That is the challenge facing Mark, 53, and his wife Elizabeth, 49, who believe they could release about 1m in equity by selling their south Dublin home and trading down to a smaller property.

Both are self-employed:

Mark co-founded a software company at the beginning of the year; Elizabeth is a human-resources consultant.

"We don't want to stop working . . . both of us like what we're doing . . . but we'd like the comfort factor of knowing there'd be something there if we couldn't get work, " says Mark. "Ideally we'd like the flexibility to work maybe two or three days a week . . . we'd like the time to have more fun.

"We know this would be possible from a business perspective. But would it be possible from a financial perspective?"

Mark estimates that the family home is worth 2m.

There is 110,000 left on the mortgage, which tracks the European Central Bank base rate of interest by a margin of 0.75%. With the payments costing about 1,230 a month, the loan should be paid off in six years.

Because getting the software business off the ground was a fulltime job, Mark's earnings have been very low for the past two years.

He jokes that he has been "living off the fat of the land", running down the family's savings and also clocking up an overdraft of 8,000 9,000. This fallow period is now coming to an end and Mark expects to begin drawing a salary of about 50,000 a year from the business shortly.

Until then, Elizabeth remains the main breadwinner, earning about 65,000 a year from her consultancy business as well as a guaranteed pension of 11,000 a year she got as part of a severance package from a previous employer.

The couple have about 65,000 in savings: 35,000 in a 30-day notice deposit earning about one percent interest at one of the main banks;

25,000 invested in technology shares; and the rest in prize bonds, with "reasonably regular" wins of 75, the minimum payout.

They also have a considerable pot of money tied up in pensions: Mark has about 200,000 in Irish Life and New Ireland pension managed funds; Elizabeth has 50,000 invested "all over the place", a legacy of the lastminute pension top-ups made just before the annual selfassessment tax deadline.

Mark believes that, with the right financial advice, they should be able to earn the equivalent of 100,000 a year in today's money from the 1m equity released by the sale of their home and from their other assets.

Any income generated from their existing businesses would be "icing on the cake", he says.

The couple accept that they may have to gradually eat into their capital to reach their income target, leaving the possibility of no inheritance for their two teenage children.

Mark has some definite views about how the money could be put to work. He would like to explore the possibilities open to pension investors. He is sceptical of Irish fund managers, questioning their independence from the big local blue-chips and the men who control them.

He would be interested in a buy-to-let investment, especially in an emerging market such as Poland, where rockbottom property prices "leave more upside than downside".

Above all, Mark is willing to take some chances in pursuit of his dream. "I'm not one to take risk just for the sake of it but, if I do, I'm willing to live with the consequences."