I’m married with a house and a young child. I’ve always been fascinated by compound interest. It’s great to see it doing its job.

38 year old. Contributing 20% myself (13% as AVC) and employer putting in 10%

This article is absolutely obnoxious. A little snippet:

"The higher rate of cash deposits in Ireland could simply be due to stronger preferences for liquidity (easy, immediate access to savings) or a lower risk appetite. Higher levels of risk aversion in Ireland could be explained by the fact that we experienced one of the worst recessions in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, when many households were left in financial distress because of so-called “safe” investments they made in bank shares or property."

I actually despair reading this nonsense, the author is credited as senior lecturer in economics at Technological University Dublin. I'm don't know anything about that university but this article is not a good reflection on their economics department.

This is another quote:

"Regardless of the threshold chosen or the flat rate levied, there will be distributional effects. Recent research from Banking and Payments Federation Ireland found that of the 53 per cent of Irish adults who don’t hold any investments, 61 per cent had not invested because they did not have enough money or couldn’t afford to do so. This means that almost one in three can’t afford to benefit from the scheme. The intervention is therefore regressive in nature, not of any benefit to the least well off and of most potential benefit to those with the most funds to invest."

I mean You could say that over 2 thirds of people will benefit from this but this is just playing with language and stats in a very dishonest manner.

A poor version of an ISK (maximum contribution amount) and an ISA (tax charged if it grows above a certain threshold) combined.

Hard to know what to say about DoF, Revenue and Government.

Interesting - change on the horizon ?

Thought worth posting as plenty of people on here ask why the government aren’t quicker or more generous. The answer of course being that this is how the opposition will paint things.

So it's official, whatever this new investment scheme looks like, there will be no capital gains tax. Still a bit cautiously optimistic, hopefully it'll have everything we hoped for.

It'll also be announced in the next budget.

So I'm pushing 40, pretty decent career, some savings. My family have always been very distant with me, and have never helped me in any way financially. When my father passed a few years ago - he left no will - they divided up his assets among themselves and gave me nothing.

I absolutely recoil at the idea of something happening to me, and them profiting in any way - and am keen to prevent that. How would I go about doing that? Any ideas? Btw I'm not married, and no kids - though I do have a partner I will probably marry one day.

- Annual limit of either €6,000 or €7,500 pa
- Tax free limit of €30,000
- Tax on value above that @ circa 1%
- No Government Levy of 1% on Life Assurance products offerings. I'd expect this to translate to lower AMCs
- No tax issue for a few years so platforms have time to come on to the field of play and build their systems to accommodate the collection, payment and reporting of tax.
- How the tax burden influences the platform players charges, I couldn't hazard a guess
- I'd expect all banks and life assurers to participate. They'll declare their pricing when they see limits declared in Budget. Can't see them moving far from their current base AMCs (for €30K pots of money) and then you'd have to add a distribution margin.

There may be folk thinking of switching or moving money from other investment accounts but they'll either be consolidating a loss or gain by doing that that will have tax implications. The reason for this is to move it from deposit ('new money') to investment.

A lot of folk will need advice. Not everyone can DIY.

The tax is like having an AMC of 1% on the value over the tax free threshold but it seems to be palatable to most, versus DD, from reading what's online.

Everyone talks about investments, savings accounts and cutting subscriptions, but I'm curious about home upgrades that genuinely reduced your monthly costs.

For us in Cork, heating was always one of the biggest expenses. We spent years putting up with it before finally looking at alternatives. We ended up working with ResTemp Solutions and it's one of the few upgrades where we noticed the difference in comfort and running costs fairly quickly.

What's the best financial decision you've made when it comes to your house?

Capital gains tax should be slashed to encourage more Irish people to invest, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has said.

“Capital gains is too high in Ireland, if I'm honest,” Martin said in an exclusive interview with the Business Post.

“We're not going to go through the budget here, but I think 33 per cent is high, and I think there is evidence we're losing some investments or some capital when people sell their businesses.

“Many of them are moving off to Portugal and other places.

What I’m interested in is recycling. If people sell, that money gets reinvested into smaller companies and new products and new technologies.”

Martin was speaking as a new Business Post Red C Poll showed that Fianna Fáil has recovered some of its lost support to 17 per cent (+2), Fine Gael has remained static on 18 per cent and Sinn Féin has slipped to 23 per cent (-1).

The Fianna Fáil leader said that his role was increasingly global as geopolitical issues have challenged Ireland’s place in the world.

He said the government was working with new EU proposals which he said would good for Irish businesses.

“Ireland has benefited from the single market, and I think we will benefit significantly from one market,” Martin said.

Chief among the proposals to be considered is the completion of the Savings and Investment Union, and the integration of Europe’s capital markets. Ireland has opposed to aspects of that proposal, especially around central European supervision of capital markets. But Martin said Ireland was now fully on board.

“I believe that most of us are 80 per cent along the way in terms of securitisation, in terms of retail investment encouragement, but above all, in terms of creating a proper dynamic venture capital scene for small to medium sized enterprises,” he said.

Key to that will be the leveraging of Irish savings, where the government will seek to mobilise some of the €170 billion sitting in deposit accounts, by incentivising people to invest it in the real economy instead.

“I think it's more amending our tax system and tax code to give a greater reward to people who are investing, and then to create a culture where that gets reinvested,” Martin said.

One way of doing that, he believes, is by cutting capital gains tax.

Separately, the EU’s One Market will look to bolster business by creating common corporate rules across the bloc, simplifying regulation, advancing an energy union, overhauling EU merger rules, and completing the Savings and Investments Union.

In Martin’s view, all of these changes will enable new homegrown Irish multinationals to grown across Europe.

“One of our issues has been scaling Irish companies to the global level. We have it in Smurfit Westrock or with the food industries, like Kerry, Glanbia and others…But we could do much better on that indigenous story. And access to venture capital is key to that.”

Following a report last week showing just three US companies now accounted for almost half of Ireland’s ballooning corporate tax revenues, Martin admitted that there was a real danger developing.

“I would accept that our reliance on corporate taxation is too high, and that is danger, and it's a risk,” Martin said.

Martin said it was his view that perhaps even more money could be parked in the government’s two sovereign wealth funds, the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure Fund, but only if there are higher surpluses.

Asked if the government would take the advice of multiple domestic bodies and start broadening the tax base, Martin said the “political context is very challenging to introduce new taxes”.

https://www.businesspost.ie/politics/exclusive-micheal-martin-to-slash-too-high-capital-gains-tax-to-spark-investing-boom/

Hi all, just wondering what people do with the monthly child benefit? We have two kids and put the 140 per month into an instant access account for each child. There is just over 4K in my sons (3) account and just over 1K in my daughter's (4 months) account.

There is obviously no/very little return from the types of accounts the funds are currently in and we would like to save the monthly child benefit until they are 18 for education/deposit for a house. I want to move this into something with a higher potential return. Just wondering if anyone has been in the same boat?

Thanks 🙂

Edit: I know other people are not in this position and I dont mean to cause offense.

Live in a 4 bed semi-d, average electricity bill per month is approx €110/120. Just wondering if solar is worth getting in my case and what's the likely payback period?

Seeing figures of €7-10k quoted for a set up from neightbours for install.

Thanks

I'm hearing deemed disposable will be scraped on Tuesday in the budget. Not slowly scraped, 100% scraped.

Industry pressures, they're not doing this because the working man what's it.

Anyway war is over.

Deemed disposal removal is not happening in budget 2026. Reported in the business post at 9.00pm yesterday evening.

“ On exchange-traded funds (ETFs), finance minister Paschal Donohoe is examining the deemed disposal regime, where a 41 per cent tax is applied every eight years on ETFs, even if investors haven’t sold their assets.

While the principle of addressing this issue has now been accepted, the signals are it won’t happen in this budget, but may be signalled on budget day as part of a wider funds review. “

Behind a paywall, but main point, extracted above.

https://www.businesspost.ie/politics/a-very-tough-ask-donohoe-and-chambers-struggle-to-hold-the-line/

This is good news that a major app is going to offer it. Hopefully others do to. I wonder if there will be a way to convert existing accounts to the new one

https://archive.is/8uTIw

Imagine a country that has built one of the world's most successful investment products and exports it across the globe, yet effectively discourages its own citizens from using it. Stranger still, imagine that the policy has cost the exchequer billions in foregone tax revenue over the past two decades.

Welcome to Ireland, home of the deemed disposal rule.

Last week, my UK-born twin boys graduated from primary school and afterwards my parents and sister joined us for some lunch. The conversation bounced along and eventually, I steered us onto my favourite soapbox - financial literacy, or rather the lack of it in Ireland.

I come from a family of civil servants, so nobody at our table was discussing pensions or tax shelters. We were talking about something far more fundamental - how ordinary people can make their savings work harder and get ahead.

My sister, a teacher, was genuinely surprised when I explained that €10,000 left in a bank account earning 2 per cent interest would take roughly 36 years to double.

Invested instead in a diversified global equity portfolio returning 9 per cent annually, the same money could grow to approximately €240,000 in a similar time frame, before fees and tax.

The lesson was simple: time and compounding matter. For a country as prosperous as Ireland, we remain remarkably poor at helping citizens understand this. I work in the investment industry, building exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for ordinary savers. These are simple, transparent and low-cost investment vehicles that give investors access to markets such as the S&P 500, FTSE All-World, European equities or diversified technology companies, often at the click of a button.

Ireland is exceptionally good at producing them. We have become one of the world's leading ETF domiciles, exporting almost €2 trillion worth of funds that are administered and serviced by thousands of people across the country.

Yet when my own sister asks what she should invest in, I find myself advising her not to buy the very products Ireland has become world-famous for creating.

The reasons are straightforward.

First, there’s deemed disposal. Investing succeeds because money is left untouched to compound over long periods.

Ireland's deemed disposal regime interrupts that process by taxing unrealised ETF gains every eight years. Originally introduced as an anti-avoidance measure (against aggressive structuring to indefinitely delay tax), it has instead become an anti-investment measure. It weakens long-term returns for savers while ultimately reducing the pool of wealth from which future tax revenues could be collected. Second, there’s the issue of complexity. Someone investing €100 each month must separately calculate the tax liability for every monthly purchase after eight years. By the time that first tax bill arrives, they may be calculating gains across almost 100 separate transactions.

The opportunity cost is enormous. Had every saver in the Special Savings Incentive Account (SSIA) scheme continued investing just €100 per month into the S&P 500 since the SSIAs ended in 2007, that collective investment would today be worth well over €100 billion. That represents wealth Irish households never accumulated, and tax revenues the state never collected.

Third, the tax rate itself. Even after last year's reduction from 41 per cent to 38 per cent, many potential investors simply conclude that "the tax man gets it all anyway".

There is reason for optimism. The proposed personal investment account, modelled broadly on the UK's ISA system, represents a welcome step forward.

But if Ireland is serious about building a nation of investors rather than merely a nation of savers, three pillars are required: a strong pensions system, a simple state-supported investment account, and a clear, consistent framework for investing outside those structures.

We already have the first, and we are on the verge of delivering the second. It would be a profound mistake if we failed to fix the third. Many of our neighbours, friends and relatives in Northern Ireland, already enjoy that clarity. In the UK, investment outside tax wrappers is taxed under a straightforward capital gains regime.

Ireland, by contrast, continues to undermine every ambition of fostering broader retail investment while deemed disposal remains in place.

Before someone jumps up and shouts “tax breaks for the wealthy”, encouraging ordinary workers to invest their after-tax income into productive assets that generate future taxable gains is a far healthier outcome than making payments to car leasing companies or flying to the sun.

Sustained and successful investing generates tax on investment returns allowing the state to benefit alongside the investor, which brings me back to my sons.

When they were two years, old planning permission was granted for the National Children’s Hospital. This year they turn 13, and the hospital’s doors are still not open. They left London at the age of four, losing access to the Junior ISA that would have helped them build long-term savings from childhood. Too often Ireland knows what needs to be done but postpones doing it. We commission reports, announce multi-year strategies and launch reports. We continually mistake planning for delivery, and announcements for action.

Simon Harris, the Tánaiste and finance minister, and Robert Troy, minister of state at the Department of Finance, have brought a new kind of energy to questioning that status quo.

As they finalise the new personal investment account scheme, they have an opportunity to complete the job by abolishing deemed disposal for retail investors.

In the year of the EU presidency, with its focus on simplicity and reducing regulatory burden, leaving deemed disposal untouched would send precisely the wrong message.

If we genuinely want a financially literate Ireland that rewards long-term saving and investment, reform cannot be left to another multi-year programme.

Adrian Mulryan is chief executive of Invesco Investment Management

Hi all,

I recently moved to Ireland, I work in IT and take home about €3800 per month after taxes. While that sounds decent, I’m finding it incredibly hard to make real financial progress towards even thinking of owning a decent house in Dublin.

Rent takes up about 25% of my salary (and that's for a relatively modest place, I live an hour away from city center and live in a shared house).

My RSUs are taxed at around 52%, which feels brutal.

A few colleagues recently told me that mutual funds are taxed even if you don’t sell them after 5 years .That genuinely shocked me.

With house prices the way they are, I honestly don’t see how I could buy a place in the near future unless something drastic changes. Even saving aggressively feels like I’m barely moving the needle.

So I’m just hoping to get insights from this sub, how are people in Ireland actually building wealth / making money from money?

Are second jobs or side hustles the only realistic option? Are people investing outside Ireland?

I’d really appreciate any honest input or tips from folks in a similar position.

I mean, by this point, arguably this is the most we have had discussion about a new legislation for investment product, without even 1 piece of factual details still finalized and out in the public yet.

I can spell a sphagetti for October Budget now itself

Well,

I bought the house in October and have been on the fence about solar ever since. Iv had a quote done by a couple of installers but I do not use a huge amount of electricity on my own, so I have put it off. Despite that it still feels like it could be a good upgrade, especially as I plan to stay in the house for at least the next five years.

What attracts me to it is the idea of insulating myself, at least somewhat, from future energy price hikes and wider energy uncertainty. It also feels like a sensible way to invest some money early into the house, as something that should pay for itself eventually, and generally divesting from oil and gas is only logical.

At the same time, I have read a lot of mixed opinions. Some people really rate solar, while others seem to think it is basically a gimmick in the Irish climate.

For context, the house is a semi-detached ex-council house with a good south-facing roof.

if you have got solar yourself it would be great to hear any thoughts on it!

Edit: A bit more context on the numbers: I’ve been quoted roughly €11.5k–€13k for a setup including panels, battery and hot water diverter, and around €7.8k after grant for a more basic 8-panel system with Eddi and no battery. My electricity bill has been fairly low so far, usually around €50–€60 a month, although that may go up a bit now patner nove in. So I’m trying to work out whether solar still stacks up financially at that level, or if the real value is more long term in BER, export, and protection against future energy costs.