Holiday property - sell or rent?

Mart2022

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Long time lurker here who has always been impressed by the highly informed advice offered to clueless people like me, so I thought I should take the plunge and ask for similarly good advice!

To summarise - I have a holiday cottage on the west coast of Ireland in a really lovely location, right by the sea.

I have €50,000 left on the mortgage, with 10 years remaining, which is costing €480 a month.

The value of the cottage now is somewhere between €160,000 and €190,000, according to a local estate agent. I paid €100,000 for it five years ago.

I don't get to use it as much as I would like, so I looked in to renting it out on Airbnb.

That would yield very good money, around €3,000 a month through the summer, but I'd pay 40% in tax, plus all the overheads - eg around €400 a month to a local person for cleaning and general upkeep, insurance, general provisions for the place, etc.

I'm in my mid 50s and at this stage I'd prefer to put every spare penny, including that monthly €480, in to my pension pot - which isn't hugely healthy.

I have 10 years left on the mortgage on my Dublin home (€137,000 still to pay, value of home around €320,000).

I'm really tempted to sell the holiday home and put the profit (less capital gains) in to that pension fund, but I just don't know if it would be more sensible to hold on to it as an asset that could be banked at a later date.

I earn around €3,500 a month, so between the two mortgages I'm paying around €1,700 a month, which is definitely an overstretch.

Honest, I'm not asking for predictions about property values, I know that's a no-no here, I'd just like to hear opinions on what you'd do in my situation. Sell or rent it out?

Thanks.
 
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