and onto the food. Due to longer term health concerns we started getting more from a more expensive shop as they had a greater selection of organic and local fresh food. After all, what good is being financially independent if you are in poor health!

Although we’re eating more meat than previous years (more out of habit than intentionality), we still do try to eat as little red meat as possible, which helps on cost (and is better for health and the environment). We typically buy non-hormone grass-fed chicken breasts in bulk and split them up and freeze them and swap beef mince for pork or turkey mince as well as steak for pork steaks etc.

All that said, I think we’re going to make a better effort to bring these costs down this year. We’ll try to build in some big batch slow cooker meals that we can freeze including more veggie options and try to balance out what we get at the cheaper and more expensive shops.

Another consideration in terms of cost is that the cash back reward credit card that we have gives 4% cash back on groceries, however, Walmart doesn’t get categorised as groceries as you can buy so many other types of things there. So while shopping online with the honey app gave us 15-20$ off per week at Walmart, we were only getting 1% cash back on the credit card. The more expensive shops (IGA/Independent) do count towards the 4%. So if we spend $12k (€8k), we’d get 480$ (324€) cashback compared to 120$ (81€) for the same spend at Walmart. But when you include the honey app discounts, those could equate to 60$ (41€)/month or 720$ (486€) for the year, meaning Walmart could be 300-400$ (200-270€) less/year on rewards/coupons alone.

If we convert the full annual food spend of $20k (€13k) into cost per person per week – assuming 2 adults and 1 small fella (I’ll average at 2.75), it comes to 140$ (95€)/week/person or 384$(260€)/week for the family.

Monthly Bills

Monthly bills were 4k (€2.7k) more than last year, largely due to a full year of paying rent – last year we had a small mortgage for half of the year. Electricity was about 500$ (338€) less than last year (when you combine gas and electricity) – we now heat with electricity and Quebec has cheaper electricity. Internet was 60$ (41€) less. Mobile was 60$ more.

Travel

Travel was $6.7k (€4.5k) more than last year at a whopping 17,751$ (11,974€) and last year’s amount included $2.7k (€1.8k) of food that has moved to the grocery category this year. This difference is because of how our travel fell in the calendar year. We were in Ireland/Portugal in Feb-Apr 2024 (2.5 months) and then again from Dec ’24-Feb ’25 (1.5 months). The costs for the 24/25 trip were largely spent up front in 2024, so this cost largely represents 4 months of travel in Europe, averaging 4,437$ (3k€)/month just on flights/accommodation and transport while travelling. Having seen this amount, we are turned off of travel now for the next 12 months!

The biggest cost was accommodation at $10k (€6.7k). Breakdown below:

The next biggest cost was the flights for the 3 of us at 3,950$(2,665€). 220$ (148€) for the one-way tickets from Faro-Cork in Feb 24, 3k (2k€) was for the return Ottawa-Toronto-Dublin flight and 580$ (391€) for the return flight from Dublin to Madeira.

Transport was the third largest at 2.5k (1.7k€). We rented a car while we were in Ireland for the whole duration. In the past we would have relied on public transport and friends and family to ferry us around but now that we have a kid, more luggage and are staying for much longer periods, we feel this expense is worth it. It enabled us to see more of friends and family too as everyone is so spread out now. The car rental for the first trip was 1,558$ (1k€) so about 51$ (34€)/day. We used our Canadian credit card to book this which includes car rental insurance as a benefit to reduce the cost, though it was tricky enough to get them to accept this which I wrote about here. Another 300$ (200€) was spent on Ubers and public transport in Portugal and 400$ (270€) went towards the car rental for the second trip, the rest of which will be covered in the 2025 spend post.

Home

We spent 4,500$ (€3k) less on the Home category than last year as last year we had to replenish a lot of electronics that we had to leave behind in Ireland. We spent a total of 5,377$ (€3.6k) in the Home category in 2024. This included things like: furniture (dining table, bed frame, wardrobes), garden stuff (hub tub supplies, lawn mower, pressure washer, umbrella), accessories (lamps, teacups, ikea stuff), renter’s insurance, maintenance stuff and purchase costs (planning permission application).

Transportation

Transport costs were 600$ (€405) less than last year at 4.3k$ (€2.9k) for the year.

Petrol was 200$ (135€) less than last year at 1.7k$ (€1.1k), this is with a newer hybrid car and driving further distances than we did in Ireland as we are more rural. Car insurance was more as we didn’t have the offset of the refund from our Irish policy at 1.5k (€1k) for the year. Car repairs and maintenance was lower at 700$(473€) for the year as we didn’t have to buy winter tires this year. Most of that cost was because we had to put out for a new windshield, we drive along a lot of dirt roads and stones get spit up and crack the glass. We’ve already had to get 2 more chips on that new windshield fixed 6 months later.

Medical

Medical costs were 2k (€1.3k) lower than last year at 3.7k (€2.5k). We didn’t have to pay for health insurance as returning residents and didn’t have doctor/assessment costs like last year. I did pay more for therapy in 2024 ($1.7k or €1.1k) and prescription costs were higher ($1.3k or 880€) as not all diabetic supplies are covered. We also had nominal dentist and optician costs.

Entertainment

Entertainment was pretty much the same as last year with variances of $100-300 (€68-200) between different sub-categories. Biggest spends being alcohol (789$ or 533€), video games (743$ or 500€) and spa visits (591$ or 399€).

Other

The remaining categories were largely between 1,000$ (670€) and 2,000$ (€1.3k) each.

Work expenses being the highest at $4k (€2.7k). Includes things like indemnity insurance, some office furniture and a new phone.

Special occasions came in at $1.9k (€1.2k) for a family wedding including clothes, gift, accomodation etc.

Giving includes mostly Christmas and birthday gifts and some charity donations at $1.6k (€1k)

Kids stuff came in at $1.4k (950€) including 400$ (270€) on toys (lego, board games and swing), 370$ (250€) on clothes, 190$ (130€) on school stuff, 100$ (68€) on activities and smaller amounts on books and medical.

Another $1.2k (800€) was spent on personal stuff like clothing, toiletries, haircuts and accessories.

1k (680€) was stuff I couldn’t categorise as I couldn’t remember what it was for.

Blog costs came in at 600$ (400€) for domain and subscriptions to run the website.

Health costs include things like classes and exercise equipment (300$ or 200€).

Bank charges came in at 418$ (282€) to the good as we got 787$ (532€) cash back from our credit card which offset the other monthly and annual bank and credit card fees.

Goals for this year

As I’m writing this at the end of June 2025, we are already halfway through the year. I started writing this post back in March when I had first done up our 2024 expenses and it was a bit of a wake-up call. If we continued at that level of spending, our time to FI would be pushed out by a few years.

Since March, we have signed a contract of purchase on a house (more on that to follow), and have been trying to keep our spending in check to try and put as much against the downpayment as possible. So far, our average spend for the first half of the year is 4,800$ (3,000€)/month at current exchange rates. If we can keep that rate going, adding in 8k for travel, that should bring us in around the 66,000$ (€42k) mark for the year. Will see how we do.

As you may have read, we moved back to Canada to be closer to family in June 2023, largely for mental health and support reasons after the pandemic took a major toll on my state of mind. That decision has still firmly been the best decision for our family for this chapter of our lives.

I’m so enjoying the connectedness and community we’ve found here. We’ve reconnected with old friends and even made new ones. I’m loving being surrounded by nature and we’re adapting to remote country life. It’s also nice having 4 distinct seasons again. Not to mention the main reason for moving back, so much more time with family.

Work

I started back to work in Dec 2023 after having been off for almost 18 months. I managed to find a way to continue working for the Irish company I had been working for remotely so it’s been really nice getting to work with my colleagues and friends I’ve built up over the last 10 years of working there.

The time difference actually works out really well, in that I have meetings pretty much back to back each morning until about noon and then everyone logs off in Irish time and I have my whole afternoon uninterrupted to focus and get things done. When the team logs on again, they have my outputs waiting for them.

I’m still on a 4-day work week which gives me the balance I need to manage my energy and allows Mr. MH and I to have a day a week to ourselves while Little MH is in school.

Just this week I started a new role in the same company, which I’m quite looking forward to.

Travel

In the year and a half since moving back, we’ve done a good bit of travel, including 3 weeks in France, 2 trips back to Ireland totalling 2.5 months, 1 month in Portugal and 2 weeks in Madeira. I worked through the vast majority of these trips which were a trial run to see what that was like and if it’s something we’d like to do more of.

Some Irish Pics

Some Madeira Pics

Time-off

This summer, I took all of August off and went down to a 3-day week for June and September. The time off consisted of lazy days, reading books, making puzzles, listening to podcasts, catching up with friends and family, walks in the countryside, activities with our son and many trips to paddle board on the lake. I even went white water rafting!

House hunt

We’ve actively been exploring housing options, which have ranged from applying for planning permission to sever a piece of land from my parent’s farm to build, to looking at sites to buy and build, to buying a fixer upper, to buying move in ready homes. We looked at building with a builder as well as at pre-fabricated/modular homes. I filled out applications, met with municipal teams, builders and pre-fab reps, drew up floor plans and so on. We’ve now gotten mortgage approval in place so we can be ready to move on something if the right home comes up. We have our eyes on one so will keep you posted if that goes ahead.

Health

Health-wise, I’m still very much on a healing journey, consuming massive amounts of content and attending virtual summits on neurodivergence, perimenopause, parenting and general healing. Most of my reading results in implementing new tools or ideas and trying new therapies which can be draining before they yield results. Mentally, I’m in a really good place but still have deeper work to do to heal from past trauma and continue to find effective coping mechanisms for the neurodivergent traits I continue to struggle with.

Sleep wins

I’ve made massive progress on my biggest struggle which was quality sleep. This is a huge win. It took lots of trial and error but I have finally found a reliable solution that has resulted in a huge increase in the amount of quality and deep sleep I am getting. In addition to all the other good sleep habits I had to put in place, melatonin has been the game changer.

Studies have shown that autistic people can have low levels of melatonin or have melatonin that’s released at the wrong time of the day and after reading that I felt more comfortable trying it out to see if it helped. It has helped more than all the other things I tried combined. That is until perimenopause kicked in with a nice dose of insomnia and night sweats, though hoping to get treatment for this soon too.

With the melatonin I went from 0-15 minutes of deep sleep a night and an average of 5 hours quality sleep a night to 1.5-4 hours of deep sleep a night and an average of 7.5 hours quality sleep a night.

I also tried an alternative sound therapy, specifically targeted at exercising the vagus nerve and engaging the “rest and digest” parasympathetic nervous system which is particularly frayed in neurodivergent people. This involved listening to 30 minutes of filtered music per day for 10 days with guidance from a therapist. From day 1, my sleep was as good if not better than with the melatonin, and I awoke feeling consistently rested, probably for the first time in my life. Unfortunately, I also started having other side-effects like nausea, headaches and tinnitus which have continued since I did it. Part of me thinks these are my body’s way of processing stuck emotions/trauma and I have to push through to come out the other side, similar to how you get sick as soon as you stop working after a busy period, you’re body feels safe to let it’s guard down. So I may do another round at a slower pace to see if it makes a difference. On the other hand, these are also symptoms of perimenopause so it’s hard to determine which is which.

The increase in quality sleep didn’t result in any massive energy changes for me but I do have more capacity for things throughout the day, I have more stamina and get drained less quickly than before and I largely stopped needing a nap to get me through the day. It also stopped the extreme exhaustion I would get in the 3 days coming up to the end of my cycle. So all in all a win I think.

Portfolio

Portfolio performance wise, we couldn’t have asked for a better year, with the portfolio closing out at 30% growth between Jan-Dec. This meant that the portfolio earned more than I did this year. Blue line is contributions (we didn’t make any additional contributions in 2024), green is growth.

Family news

Also this year we had a family wedding and my immediate family will soon all be within a 35-minute drive from each other which I’m super excited about.

Onwards and upwards for 2025.

In my usual hyperfocus mode – I’ve devoured a decent amount of content that I’d like to summarise including what perimenopause is, its symptoms and things you can do in your 30s to reduce effects, live longer and increase vitality. I am obviously not a doctor and am just compiling a summary of what I’ve read (sources below) – please consult a relevant professional before implementing anything. This 20-minute read consolidates the key take-aways from a number of hours of content so hopefully it’s of use.

To put a financial independence spin on it, studies show that 1 in 5 women will quit their jobs because of menopause symptoms. That’s a staggering number with a huge economic impact on the women themselves, their families and the companies they work for. I also think that striving for financial independence at a younger age will allow for the time needed to implement the various strategies to reduce the symptoms of menopause before they occur.

Definitions:

Menopause:

Menopause is currently defined as one day, exactly one year after your last period. It represents the end of ovarian function. Women are born with all their eggs (1-2 million at birth), by 30 we are down to 10%, by 40, 3% and the quality is declining. Menopause is when no eggs are left. No or very little sex hormone production will come from the ovaries, and estradiol levels decline to about 50% or less of your healthiest years.

Perimenopause:

The time leading up to menopause. Hormones wildly fluctuate causing psychological and physical changes to occur, including the length of time between periods.

Postmenopause:

This starts the same day as reaching menopause. Despite no longer having periods, varying degrees of symptoms still occur. Hormonal swings settle down and some symptoms may improve. However, with the absence of estrogen, women face increased risks for heart disease, osteoporosis (bone loss) and dementia. Because of increased life expectancy, women can expect to spend 40% of their lives post-menopause. Keep reading to see what you can do to reduce these risks.

When can it start:

The average age of menopause is 51-52 but can range from 45-55.

Perimenopause starts 7-10 years before the last period – or 8-11 years before you reach menopause since menopause is 1 year after your last period.

So you could well be 34 when you start to experience perimenopause symptoms.

What’s really going on:

Before getting into the symptoms, this is the science bit about what is actually happening in endocrinology in the body.

A normal healthy menstrual cycle before menopause has a reproducible monthly rise and fall of estrogen, progesterone and brain hormones LH (a chemical in your body that triggers important processes in your reproductive system), FSH (a hormone your pituitary gland makes and releases that plays a role in sexual development and reproduction) and GnRH (the key regulator of the reproductive axis).

The hypothalamus in the brain has a sensor looking for estradiol levels and when they get low it sends GnRH down to the pituitary which sends out pulses of LH and FSH which tells the ovaries to ovulate. The process of ovulation drives estrogen levels back up.

When we reach perimenopause, the egg supply is low and the signals don’t work as well. We start becoming resistant to the LH and FSH surges so the brain sends more FSH and the ovary eventually gets the egg out but sometimes it’s delayed so the timing of the previously predictable cycle gets out of whack. Sometimes they are closer together, sometimes further apart.

Estrogen and progesterone levels start changing dramatically. Estrogen surges are much higher than before and lows are lower than before.

Hormonal chaos.

This is why there is no reliable blood test to diagnose menopause. Most are diagnosed through symptoms.

In regards to hot flashes (vaso motor symptom), these are caused by a dysregulation of the thermoregulatory centre in the hypothalamus, the thermostat gets reset and causes vassal dilation. It starts in the core somewhere in the chest/neck area and goes up into the neck and out into the extremities, then you start sweating profusely from all the blood vessels dilating which can last minutes. For some women, it’s preceded by palpitations or intense feelings of dysphoria/ sadness.

Symptoms:

Symptoms vary from person to person both in the symptom itself, the duration and the severity of it.

Approximately 85% of women experience menopausal symptoms. 25% of women experience severe symptoms, 25% find symptoms to be mild and the remainder are somewhere in between.

That said, before you get too discouraged, there are actions you can take both before you get there and when you’ve reached perimenopause to better manage and even reduce these symptoms. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

As you will see by the list below, menopause can mimic other ailments/diseases so it’s important to rule those out first so you’re addressing the correct root cause. To help your doctor, it’s important to track symptoms over a period of time to see trends and cyclical activities.

The biggest early indicator is mental health changes. The brain does not like the chaos of the hormonal swings. Neurotransmitters are very sensitive to estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. These swings can result in deviations from normal levels of serotonin (influences learning, memory, and happiness as well as regulating body temperature, sleep, sexual behaviour and hunger), norepinephrine (mobilizes the brain and body for action) and dopamine (motivation, feel-good hormone). As the hormone swings become chaotic there is an increase of at least 40% of mental health disorders.

Changes can look like: suddenly feeling less optimistic, increased anxiety/panic attacks, loss of executive functioning/ADHD-like symptoms (brain fog, loss of words, difficulty concentrating, not being able to do calculations) which result in a lack of confidence at work (see stat about women leaving the workforce above).

Other symptoms can include:

• Acid reflux/GERD worsening
• Acne
• Allergies (new, different)
• Atrophic vaginitis/genitourinary syndrome of menopause GSM (or vaginal atrophy, drying and thinning of the vaginal walls)
• Balance issues
• Bloating
• Body odour (changes)
• Body aches (random come/go)
• Breast soreness
• Brittle hair and nails
• Burning mouth (decreased saliva)
• Cold flashes (more common at night)
• Depression
• Digestive problems (IBS, bloat, gas)
• Dizziness (vertigo)
• Dryness (skin, mouth and eyes)
• Exaggerated PMS symptoms (bloating, breast pain, cramps)
• Fatigue
• Gum/dental problems
• Hairloss
• Headaches
• Heart racing/palpitations (irregular heartbeat)
• Hot flashes
• Increased cortisol levels (slows digestion/contributes to constipation)
• Increased hair growth on other areas of the body (face, neck, chest)
• Increased tendon and ligament injury
• Intolerance to some foods (changing tastes)
• Irregular periods (missed periods, longer/shorter, heavier/lighter, flooding, spotting, clotting, dark/different coloured blood)
• Itchiness (overall skin, also links to paresthesia)
• Low/decreased libido
• Memory lapses (brain fog, forgetfulness)
• Migraines
• Mood swings (crying jags/sadness, anger/rage)
• Muscular skeletal issues: hip pain, joint pain (stiffness, frozen shoulder, increased inflammation), back pain with no related injury
• Muscle tension
• Muscle mass loss (sarcopenia)
• Nausea
• Night sweats
• Osteoporosis (reduced bone density)
• Reduced ability to process alcohol, drastically impacts sleep
• Restless Leg Syndrome
• Sense of smell changes
• Skin crawling (feeling something crawling on your skin)
• Sleep disruption (lack of sleep)
• Spatial awareness changes (proprioception, more clumsy)
• Stress incontinence
• Swelling of hands/feet
• Thyroid changes
• Tingling extremities
• Tinnitus
• Unexplained irritability
• Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs)
• Weight gain (low estrogen levels promote fat storage in the belly area as visceral fat)

In addition, if you have any existing conditions like IBS/GERD, arthritis, inflammatory diseases, ADHD, autism or bipolar, the symptoms of those conditions can also be further aggravated/worsened.

A lot of neurodivergent women are getting diagnosed for the first time in perimenopause as symptoms are so exaggerated and the coping mechanisms they’ve cobbled together over the years are no longer effective.

Other Important Notes:

Estrogen is protective.

Loss of estrogen accelerates the path to cardiometabolic diseases. Risk of heart disease, osteoporosis and stroke increase post menopause due to loss of estrogen.

Estrogen is neuroprotective

The longer your body is exposed to estrogen (natural or otherwise), the higher your cognition scores and the healthier the brain. The decline in estrogen is correlated with neurodegeneration.

The older you are when you go through menopause, the healthier you are for cardiometabolic disease.

Certain factors can cause you to go through menopause sooner including:

• If you smoke
• If you don’t have children (more ovulation runs through supply faster)
• If you have a hysterectomy without removing ovaries, you lose 4 years off the life of your ovaries
• If you have tubal ligation, you lose a year and a half
• If you’re African-American, you can go through a year and a half sooner
• If you have chemotherapy
• If you have surgery
• If you have any inflammatory process in the abdomen (irritable bowel or endometriosis) you will lose some of the life of the ovary

On the flip side, you may go through menopause later if you:

• Are Asian (1-2 years later)
• Have taken birth control that stops ovulation for 5 years or more (can push out by about 9 months) – that said there are many other considerations around the pill that should be considered.

Body composition changes in perimenopause without changes in diet or exercise.

Pre-menopause, about 8% of your fat is visceral (fat around your internal organs), after the transition it shifts to 23% without changes in diet or exercise. Visceral fat is a harbinger of chronic disease. We also lose muscle. The muscular-skeletal system (bone and muscle) works together, muscle controls our basal metabolic rate which determines resistance to insulin so muscle loss causes all kinds of issues.

Visceral fat is hard to lose.

It’s possible to lose but it’s hard work. The more you can reduce this BEFORE you go into perimenopause, the better your outcomes will be.

There are scanners that can identify how much visceral fat you have but a rudimentary method is to measure your waist-to-hip ratio. Take the measurement of your waist and divide it by the measurement of your hips. If it’s less than 0.7 then your chance of having clinically significant deviations in visceral fat are low. If greater than 1, you likely have higher levels of visceral fat.

Hormone replacement is better than anti-depressants to treat menopause-related depression.

Currently, SSRI use doubles across the menopause transition, however, data is now showing that hormone replacement therapy lowers the onset of depression and is a better treatment than SSRIs if depression has occurred as it treats the root cause which is a drop in estrogen.

Research into perimenopause is lacking.

If you go to PubMed – a source of 37 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books – and type in pregnancy, 1.1 million articles come up, menopause brings up 97,000 and perimenopause brings up 6,400.

Women are living longer than men but 20-25% of that is in poor health.

The higher your protein intake, the less likely you will be frail in old age.

When your mother or aunts went through menopause and any medical conditions they experienced are a big indicator of when and how you will experience menopause.

Loss of sex hormones in menopause changes the gut biome from a typical female microbiome to that of a male.

Changes in the gut microbiome can result in result in all kinds of changes. You could be eating the same foods as before but your gut is not handling them as it used to. More bloating, insensitivities etc.

Intermittent fasting can make it hard to intake the volume of protein we need to maintain muscle mass.

Metabolizing protein is its own work so it’s best to spread it out throughout the day. It’s best to break protein intake into nuggets throughout the day. Don’t just have a big protein portion at dinner. Have bits at breakfast and lunch too. Fasting can make it hard to do that.

50% of women will have an osteoporotic fracture before they die

Men are about half that.

If you break a hip over the age of 65 you have a 30% chance of death in 1 year with surgical repair, and a 79% chance without surgery.

Reduce this risk by strengthening muscles and bones. Do resistance training 3 times a week. Eat more protein. Take collagen and creatine supplements.

Any women at any point in the menopause journey has a 50% sexual dysfunction rate.

Meaning she is not happy with whatever is going on. This can be delayed orgasms, lower orgasm peaks, loss of elasticity in the skin resulting in painful sex, lack of arousal symptoms, relationship disorder (don’t love your partner or don’t feel supported), low libido etc. See solutions below.

Solutions:

In general, the healthier you are going into perimenopause, the better the course is going to be for you.

Here are some of the things you can do, both before and during perimenopause to reduce symptoms.

• Nutrition
  • in particular a Mediterranean, anti-inflammatory diet, estrogen is an anti-inflammatory hormone, so in perimenopause, that declines and we lose that protection, diet is one of the most important things that determines your level of inflammation
  • most of your food should be unprocessed/minimally processed which allows you to get plenty of vitamins, minerals, probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health
  • more fibre (fruits, veggies, whole grains, beans and legumes): most women are getting 10-12 grams a day, we need at least 25. Fibre feeds the gut microbiome slowing down glucose absorption, pulls more water into the gut and all kinds of other health benefits. A good guide is to eat as many different plants in as many colours as you can as often as you can. Here are some tips on how to get 25g of fibre a day
  • more probiotics: prebiotics (fibre) + probiotics (fermented foods/yogurt) = postbiotics (health-inducing compounds produced by gut microbes). The probiotics introduce healthy bacteria for our gut microbiome, the fibre acts as a fuel to feed those healthy gut bugs and together they create a healthy gut microbiome which has all kinds of health benefits including reduction in menopausal symptoms. Although you can take probiotic supplements, the best and most effective will be what you eat. Probiotics can be found in things like sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, yogurt, unpasteurised fermented pickles etc.
  • more protein: as above, we need to maintain our muscle mass. Protein helps build muscle. Women are generally getting 50-60 grams a day. We likely need 80-120 depending on body composition or 1g per pound of body weight. Here are some tips on how to get there
• Sleep (good sleep hygiene/routine)
  • If you have a good sleep hygiene and routine already established going into perimenopause it can help reduce symptoms
  • If you’re having hot flashes or other sleep disturbances, things like hormone therapy can help to get the thermal regulatory centre and serotonin levels back to normal
  • If you’re on HRT and still having middle-of-the-night awakenings, racing thoughts or get up to pee and can’t get back to sleep, something like progestin might help to settle down the brain
  • For better sleep, cut out alcohol or at least know that if you are choosing to drink, you are choosing alcohol over quality sleep
• Regular exercise (in particular resistance/strength training)
  • Diet and exercise with the goal of being thin can actually chip away at bone and muscle strength needed to stay fit into old age. Research is now showing that everyone, male, female, young, old, should resistance train at least three times a week
  • Use of a weighted vest may be an easy way to start building this in while walking
• Stress reduction: Keeping cortisol levels down will make you healthier in every other way
• Supplements: Vitamin D, Creatine for muscle (5g/day), Bioactive collagen for bone density
• Acupuncture: This can help reduce symptoms but is expensive and not addressing the root cause which is a decline in estrogen

For sexual dysfunction:

• Vaginal estrogen therapy can help where sex hurts
• Viagra can help where you want to do it but the blood’s not getting to where it needs to go
• If your relationship is struggling, therapy can help
• If you previously had a good libido, you have a good relationship with your partner and it doesn’t hurt, then testosterone can help

Mental health:

This last one is a hunch of mine based on what I’ve read in books like The Myth of Normal and accounts of women who have gone through menopause, so take of it what you will, but I do believe that any unresolved mental health issues, be it trauma or unprocessed emotions or grief to name a few, will come to the surface in menopause. So any work you can do before you reach perimenopause in respect to counselling or other therapies to process and release those emotions will only help to reduce symptoms and make you more resilient.

Some studies show that neurodivergent women will experience menopause symptoms more severely. My gut tells me that part of this is because neurodivergent women typically experience more trauma and have a very low window of tolerance in their nervous systems. As a lot of women are late diagnosed, it is also unlikely we will have done the relevant therapy to process and release that trauma or built up resilience in our nervous systems, hence the experience of increased symptoms in menopause. Again, just a theory but I’m hoping that the work I’ve done in this space will pay off.

Hormone Replacement Therapy

That WHI study:

Hormone replacement therapy got a bad reputation resulting from the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of a medical study that was completed by the WHI (Women’s Health Initiative) in 2002.

The data that caught the headlines was misinterpreted and stated that HRT causes a 25% increased chance of breast cancer but in actuality, the absolute risk was an increase of 0.8%. In addition, the study was done on women who were already 10-13 years post-menopausal which can be argued were already past the point of the preventative benefits that estrogen can provide.

Unfortunately, many doctors and even specialists are now refusing to prescribe HRT because of this study. You may be able to find supportive physicians in your area here.

In contrast, in 2020, a different study found that women who started HRT between 50 and 59 had a 50% decreased risk of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality. Estrogen is better at prevention than cure. It’s protective of the coronary arteries so taking estrogen away, we lose that protection and disease and plaque can start to build up so there is a worry that adding estrogen once you’ve developed sclerosis or plaque might loosen the plaque which can lead to slightly increased risk of stroke so it’s important to get the right tests and scans before starting.

HRT or not?

Not every woman will choose HRT but every woman deserves an informed conversation about it and let her make her choice.

It’s a bit like when I took Little MH for his vaccines – there is a booklet that says getting this vaccine has these risks but not getting the vaccine and actually catching the disease has these much greater risks up to and including death.

So HRT has a small risk of breast cancer but lack of estrogen increases cardiovascular disease, diabetes and insulin resistance and increased cholesterol. Statistics show that the most common cause of death of women is cardiovascular disease, heart attack or stroke. So framing it this way can help to shift the perspective.

On cholesterol: 80% of women will have abnormal cholesterol levels through menopause. Elevated LDL and lowering HDL means greater risk of cardiovascular disease. Statin is typically prescribed. In 2020, it was found that Statin does not decrease risk of primary heart attack in women (though it does for secondary) and does not decrease risk of death from cardiovascular disease but as above, if given in the right window of opportunity, HRT does.

Side note:

The difference between low-dose birth control pill and high-dose hormone replacement are not that far apart.

Heart Attack Signs in Women

On the topic of heart attacks, did you know women are much more likely to die in a hospital setting from a heart attack than a man because we don’t present the same symptoms as men do?

Women experience more psychological symptoms rather than the biological symptoms that men do. As a result we are more likely to brush them off and delay going to the hospital.

Symptoms can include:

• Neck, jaw, shoulder, upper back or upper belly (abdomen) discomfort.
• Shortness of breath.
• Pain in one or both arms.
• Nausea or vomiting.
• Sweating.
• Lightheadedness or dizziness.
• Unusual fatigue.
• Heartburn (indigestion)

Sources:

• Andrew Huberman Podcast with Dr. Marie Claire Haver
• The menopause wiki
• Fibre Fuelled by Dr. Will Bulsiwicz
• The Myth of Normal by Dr. Gabor Mate and Daniel Mate

Planning

This 6 week workation was part of 2.5 month workation between Portugal and Ireland. See details of the Portugal portion here.

Flights

Per the Portugal update, we booked the below route for about 2,872$ (1,967€)

• Montreal – Lisbon return (2,424$/1,660€)
• Bus Lisbon – Portimao (80$/55€)
• Faro – Cork 1 way (214$/147€)
• Dublin – Lisbon 1 way (154$/105€)
• Lisbon accommodation 2 nights (Free via homeexchange)

Accommodation

Accommodation in Ireland is expensive and hard to come by. It took a good bit of searching but we managed to find a lovely spot close to the sea. As it was not in the city we also needed to rent a car to get around which added to the expense.

Sites I checked to find accommodation:

• Daft.ie – search for short term rentals or holiday homes
• Homeexchange.com
• Booking.com
• Hogans Irish Cottages
• Trident Holiday Homes

As we wanted to catch up with as many friends and family as we could we decided to split the trip up.

We spent 3 weeks in Cork, 2.5 weeks in Mayo/Sligo and 4 days in Dublin.

In Cork, we stayed in one rented accommodation that came to 2,654$ (1,818€) for the 3 weeks. We also had to pay an additional sum at the end for utilities which came to 365$ (250€).

For the 2.5 weeks in Mayo/Sligo, we spent 1 week in Ballina for free using our guest points from Homeexchange. A few nights in Strandhill with Mr.MH’s sister and the remainder at Mr. MH’s home.

For the 4 days in Dublin, we split it between Mr. MH’s siblings.

We also had a 2 night stop over in Lisbon to break up the return trip which we again had for free through Homeexchange.

Car Rental

There used to be a day when I would go out of my way to save money by using public transport, but my relationship with money has shifted over the years, especially now that we have Little MH. Now, I am willing to pay a bit more to make things easier on ourselves. It was also important for us to be able to get out to visit our friends and family while we were in Ireland so renting a car made the most sense.

Renting a car in Ireland is, let’s say, interesting.

I’ll try to summarise how best to go about it, to save hassle and added costs.

Before you book:

• See if you have a credit card that offers car rental insurance as an added benefit or see if you can apply for one before your trip.
• Call the credit card insurance provider and get a letter in writing that states that coverage includes the Republic of Ireland. The wording has to be exact. The car rental will not accept terms like “Worldwide” or “Ireland”, it has to state Republic of Ireland specifically for them to accept the waiver. The credit card company may point you to the standard terms and conditions but insist that you get a separate specific letter with the card holders name on it.
• Make sure the credit card is in the name of the person that will be driving, if it isn’t, see if you can order a supplementary card with their name on it
• Make sure you have enough credit to cover the 5,000€ hold that will be placed on the card for waiving the car rental company’s insurance.

When you book:

• Make sure you select an automatic transmission if you can’t drive manual as most cars will be manual, especially if in our case, you converted your Canadian license to Irish, there may be a restriction to only be licensed to drive automatic cars.
• Make sure you waive the car rental company’s insurance when booking.
• Use the credit card that has the car rental insurance as a benefit for the entire booking. The name on the card should also be who will be the driver.
• Decide who will be the driver if you don’t want to pay extra to have both people covered to drive. As above, the driver is whose name should be on the credit card used to waive the insurance.

When you pick-up:

• Make sure you have the letter printed off that states your credit card’s insurance includes coverage in the Republic of Ireland, or better yet send the letter by email in advance to the car rental to ensure they have no issues with it before you arrive.
• Make sure you have the credit card in the name of the person who will be driving
• Make sure you have 5,000€ free on the card for them to place a hold. This will be held for the duration of the rental.
• Make sure you have an in-date license to present
• Walk around the car, taking a video and pictures, to show any damage already on the car, before you drive off the lot.

You can only rent a car for a max of 1 month so if you need it for longer you can just do another booking and get another car for the remainder of the trip. You’ll need to pay again for the extras like car seats and one-way transfer fees if you’re dropping at a different location but that’s not too expensive for the hassle you save from taking public transport with 2.5 months worth of luggage and any groceries you will have accumulated from the stay.

We booked through rentalcars.com and got an automatic Toyota Yaris for the full 6 weeks for 1,112$ (761€) and paid an additional 445$ (304€) for 2 car seat rentals and 2 one-way fees as we had to swap cars at the one-month mark. So about 37$(25€)/day total.

School

We continued some of the activity books we got from the school but also borrowed some lego’s from Little MH’s cousin and some new activity books from friends. Social-wise, we had so many play dates, catch ups and sleepovers with friends and family. It was wonderful.

During the week, Little MH got to go to the sea, climb some sand dunes, go to an indoor trampoline park, meet an Irish wolfhound pup, eat award winning ice-cream, drive a car out to Coney Island, visit playgrounds and other activities.

What it cost

The below details what it cost for the 6 weeks in Ireland in Mar/Apr. Flights are proportioned 60% to this portion of the trip and 40% to the Portugal portion. It also includes a 2 night stop over in Lisbon on the way home. The total cost excluding ongoing costs at home was 9,901$ (6,782€) which averages 6,601$ (4,521€)/month.

• Accommodation: As above, the only costs we paid for accommodation was for our 3 weeks in Cork.
• Food/drink: included groceries, take-aways and restaurants.
• Flights: included 60% of the costs of our flights from Montreal to Lisbon, Faro to Cork, and Dublin to Lisbon for 3 people.
• Transport/Parking: included car rental, petrol, tolls and ubers.
• Entertainment: included a night out, a spa day for me, the trampoline park, and entrance to see the Palace of Monserrat on our stopover in Lisbon (highly recommended).
• Shopping: includes a clothes top-up for Little MH who had outgrown some of the clothes we brought.
• Costs at home: included rent for the full 2 months (not proportioned for 6 weeks), mobile and internet.

Our current estimates on what we will spend per year in Canada is 64,000$ (44,000€) or 5,333$ (3,652€)/month. Averaging out the 6-week stay into the average for 1 month the stay in Ireland was about 1,500$ (1,000€) more than that not including the ongoing costs at home or 2,800$ (1,900€) more per month including ongoing costs at home.

How it went

Overall, it was a great stay. It was a big contrast to Portugal where we saw very few people. Once we were in Ireland, we had catch-ups with friends or family once every few days. We:

• had a dinner and a few sleepovers with some of our best friends
• had a birthday party at Little MH’s cousin’s house
• had a few friends call out to us at ours
• had a dinner with Mr. MH’s whole family and all of Little MH’s Irish cousins at a restaurant
• climbed and ran down some sand dunes (I still have sand in coming out of my shoes months later)
• had the best dinner I’ve had at a restaurant in quite some time (check out Stoked if you’re ever in Strandhill in Sligo – go with a group and order one of everything (tapas))
• had proper catch ups with family.

I also got to go into the office and catch up with workmates and had a full spa day and dinner with a friend. I also got to go for my morning walks in beautiful locations a lot warmer and greener than I would have at home, some through forests, by lakes and by the sea.

For our stopover in Lisbon, we met up with some new friends I had reacquainted with when we were in Portimao, and went to Sintra, had some of the freshest and best pastel de natas I’ve had so far, went to the Palace of Monserat (some of the nicest architecture I’ve ever seen, Little MH was so excited and impressed to be in a real castle – it looked very regal), took the scenic route back to Lisbon through the most Western point of Europe (Cabo da Roca), and stopped in Cascais for dinner at a vegetarian restaurant where they have all the dishes prepared on a table for you to see before you order.

After all that, however wonderful, I was dysregulated and tired and looking very much forward to getting home and back into a routine, keeping in mind that I was still working 3-4 days a week between all those visits and activities for most of the stay.

Once home, while my Dad collected us from the airport, my Mom turned the heat back up in our house and had a fresh pot of homemade soup and homemade apple crisp with apples off last year’s tree waiting for us in the oven when we got home. My Dad had also finished the extension he had been working on in the house so we had a whole new space to expand into. These are just some of the things that continue to remind me that the move home was the right choice for this chapter of our lives.

The first few weeks home were very low-key, not including the first few days where I rearranged all the furniture to make the best use of the new extension.

I had also put on an extra kilo from all the restaurants, pastries and fresh food, so definitely tried to up my exercise game to shake that, which I’ve thankfully been able to do (months later). Totally worth it.

Lessons learned

The only thing I think I’d do differently about this trip, next time, would be to do a bit less moving around so I don’t get so dysregulated. Other than that it was pretty great.

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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. This method of travel is used by a lot of families who worldschool and travel full time. It is easier on the mind and body in terms of adapting to change and usually cheaper as you can avail of long-term stay discounts.

In terms of when and where, Ireland was obviously part of the equation but when we decided that we’d want to be in Canada for the summer, it made sense to travel somewhere warmer during the winter. Travelling in the off-season is also quieter and cheaper. When we lived in Ireland, Portugal was only a 2.5 hour flight away and we had been a few times and knew we liked it.

I played around with different durations, originally we planned on travelling for 3 months but when it came time to actually book we felt this might be a little too long to be away from our home base and cut it down to 2.5 months.

Flights

As usual, I had a spreadsheet to plot out the trip. I looked at a few different flight routes and checked prices on google flights fairly regularly to get the best price. Once upon a time, I would have looked for the cheapest deal only regardless of duration and flight times but now I know what toll it takes on my body and I’m willing to pay a bit more for better options. I generally try to find direct flights that leave between 10am and 8pm. I’d love to avoid red-eye flights but that seems to be the only option from Montreal to Europe.

The route options I looked at were:

Route 1:

• Montreal-Lisbon 1 way
• Bus Lisbon-Portimao
• Bus Portimao-Faro
• Faro-Cork 1 way
• Bus Cork-Dublin
• Dublin-Toronto 1 way
• Toronto train to Ottawa

Route 2:

• Montreal-Lisbon return
• Bus Lisbon-Portimao
• Bus Portimao-Faro
• Faro-Cork return
• Bus Faro-Lisbon
• Lisbon accommodation 2 nights

Route 3:

• Montreal Lisbon return
• Bus Lisbon-Portimao
• Faro – Cork 1 way
• Dublin – Lisbon 1 way
• Lisbon accommodation 2 nights

All 3 options priced out at about 3,100$ for the 3 of us. That meant the choice was really down to preference. We opted for Route 3. The longest day was the first flight and bus, the rest were direct 1 way flights/bus trips.

Accommodation

Once we had the flights/dates booked, we needed accommodations. Portugal was the simplest as we were staying in one location for the whole duration. I searched on booking.com, homeexchange.com and a local real estate office which we had found through booking.com and had stayed with a few times before.

As we had been before we knew the area and where on the map we wanted to be so it made it easier to narrow down where we wanted to be.

We ended up booking a three-bed apartment with huge balcony as we hoped we would get some visitors to come stay with us.

School

Little MH is in kindergarten so school is not yet mandatory in Quebec. We let the school know the dates we’d be gone and they provided us with some activity books to work on while we were away.

In terms of socialisation, I found some local ex-pat/digital nomad/ worldschooling Facebook groups in Portimao. During the week, school-aged kids are in school so the playground isn’t a guarantee to find similar aged kids, unless they’re on holiday. The world schooling/digital nomad groups would have more school-aged English speaking kids available during the week for meetups. Little MH went to one of the group meetups while we were there but in general was happy out with just us. While I was working, Mr. MH and Little MH would go to the playground, play on the beach and play ball on the boardwalk.

Packing

We’ve gotten fairly good at packing minimally after all our travels. This time we managed to keep it to 2 40L backpacks, 2 regular backpacks and 1 large handbag.

At a high level we brought:

• 4-5 days worth of clothes each
• Minimal toiletries
• 3 months of diabetic supplies
• School activities, pencil, eraser, markers
• Electronics:
  • Work laptop, keyboard and mouse
  • Personal laptop
  • PS5
  • Nintendo Switch
  • Plug converters and chargers

I have a “leaving for months” checklist at home that I’ll add in at another time that includes the things we needed to prepare before we left to maintain the house/car ie: have plants watered, mail collected, arrange to have the car driven periodically to stop the battery from dying etc. I’d keep a paper list in the kitchen that we could add things to in the days coming up to the trip to help keep track of things not to forget.

What it cost

The below details what it cost for the 1 month in Portugal for the month of Feb. Flights and travel insurance are proportioned 40% to this portion of the trip and 60% to the Irish portion which I’ll detail in another post. The total cost was 4,342€ (6,338$).

We of course have ongoing costs at home which add to this. Costs for Feb for remaining expenses like Rent, Electricity, Internet etc came to 1,369€ (2,000$). Some of the travel costs like flights and accommodation would have been paid in December and January so the outgoing for Feb was not the full 6,292€ (9,187$).

Our estimated annual spend for the 12 months including travel is 44,000€ (64,000$), this averages out to 3,652€ (5,333$)/month. So the Portugal portion on its own is only a little over 1,000€ more than the average monthly spend.

How it went

In summary, it was lovely. The weather was warm and sunny and we had the beach, boardwalk and restaurants pretty much to ourselves, which is typical for this time of year. Working from a nice location was also great.

That said, a month is probably our limit. As we experienced in a previous mini-retirement, even though we had people visit us, it does become very isolating to not have friends and family to visit on the weekends.

A typical work day

• I would wake up naturally without an alarm between 7 and 8am
• Make my way to the kitchen for breakfast
• Little MH would already be awake, playing the switch or PS5
• Make myself and Little MH breakfast, having my tea on the balcony in the sun if it was out
• Get dressed, brush teeth etc
• Go for a walk on the beach by myself, taking a few moments to consciously breathe in the fresh sea air and look up at the sky without sunglasses to let in the morning light to my retinas to set my circadian rhythm and regulate hormones.
• Get back, grab my water bottle and log on to work
• Mr. MH would usually get up some time between 9 and 10am and get himself and Little MH ready to head out for some activity and groceries.
• I would typically have lunch by myself on the balcony
• Work for a few more hours
• Mr. MH would have dinner ready by the time I log off from work
• Eat dinner together as a family
• Spend the evening sometimes doing a school activity or playing card games, sometimes doing our own thing.
• Get Little MH ready for bed and asleep some time between 8:30 and 9pm. I’d usually go to bed at the same time as Little MH.
• Mr. MH would stay up a bit later.

A typical weekend

Similar to the work day in terms of wake up and sleep routine. We’d go to restaurants more often on the weekend. Sometimes for brunch, sometimes for dinner, heading down to the beach and playground either before or after food. I’d call home at some point. We had Mr. MH’s sister over for a few nights one weekend.

A few weeks before we got to Portugal, I saw on Facebook that someone I went to school with was posting pictures of Portugal. We got to chatting and it ended up they had moved there in 2020 and spend their summer’s at a cottage 20 minutes from where we are living now in Canada. Although I was probably 12 years old the last time I saw them in person, we decided to meet up. They came down with their partner for a night and we got to catch up. We will likely meet up again this summer. Such a small world.

Lessons learned

As with every trial, there comes some error to learn from As long as we learn from them, it will make the next trip even better.

1. We may have been able to save money on groceries by availing of grocery delivery from bigger chains. Continente and Uber Eats offer food delivery which we’ll likely avail of next time.
2. Uber/Bolt to and from the airport is only slightly more expensive and less hassle than the train and bus that we used to take. The bus/train takes 1.5 hours from Faro to Portimao and you still need to use Uber to get to the train and to the accommodation costing about 28€ for the 3 of us. Uber was 50 minutes total, 40€, and no timetables to worry about.
3. In regards to deposits, from now on we will take a video tour of the accommodation as soon as we get there. This trip Little MH accidentally pulled a curtain rod down and as a result the property manager did a thorough walk through when we left and blamed us for breaking a number of other things that were broken when we got there. We are still trying to get some of our deposit back on this one. Also, best to give the deposit as a separate payment not included in the total for the accommodation so that you can dispute it with your bank if needed. Lastly, perhaps booking through a website like booking.com rather than directly though the property company might give you more protections in terms of these types of disputes.
4. Packing wise – next time we might try to pack 1 checked bag between us. Having to carry all our bags on our backs any time we move around is cumbersome. While it’s nice to not have to wait for your bag in baggage claim and there is no risk of it going missing, we’re still trying to find the balance of what we carry and what we check.
5. As mentioned before, a month is probably a little too long, unless we can get more people to come visit us. I think the sweet spot might be 3 weeks.

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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 (17k) and any other income offsets.

Overall Spend

Here is a summary of the main categories with spend over 2,000€.

And all main spend categories summarised by annual and average monthly spend in both Euro and Canadian Dollar.

EURO

CAD

Food

EUR

CAD

Food stayed almost exactly the same as last year at 10.1k.

Our grocery category (8.7k) includes everything you’d buy at the grocery store so can include alcohol, toiletries, cleaning products, the odd centre aisle item like small tools, toys for our son etc.

Grocery spend was about 400€ more than last year but we spent less on take-away and restaurants (600€ less combined).

So even given the rate of inflation this year on food, we don’t seem to be seeing that much of an increase in our grocery bill, this is likely due to our efforts to eat as little processed foods as possible. We also plan our meals and make lists for grocery shopping which helps reduce food waste.

If we convert the full annual food spend of 10.1k into cost per person per week – assuming 2 adults and 1 small fella (I’ll average at 2.75), it comes to 71€/week/person.

For those that are wondering about the food cost difference between Canada and Ireland. We haven’t really noticed much of a difference.

We shop online at Walmart which helps us avoid the shopping when hungry additions you inevitably throw into your cart, and are usually able to find discount codes using this chrome plug-in that knocks off about 20$ each week. As above, we try to eat whole, local, organic, fairly treated foods as much as possible, so even with the added costs for organic, I do think it is less than a lot of pre-made, processed foods would be. We are averaging about 200€/week since moving to Canada.

Monthly Bills

EUR

CAD

Monthly bills came in at just under 10k which is 2,500€ more than last year. The vast majority was mortgage/rent (6.4k). This is higher than last year as we are now renting instead of paying a small mortgage.

Gas was only 100€ more than last year at 1,265€ but we didn’t have a gas bill once we moved to Canada as our rental is heated with Electricity.

Electricity was 80€ less than last year at 457€. Electricity in Quebec is relatively cheap at 7.3¢/kwh.

Internet was 127€ more than last year as we are now paying 44€/month instead of the average 37€/month we were spending in Ireland (due to new customer offers).

Mobile was slightly less than last year at 520€ but this is only because we’ve been sharing a phone. I am very rarely not in a place with wifi so I don’t really need a phone plan. We are now paying about 30€/month for a bring-your-own-device plan of 20GB and unlimited calls/texts in Canada.

Moving Costs

EUR

CAD

As mentioned, we moved back to Canada this year. This is hopefully a once-in-a-decade cost ;). We spent 7,560€ to ship our furniture. It was well worth the cost for us to have all our belongings transplanted into our new home to help us feel at home more quickly. We spent a lot on our furniture and accessories in Ireland and it made sense to ship them rather than sell them off and replace them on this end. The other costs were flights and shipping materials.

Vacation

EUR

CAD

We spent more than double on travel this year than we did last year at 7.6k. The reason it is higher is that we had 2 weeks in Portugal (from Ireland), 3 weeks in Paris (from Canada) and bought our flights from Canada to Portugal and Ireland for early 2024 in Dec of 2023.

So flights came in at 3,356€ which was 310€ for Portugal from Cork for the 3 of us, 1,278€ for Paris/Ireland from Montreal for 2 of us, and 1,766€ for Portugal/Ireland from Montreal for the 3 of us.

Food came to 1,850€ for the 5 weeks so about 370€/week (compared to the average of 200€/week when staying home), due to taking part in restaurants and nights out on holiday.

Despite being abroad for 5 weeks, our accommodation costs only came to 1,912€. This averages out to 54€/night including 3 weeks in Paris. We managed this largely because we used our guest points that we had built up from home-exchange. We managed to stay almost the entire 3 weeks in Paris without paying for accommodation and we still have 2-3 weeks of points left over!

Here are some of the places we stayed.

Home

EUR

CAD

Home costs were significantly more than last year coming in at 6.7k compared to 1.8k. Part of the reason this looks to be so much higher is that our home-related costs last year were probably lower than usual as we knew we would be moving and did not buy anything we didn’t need. Once we moved, we had to buy a lot of new stuff to get set up in Canada. We sold a lot of our electronics and some furniture in Ireland which helped towards some of the costs but I can’t say we didn’t have fun buying new stuff.

We spent 2.4k on electronics including 2 new TVs, a sound system and 2 PS5s.

We spent 1.2k on furniture including dining room chairs, a kitchen island and a headboard.

We spent 900€ on small appliances including an espresso machine and BBQ.

Accessories costs seem very low at 385€ but this is because we offset these purchases with sales of stuff in Ireland. We sold off 2.4k of stuff in Ireland but bought 2.8k of stuff in Canada. Biggest costs here were an inflatable hot tub, new Christmas decorations and blinds. Although we are renting, we did still need a lot of organisational things like towel bars, soap dispensers, storage bins, door mats etc.

Smaller amounts then, were spent on maintenance, renos getting the house ready for sale, plants and insurance.

Our insurance costs seem so low as we got refunds from our cancelled Irish policies.

Medical

EUR

CAD

Medical costs were higher this year, coming in at almost 4k compared to 1.4k last year. Although we only needed health insurance for part of the year it still cost us 1.8k as we had to pay for interim insurance in Canada while we waited for our government insurance plan to kick in.

Doctor costs were also quite a bit higher at 1k. The largest part of this was my autism assessment and diagnosis which I had to pay for privately. Mr. MH also had to go to a private clinic a few times in Canada to get forms completed for his license and to get a prescription as we don’t yet have a family doctor.

Prescription costs were also higher as we had to pay out of pocket for Mr. MH’s diabetic stuff until we could apply for coverage under the provincial plan.

Little MH had a broken tooth which ultimately needed to be extracted, poor guy, so that brought up our dental costs. We should be getting a tax credit against that next year though which should offset that.

These costs should be significantly lower next year once all our tax credits and benefits kick in.

Transportation

EUR

CAD

Transport costs were only slightly higher than last year at 3.4k instead of 2.8k.

Petrol was about the same at 1.3k although I expect this to be lower next year. When in Ireland we had a 2012 hybrid but when we first moved to Canada we borrowed an older car for the first few months which would have cost more in petrol. In October we bought a 2021 hybrid and are seeing a big reduction in fuel costs so this will be an interesting comparison next year.

Car repairs and maintenance came in at 1k and is largely due to the cost of our winter tires. We hope to get a few winters out of them so again, hopefully this will be less next year.

Car insurance appears lower as we got a refund from our Irish policy which offset the costs on the Irish side. Next year this will appear higher. We pay 870€ for car insurance.

Entertainment

EUR

CAD

Entertainment was 1,400€ less than last year. We spent 480€ less on video games and 285€ less on alcohol. Mr. MH also got money back on sporting events as he had spare tickets to the Rugby World Cup which he sold on. In total, we spent 2.1k on entertainment.

Spending across sub-categories was fairly even between 100€ and 400€ on each.

Other

EUR

CAD

The remaining categories were largely between 1,000€ and 2,000€ each.

Misc was the highest at 1.8k. I got my Irish citizenship this year! This was the cost of my certificate and last-minute flight changes to Ireland.

Another 1.8k was spent on personal stuff like clothing, toiletries, haircuts, accessories, winter boots etc.

I had 1.7k of expenses for work, including indemnity insurance and customs on the shipment of my laptop.

Giving includes charity and gifts at 1.7k. Gifts include birthdays, Christmas and a thank-you gift for my parents for minding little MH while we were in Paris.

Kid stuff includes things like, activities, books, clothing, school supplies, and toys. The biggest cost here was a swing set and trampoline.

Blog costs came in at 873€ for insurance and subscriptions to run the website.

Health costs include things like classes and exercise equipment (800€). This year we bought a bike, a paddle board and some weights and I went to a few yoga classes.

Goals for next year

Needless to say, I’m hoping our costs next year will be significantly lower!

I’m going to target 43,000€ (63,000$). This will include 2.5 months in Portugal and Ireland along with our increased costs from renting.

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 car made up 2%.

For now, our new asset breakdown looks like this:

79% of our equity is now made up of our Canadian ETF portfolio. 12% remains in our Irish stock account which we will start to sell off when we start to withdraw from the portfolio. 5% is the value of our car and 4% remains in cash as an emergency fund.

In terms of existing assets, I wasn’t going to sell them off and trigger a tax event unnecessarily so for now our portfolio will look a bit more complicated than it needs to be. Eventually, as we start to sell off funds when we start to withdraw, we will sell off the funds we no longer want to hold first and our portfolio will get simpler over time.

Detailed Canadian ETF Breakdown

Once we moved, we had to decide how to restructure our assets. I didn’t want to have assets in 2 countries as I didn’t want to have to keep filing taxes in both as well as to continue managing multiple investment accounts and portfolios. I’m a big fan of the keep-it-simple approach.

As mentioned in my last post, we decided we would rent instead of buy a new home for the time being and so we wouldn’t be needing any large sums any time soon and even if we do want to buy again, we’ve decided we’d like to save up and start again, leaving the rest of our assets invested to grow.

To start building out our new portfolio, I did up a budget, figuring out how much cash we would need to cover the next twelve months including the purchase of a new car and other setup costs. I also figured we needed to leave some cash in our Irish account as we had plans to travel to France, Portugal and Ireland within the next twelve months and there was no point converting the cash only to convert it back again a few months later. Once I knew how much we needed to leave out, we took the money from the sale of our Irish home, sold our Irish ETFs and moved the money to Canada. From there I took the opportunity to apply the knowledge I’ve acquired in investing so far and made up a new consolidated ETF portfolio.

Initially, I was just going to continue replicating the ETF portfolio I already had. It has performed well enough and has good diversification, but when it came to investing the largest sum of money I will probably ever invest at one time, I thought about all the other long-time FIRE bloggers that I follow. All of the American bloggers have said time and time again to just invest in VTSAX (Vanguard Total US Stock Market Fund) and block out the noise about anything else. J L Collins says he plans to never sell and just live off the dividends.

The bloggers I follow worked to reach their full FIRE number before retiring early but have way more now than they will ever need, partly because they never really stopped working. They just work how and when they want to work now, on things that they are passionate about. Working for money is optional for them but if you have the drive to reach FIRE, you are not going to be the kind of person to sit back and never earn money again. Looking at my investment portfolio and own journey to FIRE in this light gave me new perspective. I decided I would follow suit and take a bit more risk than I previously would have by investing in one ETF with exposure ONLY to the US stock market.

Consideration 1: VTSAX is not available in Canada. After some research, I found a very similar fund. This post gives a good comparison. In summary, if you buy VUN (Vanguard Total US Stock Market ETF), it’s made up of the same underlying stocks as VTSAX but it is purchased in Canadian Dollar. Unfortunately, the annual management fee is 4 times higher than if you were in the US (0.16 instead of 0.04) :(, I suspect this is due to currency conversion costs.

I could have converted my Canadian Dollar to US Dollar and bought VTI or VUS (other similar funds in USD) but that added more complexity, more currency hedge risks and would subject me to US withholding taxes which I’d have to track and claim back at tax time. Again, I’m all for the Keep It Simple approach which just means I’ll pay a slightly higher annual fee.

Consideration 2: Not all of this money is mine alone, some belongs to Mr. MH and so he had to agree with the latest shift. He bought his previous ETF portfolio after me and although his was made up of the same funds as mine, the timing meant that his portfolio dipped for much longer and his best-performing fund during the pandemic was VCE (Vanguard FTSE Canada Index). Because of this, he felt more comfortable keeping at least some of the portfolio invested in a Canadian stock market ETF.

This meant that our target portfolio allocation was going to look something like 95% VUN and 5% VCN (Vanguard FTSE Canada All Cap Index) – this is a newer, broader ETF than VCE.

I started off by investing the proceeds of our house first. I bought mostly VUN and a small amount of VCN per the plan. Then as we were moving over the proceeds from our Irish ETF portfolio my nerves started creeping in about how over-exposed to the US markets we were. I decided I wanted to build back in some regional diversity and looked for another fund or two to help round out my portfolio. As we add more money we will purchase the other funds to balance it out a bit more.

Previously our ETF portfolio was made up of 5 funds. Now I think I can get the diversification I’m comfortable with in 3.

Our new target is something like 80% US, 15% Developed Markets excluding US, 5% Emerging Markets

This should give us a weighted MER of 0.19%, estimated annual growth of 12.02% and estimated annual dividends of 1.58% (based on returns since inception per current fact sheets).

Our current portfolio including our Irish stocks currently looks quite disorganised but I’m ok with that as the estimated returns of the portfolio are slightly better than the above projections. Our current weighted MER is 0.18%, estimated annual returns are 12.28% and dividends of 1.37%.

Once you get to a certain level of funds, you can start to see really fun gains or really scary losses on a daily basis. This has been an interesting experience. Our life’s savings are literally all in the stock market. We signed up to an account which lets you consolidate all of your investment accounts into one dashboard with reports. So far our Canadian accounts have gone like this:

The blue line is contributions and the green line is value of investments. So in August, we lumped in our house proceeds and we saw a nice uptick, very shortly followed by a downturn which didn’t go below our initial contributions but was still a drop of 24,000$ in the span of a few weeks. Thankfully, this has now gone back up to above where it was at the previous peak but before you go putting large sums into investments, be sure you are committed to the buy and hold strategy as the smallest drop in your share price can result in big drops in your portfolio. If you sell when it dips, you are locking in your loss, but if you hold on for long enough it will recover.

The current year to date returns are coming in at 14.53% not including dividends.

Different accounts

Another thing I haven’t gone into yet are the different investment accounts available in Canada. As soon as we got back, we opened up a number of new accounts under each of our names in order to maximise our tax benefits. Below are the different accounts we currently hold in each of our names.

• Tax-Free Savings Account (TFSA)
• Register Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP)
• First Home Savings Account (FHSA)
• Margin Account

The TFSA gives you a certain amount of money you can invest per year tax free. This is after tax income but grows tax free and is tax free on withdrawal. Unfortunately for us, your contribution room stops growing once you are out of country so we only have a portion of the 88,000$ room other Canadians have. Still it’s a great account to have.

RRSP’s are similar to Irish pensions in that they are tax-deferral accounts with annual contribution limits where you contribute to them in your higher earning years to reduce your taxable income, the investments grow tax free until withdrawal, at which time you pay your marginal income tax rate. The benefit Canadian RRSPs have over Irish pensions is that you can easily open an account and manage the funds yourself and there is no minimum age for withdrawal.

FHSA’s are tax-free savings accounts to help people save for their first home. There are annual contribution limits up to a maximum of 40k, contributions are tax-deductible, growth is tax-free and withdrawal is tax-free. Contrary to what the name implies, if you have NOT owned your primary home in Canada in the last 4 calendar years, you are still eligible for an account. If you do not decide to buy a house in the end, you can roll the money into your RRSP without impacting your RRSP contribution limits. Your contribution room only starts growing once you open an account so even if you don’t intend on investing/saving for a home, it might be a good idea to open an account just in case you do in the next few years.

Margin accounts are your usual taxable after tax investment accounts.

As we’ve been out of country for 9 years, our contribution room in our TFSA and RRSPs are not as high as they could be but something is better than nothing. So for now, we have maxed out our TFSAs, RRSPs and FHSAs and lumped the rest in our Margin accounts. As I haven’t worked much this year, this may seem like a waste as I won’t have income tax to reduce but getting the money invested and allowing it to grow as soon as possible will outweigh the tax savings I would have made if I had spread it out over higher income earning years.

There is also a Registered Education Savings Plan (RESP) we may look into for our son but I’m not 100% sold on the benefits vs. restrictions. Should our son not go to third level education in Canada, your marginal income tax is charged on withdrawal PLUS a 12-20% withdrawal penalty. For now I’ll just keep investing in our other accounts and use those funds to pay for college if needs be.

As Forest Gump once said: That’s all I got to say about that.

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 little we need to work to cover the rest of our expenses. We’re also looking to split our time between Canada, Portugal and Ireland over the next 12 months. Should we wish to buy another house at some point, we will start over, building up a new downpayment and getting another mortgage. We would hope that our portfolio growth would cover our mortgage payments at minimum at that point and would still be mortgage-neutral.

When

I knew in June of 2022 that I wanted to move back. It took many months for me to convince Mr. MH that this was not a passing whim (of which I have many in fairness to him). It was particularly hard for Mr. MH to come to terms with as I had been so adamant only weeks prior that I had zero intention of moving back to Canada for as long as I could see. Given my state of mind at the time, I can understand his reluctance. During the time it took me to convince Mr. MH, I researched, plotted and planned. We sold off furniture and toys, donated books and got the house ready for sale. Whether we moved to Canada or not, we still planned on selling our house and moving within Ireland to somewhere closer to family/friends as you’ll read about below. In the end, we reduced our last 9 years and a three-bedroom house into a 20-foot shipping container. Finally, by June of 2023, we flew back to Canada with what was left of our belongings trailing behind us.

Why

Part of the change stemmed from the isolation I felt during the pandemic and my state of mind. I was in search of 2 things. 1. The ability for me to quit work, preferably with Mr. MH off at the same time for a significant amount of time and 2. Community. I ran through many scenarios trying to figure this out.

One of the silver linings of the pandemic is that it opened up the opportunity to work remotely and although that has changed somewhat since, there are still opportunities that weren’t there before.

At one point, we were looking at buying an old farmhouse on 5 acres of land in Mayo to be closer to Mr. MH’s family and to be in nature.

At another, we were looking at a house in the same estate as some friends of ours in Cork where we could be mortgage-free and live off one part-time income. And every option in between, each option we considered had to tick both boxes, and for each we compiled a list of how much closer we would be to how many friends and family members. Then about 2 weeks before we were due to come back to Canada for the summer, a switch flicked. I knew then that I needed to come home. I couldn’t describe it as anything other than intuition.

Now, we are renting a two-bedroom house in the countryside less than 2km from my parents. I thoroughly appreciate the sense of community I so lacked. I see my parents almost every day. We have each other over for dinner once or twice a week and borrow milk and random ingredients from each other (we are a 40-minute drive to the nearest town). My sister randomly bought me a pair of pants she thought I would like. My Mom, while watching my son, baked zucchini bread as an activity and made an extra loaf to share with us. She also recently made me a pot of homemade soup when I was sick. My Dad helps us with things around the house. My siblings drop by unplanned or at short notice. We have play-dates with cousins and family BBQs. In the Summer, we spend time at the lake 20 minutes away. I got a paddle board which I absolutely love to get out on. My parents watch our son from time to time which has allowed us to get some alone time.

We even got to go to France for 2 weeks for the Rugby World Cup child-free! None of this was possible from where we were. Prior to this, we had been away from our son only twice for a total of 4 nights in 4 years.

It’s not all one-sided. I get to help out too which I thankfully now have some energy to do. I help with things like tech support, babysitting, lifts to doctors’ appointments, dinners and house cleaning for example. We also buy things for each other where we see it’s needed without expecting anything in return.

For this chapter of our lives, it feels like friends are so busy with kids and activities that it’s hard to schedule in any time together. If we are to see other people regularly, it’s far more likely if we are closer to family – at least for now.

I recently listened to a wellness podcast that said that community and connectedness are a missing link in sustained wellness and I couldn’t agree more. It’s made a huge difference to the quality of my life.

How

The move went as smoothly as it could have gone, though I like to think my level of planning had something to do with that.

I use a software called Asana to help manage big to-do lists. It’s shared with my husband so we can each work away on things and keep each other updated in one place with the progress using comments and attachments. Our move to Canada list had the following sections:

• get house ready for sale
• packing/shipping
• before we leave
• finance stuff
• after arrival
• quality of medical care research
• shopping on arrival
• house to-do (rental)

We would add to the list as soon as we thought of something else that needed to be done and keep it up to date as we went along to make sure nothing got forgotten. Coming up to the last day, I also had a paper to-do list on the kitchen counter with the last-minute stuff.

I also had a spreadsheet (of course) which had the following tabs:

• rent vs buy analysis
  • this included the total of our assets alongside various options of buying a house vs renting a house to see how much our portfolio would cover of our living expenses and how many months of the year I would have to work to cover our remaining expenses. Some example scenarios below.
  • I also kept track of the exchange rate trends and calculated what gross salary I would need to make to cover all expenses after taxes in the 2 provinces we were considering (Quebec and Ontario have very different income tax rates)
• move furniture
  • this was an analysis of what we paid for our furniture, what we thought we could sell it for second hand, what we would have to spend to replace it in Canada vs what it would cost for us to ship it
• home build
  • we also looked at the option of severing a plot from my parents’ farm to build a prefab home
• rent option
  • this looked at what rental yield we thought we could get if we rented our Irish home out instead of selling
• estimated cost of living
  • this included a few of the rent vs buy scenarios using our current cost of living in Ireland as a base and adding/taking away costs per our research and understanding of Canadian costs
• move costs
  • this included estimates on how much the move would cost us including house sale costs, shipping and flights as well as the sale of our car. This was used to help us manage cash flow as we knew we’d need some large sums available for things before the assets from the house sale were freed up

We had a few administrative hiccups getting set back up on this side but overall can’t complain. We had a very soft landing in that we had a place to stay for the first few weeks with my parents. And then when our furniture arrived, we moved into our rental.

Of course, wrapping up our life in Ireland and saying our “see you later’s” was hard and definitely had me questioning my decision the closer we got to leaving but now that we’re 5 months in on the other side I have to say it was the best decision for our family for this chapter of our lives.

Rent vs Buy Scenarios

In this section, I will go through the various scenarios we considered when looking at renting vs buying in Canada. All of the below scenarios were based on actual houses available to buy/rent in the areas we were considering. I will generalise the information without giving specific personal figures however, I will share the actual expected outcomes of each for comparison purposes.

1. Buy house for cash, invest the rest, withdraw 7.5% of portfolio per year, add on non-employment non-dividend income (tax refunds, child benefits, passive blog income), minus base living expenses.
2. Buy house with 90k mortgage, invest the rest, withdraw 7.5% of portfolio per year, add on non-employment non-dividend income (tax refunds, child benefits, passive blog income), minus living expenses (base + mortgage).
3. Buy a duplex with 70k mortgage, invest the rest, withdraw 7.5% of portfolio per year, add on non-employment non-dividend income (tax refunds, child benefits, passive blog income), add on Air BnB income for the other unit minus living expenses (base + mortgage + additional homeownership costs) minus Air BnB fees and rental income taxes.
4. Rent for 1,000$, invest everything, withdraw 6.5% of portfolio per year, add on non-employment non-dividend income (tax refunds, child benefits, passive blog income), minus living expenses (living expenses including rent would be comparable to owning as home ownership costs are much higher in Canada – higher property taxes, higher insurance)
5. Rent for 2,100$, everything else the same as option 4 except increase withdrawal from portfolio to 7.5%
6. Rent for 1,000$, spend an additional 2,500€ in rent for 3 months in Portugal/Ireland, everything else same as option 4 except decrease withdrawal from portfolio to 6%
7. Stay in Ireland, move to a house where we could be mortgage-free with assets from our current home, leave remaining assets invested, withdraw 6% from portfolio, add on non-employment non-dividend income (tax refunds, child benefits, passive blog income) minus living expenses (current minus mortgage)

The below table shares the outcomes of each of the above scenarios in terms of remaining expenses that would need to be covered through employment income.

Selling our house

We sold our house using auctioneera. They offer all the same services as a traditional estate agent but for a flat fee instead of a percentage which saved us a few thousand euro. We liked the online nature of their service and the dashboard/updates you’d get after every viewing.

We did a lot of decluttering and staging ourselves. Our house listing went live on Feb 17. We had a total of 4 group viewings with 19 people from Feb 23 to Mar 10. For each viewing, I made sure the house was spotless, aired out and staged the same as we did for the photos. On some days I even made fresh cookies so the house smelled of baking. On the evening of Mar 10, the bidding went available online and we watched 6 people make bids on our home. It finished up at 40k over asking. We went sale agreed on Mar 16. We had a condition that we needed the house until the end of June so we moved out on Jun 22 and had funds in our account from the sale on July 12.

Moving furniture

As mentioned above we were quite torn on whether the cost of shipping our furniture was worth it.

We estimated we spent around 17k on furniture and accessories for the house. If we managed to sell all of it (which was unlikely), we’d maybe stand to make about 25% of that back (4k). We’d then have to replace all of that furniture on the Canada side. We estimated it would cost us about 10k to replace what we’d need. This would not be a like-for-like replacement. As we hadn’t planned on leaving Ireland, the furniture we bought was higher quality – stuff we really liked. We’d also likely still have some things to ship as we had some sentimental items like a few baby things, teddies/toys for our son, and a wedding present that is dear to us that we couldn’t fit in a suitcase.

Our first shipping quotes were at peak due to pandemic backlogs, port congestion and strikes. They ranged from 9,500€ to 11,000€ for a SHARED 20-foot container not including insurance.

I found a site called Freightos that tracks the ticker rates for certain shipment routes. Like tickers for the stock market, there are similar ticker rates for freight costs – referred to as the FBX. I signed up to their newsletter and kept up to date on the rates for our shipment route. We used this as a basis for comparison when looking for new quotes closer to the date of our move. A year later, we got updated quotes from the existing companies and they were coming in even higher than before! It pays to shop around as we got a quote from a different company and managed to get our full 20-foot container including insurance for 7,560€.

We still had to downsize some of our furniture in order to fit everything into 20 feet and there were some things we no longer needed or electronics that wouldn’t work in Canada so we still had to sell some things and replace them on the other side on top of the shipping but it was oh so nice to get our furniture from our Irish life to help us feel at home more quickly in Canada. I think this was particularly helpful for our son’s adjustment to his new life, to have some elements of familiarity.

In terms of timing, we sold our car the morning the movers came! Our furniture was packed up and collected on Jun 22nd. We got a taxi to our friends’ house where they surprised us with a final gathering of some of our best friends for dinner and then we flew out the very next day. Our furniture arrived at our new rental on August 1st. There were quite a few forms to fill out and sign off on. One set of forms you have to have completed and signed on arrival in customs when you fly in, in order to avoid paying customs on your personal items. Then once it arrived at the port, we had to drive to Montreal to sign another customs form in order to release the goods.

Moving Money

We did a good bit of research trying to find the cheapest way to get out money moved back to Canada. As we were moving such a large sum, both the exchange rate and the exchange fees were going to make a huge difference so this was an important one.

When I first checked with a currency broker I had used in the past, they were offering an exchange rate that was 0.13 points lower than the market rate. This seemingly small number was going to cost us over 7,000$ (4,700€) in difference.

I ended up finding a company called Atlantic Money who give you the market rate and only charge a flat fee per exchange. The catch was that the transfers were limited to what our online banking would allow per day which was 10,000€. This meant I needed to make a transfer per day for a lot of days to get the full amount changed over but this also allowed us to “dollar cost average” with the exchange rate. Even with the flat fee and the number of exchanges we needed to make, the fees came to less than 100€. A far cry from the 4,700€ cut the broker was going to take.

As I hadn’t used them before I started with a small transfer of 1,000€ to make sure it got to my Canadian account as expected. Once tested, we continued on with the daily transfer until all funds were transferred. We had to prove where the money came from for anti-money laundering purposes but it was super fast to complete and get approved.

They also now have a Business account if you have a business and work or get paid in multiple currencies.

Home build

We also priced out what it would cost to buy a plot of land off my parents and build a pre-fab home.

In 2022, this was what we had estimated.

For a prefab 2-bedroom bungalow like this one, it would cost between 434,000$ (295,000€) and 487,000$ (331,000€) including site works and land.

Break-down looked like this:

Estimated cost of living

In Ireland, by the time we left, our annual cost of living was averaging at about 36,000€ with a small mortgage.

Annual expense posts here: 2022 (35k), 2021 (38k), 2020 (39k).

We mapped out a few scenarios of living expenses in Canada per below:

Of course, these are estimates and we will get a better sense of what is realistic once we’ve lived here for 12 months, which I hope to share, but for now, we had to start somewhere. I used sites like numbeo and local blogs/forums/family to get a sense of what things cost here now. Will keep you posted on how close or far off we were.

And that about covers it! It looks like a lot of effort now looking back but we were both off and I’m a good planner so it was a lot more gradual than it looks reading it all in one blog post.

In my next posts, I’ll give an update on what our new Canadian portfolio looks like now as well as how we spent our time in the almost 18 months we were both off together.

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.

Starting off I should say, we did not get here overnight. We are probably 15 years into our journey of getting and staying out of debt, consistently spending less than we earn and using the remainder to either pay for big life expenses in cash such as cars (albeit old), our wedding, two down payments, renovations and extended maternity leave or building up some investments such as paying down our mortgage, stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs)).

It’s important not to compare the beginning of your journey to the middle of someone else’s, so keep that in mind as you read on.

What is a mini-retirement?

In short, a mini-retirement is an extended break from your regular work, it can be for 2 months or even a year or more.

This will be our family’s second mini-retirement. The first was 2 months in duration in Portugal at the beginning of 2020 right before the first lockdown at the tail end of my maternity leave. You can read that series in the posts below.

Why we took a mini-retirement

The short answer is, because we felt like it and because we could.

The long answer is, the pandemic was hard, as it was for many. I hadn’t seen some of my immediate family for 3 years. My twin nephews were 1 the last time I saw them, now they are 4. There were points during the pandemic when I wasn’t sure I’d ever see them again – this may seem dramatic but my mental state was not normal at that time – actually it still isn’t but I’ll get into that later. I wanted to be able to visit and catch up without being rushed. I wanted to make up for lost time.

Second, I was and still am recovering from burnout.

How we managed a mini-retirement

You can read more about how to plan for a mini-retirement in general in my previous post, but for this time for us, we made the decision in January 2022.

Budgeting

First things first, could we afford it?

I track my expenses in detail 3-4 times a year so I have a fairly good idea of what our monthly expenses are month on month. At the moment, our monthly expenses are 3,000€/month on average.

We knew we wanted to take 3 months off and that if I went back contracting it would take 2 months of working before I would get paid again – when you work on contract, you invoice at the end of the first month and the company generally has 30 days to pay it so you have to work for 2 full months before you are paid. This meant we needed money for 5 months to get us to our next paycheck.

Simple math is 5 months times 3,000€/month = 15,000€.

Our bank balance at the beginning of January was 15k. We like to keep 10k as an emergency fund so we had 5k extra to put towards our next goal. I figured we’d be able to save the additional 15k back up by the end of my contract so I added 5k to my ETF investment portfolio in Degiro*.

I finished my contract at the end of June but had 1 final paycheck due at the end of July, so by the end of July we had built our savings back up to 26k (including our 10k emergency fund). Meaning we were saving about 2,500€/month towards this plan.

Getting off work

I was working contract work and Mr. MH was already off as a stay-at-home-Dad, so we only had to worry about getting work off for one job. In March, I told my Manager I would not be extending my contract at the end of June but that I would like to come back in October if they had work for me. I was told it wouldn’t be guaranteed but that I should get in touch a month before I wanted to come back and they would see what they could do. Worse case, I would be applying for a contract somewhere else. With the way the job market is at the moment, this was a risk I was willing to take.

Preparing to go

In terms of preparing to go, we installed a lockbox for our house along with a Ring battery operated security camera for the outside and we re-purposed the camera we used as our baby monitor to watch the back door. We told our friends and family to use our house while we were away, which was made easier by the lockbox. They kindly watered our plants when they stayed meaning we only needed to bug friends of ours to drop by twice while we were away.

The last time we were away for a long period, our car battery died which we solved in the past by taking the battery out and putting it back when we returned. We thought we’d do the same this time however since we now have a hybrid, this caused the battery to prematurely die. We have since learned that hybrid cars, especially those with stop/start functions need a special battery and for that battery to be fitted by a garage in order to sync it up properly with the onboard system. So, depending on what type of car you have, you may need to get friends or neighbours to drive your car intermittently while you are away, if gone for extended periods.

Packing-wise, due to all the baggage delays and stories of lost baggage, we only brought our stuff in carry-ons. As we are fairly minimalist and used to travelling light for the likes of Ryanair, I’d been doing some research into the best/biggest carry-on which fits even Ryanair’s size limits. I invested in this Osprey 40L backpack which I’m fairly pleased with and managed to fit all my stuff in for the 2 months. We did have one suitcase filled with baby stuff for my sister but even that managed to make it through ok.

What our mini-retirement cost

The below table outlines what we spent our money on from July-September 2022. This includes 2 months in Canada and 1 month in Ireland and the flights we purchased in March.

In total, we spent 9,741€ or an average of 3,247€/month. Adding on the additional 2 months of 3,000€ to our next paycheck, this comes to 15,741€ which is almost 1,000€ over what we had estimated.

As the flights were purchased in March, that brings our actual monthly average for Jul-Sep down to 2,625€ and our total actual spend during that timeframe to 7,876€, add onto that the additional 3,000€/month until our next paycheck and that comes to 13,876€, so slightly under our estimated actual spend for that timeframe.

Out of curiosity, when I looked at the money we spent while in Canada only (including ongoing Irish costs such as mortgage etc), the monthly average came to only 1,874€/month.

How our mini-retirement went

On the surface, we had a wonderful summer. We got quality time and catch-ups in with friends and family. Mr. MH and I had date nights and nights away on our own. We got to go to the cinema and splashed out on a fancy-tasting menu. Little MH learned to swim. We had pool time, beach time, lake time, boat time and nice weather. Little MH had lots of play dates with cousins. Mr. MH read lots of books. I made jigsaw puzzles while singing along to my favourite songs. We got to eat food we hadn’t had in years. We shared many meals in good company and ate in restaurants.

Once we were back in Ireland and back into the routine, Mr. MH and I had a few hours each day to ourselves as Little MH had started back to playschool. We went on long walks in nature on our own in the fresh Autumn air. We got to catch back up with Irish family with cousin play dates for Little MH here too.

For all of this, I am so grateful.

Digging deeper, I am still struggling mentally and physically. I am tired all the time. I don’t have the energy to do the things I want in life. Mood-wise I feel mostly numb. About a month into our time off I was frustrated with myself for not feeling more rested, even with all the support and no work, I was still running on empty. For the first month, I was obsessing, planning and analysing our next move (more on that to follow). I remember basking in the sun on my parent’s pontoon boat surrounded by family feeling nothing and being mad at myself for not being able to be present and feel joy at what should be a most joyful moment. I then vowed to stop my planning and to spend the last month being more present. This helped somewhat but not as much as I’d hoped.

Reading some other FIRE blogs, for those that had already retired, some said it took them a year to decompress from the working world. So maybe my expectations for feeling rested are too high.

Somewhere along the way, I decided I needed to take some more time to try and heal. I feel like I’ve been troubleshooting for a year and although I’ve definitely levelled off and am much more stable, I’m still numb most of the time. I do get moments of joy every day and some moments where my heart is just brimming with love and gratitude but I very quickly fall back to my baseline of numbness.

So, Mr. MH will be going back to work while I focus on getting better. I’m very lucky to be in this position and am thankful for that. Since we’ve been back, my routine looks like this:

• Wake up with Little MH between 6:30 and 7 and have breakfast together
• I’ve started taking the Revive Active energy sachets before eating/drinking anything each morning
• Get Little MH off to playschool
• Come back and exercise with either a brisk walk in nature if it’s nice or some strength training and/or yoga for 30-60 minutes
• Shower, clean the house, make the beds and collect Little MH
• Have lunch
• Food-wise, we’re following a 4-week gut health program featured in the book Fibre Fuelled.
• Putter around in the afternoon, go to the shop, library, playground, give Little MH snacks (so many snacks) etc
• Start dinner around 4
• Chill out for a bit after dinner
• Get Little MH to bed around 8:30
• Go to bed myself between 8:30 and 9 – I downloaded a sleep tracker and have been seeing that my sleep quality is very poor (very little deep sleep, awake for 1.5 hours most nights) so I have to go to bed very early if I’m to get 7-8 hours actual sleep.

I’m about 2 weeks into this routine and feeling more energized most days, not waking up as groggy. My default mood has not really improved so I will give it one more week before heading back to the GP. I think it may be a matter of going back on anti-depressants for a while and maybe getting referred to a sleep clinic.

All-in-all, I’m so grateful for having this time with friends and family. For being able to take time to get better.

I do think that as we are living and working longer, mini-retirements will one day become the norm. People will be able to take extended career breaks to enjoy life while you are still able to do things you love.

The beauty of reaching financial stability is being able to choose when to do things like this and not feeling trapped to keep going when your body says stop.

What do you think? If you could take a mini-retirement what would you do? Has anyone experienced what I’m going through and what did you do to get better?

* This post contains a referral link where I get a bonus if you sign up and use the service at no cost to you. Note investing comes with a risk of loss. Do not invest any money you can’t afford to lose.

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 search for people interested in coming to your city and see if they want to stay while you’re away. If that doesn’t work out, you can also gather guest points before you go by either hosting people when you are at home in a spare room or while you are away visiting friends/family or on a different paid holiday. Once you have the guest points you can then use them yourself another time without needing to organise a reciprocal exchange.

Cost

You can sign up for free until you are ready to make your first exchange. Once you are ready to do a swap or host someone there is an annual cost of 149€. This gets you unlimited exchanges, member support, assistance in case of cancellation or non-compliance and property damage coverage. You can read more about the terms and conditions of these here.

HomeExchange gifts you guest points for completing certain steps of your sign up process. When I first signed up I got 450 points as a sign-up offer, 350 points for completing my profile, 350 points for completing the description of my home and 100 points for signing up, for a total of 1,250 points. And if you sign up with this link we both get an additional 250 points.

To give you an idea of what this will get you, most homes are available for between 100 and 250 guest points per night. So 1,500 guest points will get you 6 nights of accommodation at the higher end of the scale or 15 nights at the lower end of the scale.

Guest points are decided based on the size of home, amenities and location.

If you’re looking for a family holiday in Ireland this summer, for example, you could be looking at 210€/night for a two-bedroom apartment at a family-friendly hotel or a minimum of 100€/night for a home on Airbnb. For a week that would cost you between 700€ and 1,470€ for 7 nights. If you were up for camping, it would bring the cost down to about 200€ for a week but you’d also need to dish out for the camping gear if you don’t already have that and be up for camping.

Range/Selection

We’ve had our home up since 2019 but didn’t get to use it until this month due to the pandemic. In that time we’ve had offers from people in Spain, the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Italy, Australia and Guadeloupe and that’s without even putting availability up for our home.

The platform is still growing but already has 450,000 homes in 159 countries listed.

On HomeExchange there are 263 homes in Ireland available to accommodate 2 adults and 3 kids in July with 37 of those being secondary residences, which are easier to organise an exchange for Guest Points in. Or 337 homes if you’re looking for just 2 adults. So for the 149€ sign-up and the gifted guest points, you could very likely find a week’s holiday in a fully kitted out home for a family of 5 for cheaper than the camping alternative!

Primary residences

Secondary residences

Benefits

Some of the benefits that HomeExchange offers that you don’t get through normal paid accommodation options is that you have access to family homes with all the mod cons including – depending on which you choose – kids toys, play structures, laundry facilities, a spice drawer and condiments etc which can save on both packing and cost – I don’t know about you but I find it sucks having to buy mayonnaise and spices on a 2 week holiday only to leave them behind us barely used – both on the cost and waste perspective.

If you go down the guest point route and stay with other people (often for reduced points), you also get to meet other people and get a proper insight into local culture which you wouldn’t get if you were on your own. In some cases, people also lend out their cars or drive you around.

Another benefit compared to renting out your spare room for money is that you don’t incur income tax and can typically stay in high-cost places for much much less using built-up guest points or direct swaps.

Effort

Like anything, there are pros and cons. 3 of the main cons are:

• Finding someone to exchange with can take some time
• Getting your house ready for guests before your holiday
• Cleaning your house when you get back from holiday

If you’re looking for a reciprocal exchange or even if you’re looking for a guest point exchange, it can take a bit more time and effort to find one compared to a straight booking for paid accommodation. It can typically take 10-15 requests to find someone to swap with. This effort can be really worth it for high-cost longer stay places like all of Ireland at the moment, London, San Fransisco or Paris for example but might not be worth the effort for cheaper places where you could just pay for a place and be done with it. One workaround here, as mentioned above, is the option to do a reverse lookup to find people that are interested in your home, you could have them stay for guest points and you could use those guest points in another location.

Another con is that getting your home ready for an exchange adds a bit more effort to your holiday prep. You need to have your house clean and beds made up for guests before you go on holiday if you’re doing a reciprocal exchange and then need to clean the sheets and make up the beds again when you get home. You can agree with your guests what you’d like them to do before they go, some people ask that you wash the sheets for them while others just get you to strip the beds and leave the sheets on the floor. I think I’ll just get spare guest sheets so that we don’t need to have the sheets washed and beds made up on the day/night we return home and just need to pull out our own clean sheets.

Insurance question

After reading through the terms and conditions, I’m not clear on 2 things:

• Can people who are renting use the platform (due to not having their own building cover insurance in place)
• Do I need additional non-standard home insurance to ensure full damage coverage (as one of the conditions of claiming is providing proof of home insurance and when previously discussed with my provider I was told I’d need non-standard cover to protect our home for both primary residence cover AND unknown guests while we are not here)

I have an open question with HomeExchange on this and will update this post once I hear back.

Our experience

We are hosting our first guest this week for 3 weeks. We reduced our guest points by a little less than half to “rent” out our spare room. Our guest is an 18-year-old international student here on a work experience to learn English. In exchange, we get guest points which we plan to use for our stay in France next Fall for the Rugby World Cup. Looking at Airbnb, this could save us over 2,000€ for the 2-week stay we are planning to take. Will let you know how we get on.

Another option for the site would be to work remotely for an extended period of time from another place. We’ve had an offer for example from someone in Spain to do a semester from September to June in their home while their family comes here to learn English. We weren’t up for that particular offer but may look for a similar offer next winter.

Again, if you’re thinking of giving HomeExchange a try, please use this link and get 250 extra guest points on signup.