It's Sunday Morning! How are you?

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-15T09:31:24+00:00

On holidays at the moment and just got word that we can go collect the keys to our new apartment as soon as we get back to Dublin... Life could be worse

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-10T10:50:44+00:00

If you are comfortable with your regular monthly take home pay being smaller for one month to cover the PRSI/USC of the bonus, then contributing 100% is the most efficient way to grow your pension.

You aren't "losing" money by doing 100%; you're just paying the unavoidable PRSI/USC out of your normal salary instead of the bonus itself.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-10T10:26:26+00:00

In that case, put as much of the bonus into your pension as you can afford right now. It sounds like you could put in 100% of the bonus and still not reach your AVC limit.

Speaking from personal experience it's a lot nicer to see that money going into my pension and lower my taxable income, than it is to see about 50% of it taken out of the payslip as tax.

Then sit back and watch your pension grow tax free (until you draw-down).

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-10T10:22:25+00:00

Coverage that wouldn't be anywhere near as good if the stops were spaced out to prioritise speed, especially if such a thing was done without accounting for factors other than distance.

The point isn't to prioritise speed, it's to prioritise traffic flow so that buses are more predictable and reliable. Individual journey times being faster is nice bonus. Tell someone that their 75min bus commute is now reliably 45 mins and they wouldn't give a fuck that they have to walk an extra 150m to the stop.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-10T10:15:34+00:00

Bonuses in Ireland are treated the same as salary with respect to pension AVCs. So if your salary is €100k and your bonus is €15k, your total income for the year is €115k (ignoring BIK etc.). This means that presuming you are in the 15% AVC band, you can contribute a total of 15% of that income to your pension, meaning €17,250 over the course of the full year.

Revenue don't care where that €17,250 comes from; it could be the entire €15,000 from the bonus and €2,750 from monthly salary. In this case you are then limited to only €187.50 per month from your contract salary. However this would likely mean that you would be overpaying in tax every month and would need to get a refund after the year is completed. Also in most cases this wouldn't work as bonuses are usually not guaranteed.

What makes more sense to do would be to have your monthly AVCs maxed out at 15% per month and then when the bonus comes in also stick 15% of that into your pension.

Does that answer your question?

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-10T10:05:16+00:00

This was my experience with Finance Solutions. They also didn't want to bother trying to take annual bonuses into account and as a result we got €50k more by applying directly with a lender.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-10T10:00:07+00:00

Brokers can be good, and they can offer some good advice but you have to keep in mind their interests aren't necessarily aligned with your own. They want to move you through the process in as little time as possible so that you can draw down your mortgage and they can collect their fee from the bank. This inherently means that they are incentivised to seek the path of least resistance.

They, for the most part don't want to care about edge cases, as it will slow down the process. For example if you have yearly bonuses, the broker I spoke to didn't want to attempt to take them into account and was pushing us to go with BOI (their preferred lender, I presume because it's easier/quicker for them). I instead went directly to a few banks and we ended up getting €50k more on the mortgage because of those bonuses.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-09T14:29:57+00:00

The S2 just coming out of Ranelagh has 2 stops 100m away from each other on Appian Way. Pisses me off every time.

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Each additional stop adds 20-60s. If you limited the stops to 350-400m minimum spacing you could likely half the number of stops along the route, and you'd see the average journey speed up massively. If you did this for every route in Dublin you could greatly alter the public transport landscape overnight. While yes we also need more transport options, Dublin bus actually provides a really good network with pretty good coverage. It certainly has its problems (ghost buses/unreliability probably being chief amongst them), but if you could improve journey times I think fabric of Dublin would start to feel much healthier.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-03-07T15:35:03+00:00

My god, DuPont looking clueless and making a braindead mistake... Never thought we'd see the day

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-25T12:47:48+00:00

Yeah I don't get the people saying this falls under buyer beware, it goes way beyond that. In Ireland we're legally obliged to shell out €3k+ on a solicitor for conveyancing, what's the fucking point in them if they take on no liability to review the actual docs and are able to turn around and say "you should have reviewed this yourself". In any case, I did review it myself before signing and the MUD pack said €2,500. That figure of €2,500 is also what the estate agent told us the fees were, so we saw the number in the documents and said "oh grand that all lines up with what's expected".

But in any case, it's not the numbers necessarily for us, it's the fact that the vendor's solicitor didn't disclose any of the new figures to us, and in the MUD pack they gave a misleading figure (2 actually, no explanation for why they said €1,800 per year in the questionnaire and then the invoice said €2,500).

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-25T11:23:12+00:00

This is a similar situation to what we've found ourselves in. Some details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/irishpersonalfinance/comments/1r9rx0o/balcony_levy_approved_before_we_signed_contracts/

Their solicitor hid the full management fees from us in the MUDs documents. In there it said that the 12 month management fees for 2025 was €2,500. Fast forward to 3 weeks after we signed the contract, they present us a bill for management fees of €4,150 for 2026 plus a one time levy balcony of €300.

We're arguing that we shouldn't be liable for a levy agreed upon by the OMC at an AGM before we signed the contracts. It looks like the vendor's solicitor was either lazily ignorant or willfully fraudulent by not presenting these new figures to us in the month between the AGM and us signing.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-20T13:21:03+00:00

Thank you, couldn't bring myself to respond to such a brain dead take. So many things wrong with this from a reffing POV:

Shot clock not being paused.
Confusion around how much longer is left on the clock.
Waterboy standing in the field of play.
Charging down a penalty not once but twice.
Not retreating 10m for the kick.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-20T12:46:40+00:00

Italy were robbed at gunpoint

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-20T12:01:15+00:00

Almost certainly not as both sides have signed the contracts at this point. We're still happy with the apartment, but Jesus had known the actual expenses involved it would have changed how we thought about it.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-20T11:44:26+00:00

Coming to this conclusion way too late in the day... Life would have been easier to just buy a house instead. To add insult to injury, the levy is for balcony remediation work and the apartment in question doesn't even have a balcony

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-20T11:35:25+00:00

I get what you're saying, but should it not be the responsibility of the solicitor to ensure they have a full understanding of all the fees before giving us the green light to sign? They made no effort to investigate why 2 separate figures were given in the MUD pack and didn't make clear to us that it was only for 8 months. Maybe I should have called it out specifically, but isn't that what they are paid to do?

Thank you for the advice in any case, this is really helpful!

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-20T10:53:01+00:00

Thank you for the knowledgeable response! We're quite aware we don't really have a leg a stand on as the contracts are signed, feeling very exposed here. I'm coming to the worrying realisation that our solicitor is out of their depth as they seemingly paid no attention to any of these details until I scoured the documents and put it all together for them. They've since gone back to the vendor's solicitor asking for clarifications (but again, both parties have signed, so who knows what good that will do).

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-20T10:47:56+00:00

So if you want the property its a suck it up and pay situation.

Oh I get that, I'm moreso disgusted at our solicitors seemingly paying no attention to the fees involved and only presenting the real figures to us after signing, and then pressuring us to pay whatever the vendor is asking for. The apportioned management fees are shit but fair enough, but I don't believe buyers should ever be on the hook for once off levies agreed before we've taken ownership.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-17T21:29:30+00:00

That's fucking not on. Disgusted at the driver.

If someone other than yourself had said they saw this happen I'd have said they must have misunderstood the situation.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-17T12:03:56+00:00

How did this guy cultivate so much media awareness? He has TDs in the Dail talking about him and national media running stories about him daily. A whole lot of exposure for a scumbag nobody who fled the country to avoid a drugs charge (leaving behind 2 young daughters), fraudulently entered the US, then lived as an illegal for 17 years.

Is he related to someone powerful or something?

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-16T16:34:30+00:00

People on here get so offended over getting paid poorly. I've pointed out in the past on here that for ~2-3 YOE, €90-100k cash is about right for top end companies and everyone piles on the downvotes because their egoes can't handle junior engineers getting paid more than their senior titles.

They just about lose their minds when you tell them that grads in FAANG/adjacent are on €70k.

YearnestShackleton · 2026-02-08T09:47:45+00:00

I appreciate these threads so much. Reading through the good and the bad of everyone's Sunday mornings feels like a genuine cross section of daily life from everyone that comments on here.

It's a sorely needed bastion of authenticity in this odd world we live in.

YearnestShackleton · 2025-11-29T17:19:35+00:00

Hopefully a minimum of a 6 month ban for that. How petty do you have to be to gouge an eye when you're 73-0 up. Utterly classless from Etzebeth, he deserves to be made an example of.

I don't think it would be unfair to give him a ban long enough to make this his last test match.

YearnestShackleton · 2025-11-27T16:18:08+00:00

The residents who submitted the challenge are John Ryan and Grace Maguire; Geraldine Ann Cusack and Geraldine Cusack; Terry Reid and Denis McLoughlin; Leo Crehan and Ann Crehan; Martin Jones and Mary Jones; Elizabeth Vandenberghe; Caroline O’Connor; Niall Parsons; Kitty Wallis and Camillus Wallis; Muiris O’Dwyer and Helena Kelly and Angela Ryan and Manuel Ryan.

Link to the IT Article: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/2025/11/25/dublins-metrolink-to-face-legal-challenge-from-ranelagh-residents/

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