‘I see Portugal as home now. Coming from Ireland, I never thought I would say that’

For Sharon Farrell, the Algarve always felt like home even when she was still living in Belfast. The finance professional first visited this part of Portugal with her parents in 1997.

“We were blown away by the food, the culture, the people and the climate – let’s face it, if the sun’s shining every day, it’s hard not to be happy,” she says.

This love affair intensified when Farrell bought a property in the region in 2006, taking care to choose a house with a 20-minute commute to the airport to make things easier to travel with her son, who was then three.

“You come in the front door and think ‘We’re home’, with that release of breath, and you would open the shutters, see the pool is there and think: now we can relax,” she says.

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Moving to the Algarve permanently in 2019 still hasn’t dulled the shine for Farrell. “I see Portugal as home now and I never thought I would say that, coming from Ireland.”

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Farrell grew up as one of eight children in a “large, opinionated Catholic family” in picturesque Rostrevor, Co Down.

“Blink on the road past and you’ll miss it but it’s absolutely stunning. It’s like anywhere you grow up, though: you never appreciate it at the time,” she says. “It’s right on foot of Carlingford lough with views up to the mountains.”

Farrell fell in love with financial planning at 17, after taking a gig driving an adviser around the local countryside to meet clients. “We would arrive at people’s door, and they’d say, ‘You can’t leave that wee girl in the car’, so I was brought in, given a cup of tea while they discussed investments, pensions and mortgages,” she says.

“I thought, Oh my God, this is fantastic, this is what I want to do. For me, it was very personal: you were supporting or helping families make the best of whatever money was available to them.”

She was so keen to get started, she questioned whether to continue on with her A levels until her father convinced her to finish school first and then apply to university. She later accepted a place at Ulster University and, as soon as she could, she began applying for jobs.

“I remember going to an interview ... there were no mobile phones back then and I had to travel two hours to get to the interview. So by the time I got home they had rang and asked if I could start on Monday.”

Legislative changes coupled with Brexit made it easy for her to decide to walk away from running a business. “The compliance changed and everything was becoming very onerous”

Before long, Farrell found her passion for pensions and retirement planning. In 1997 she moved into managing teams and projects for Pearl, a company in Belfast, where she lived with her husband at the time.

In 1999 she made the decision to go out on her own, undeterred by the risks of leaving a stable salary behind. “I think it’s just fearlessness and loving what you do, knowing you can do it in a way that works for you and the clients,” she says.

“People talk about salary, and I don’t think I really gave much thought to not having a salary. I knew I could create one.”

After building a roster of clients and a successful business over the decades, by 2019, Farrell was ready to sell and relax in the Portuguese sunshine.

Legislative changes coupled with Brexit made it easy for her to decide to walk away from running a business. “The compliance changed and everything was becoming very onerous. For example, I had three different terms of business.”

However, the plan to “take it easy” on a pool lounger lasted “all of two minutes”, and before long she found herself as a partner at Blevins Frank and as chairwoman of the Ireland Portuguese Network.

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She also established a local women’s business network with her next seminar on balance and wellness for women juggling a career and family, scheduled for September. “I’m not sure the word ‘retire’ ever really came into it,” she says.

Setting up in a popular retirement area of Portugal, a country that offers favourable tax treatment, at a company specialising in managing expat pensions and finances, has kept Farrell busy, particularly during the pandemic. “People were stuck in the house. The first thing they did was fiddle on their computers, thinking ‘We should sort our finances out’, so the inbox was busy.”

Farrell noticed that webinars the company ran on how to set up financially in Portugal were suddenly attracting 200-300 participants, when pre-pandemic the numbers were about 30.

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Farrell praises the Portuguese government for its response to Covid-19, but the restrictions made it tricky on the family. Her son was still living in Belfast, attending Queen’s University while Farrell completed lockdown in Portugal. “It was tough being separated but we just got on with it,” she says.

Aside from financial planning, Farrell has found herself becoming a one-stop shop for British and Irish expats moving to the Algarve.

“We cover everything about making the Algarve home, from legal, finance and property purchases to being asked what the medical system is like, what the schools are like,” she says.

Locally, her friends tease her with the nickname Miss Connector due to her tendency to encourage new expats to join social and business networks. “When you move, it’s very hard to find your crew but finding that will help you settle better,” she says.

“I do a lot of introductions because when they move into a country, they need just one person, so if you invite someone to dinner they might like all eight people at the table but they get on with the seventh person. That’s success for me.”