You see, I come from a long line of longevity and unless something catastrophic happens, can look forward to reaching my 90s. That’s 40+ years from now and at least 25 of those will be retired with no income except my rather pathetic self employed pension (£2k per annum – which costs me 10% of my income) and the state benefit (if one exists then) plus I would like to retire at 60, not 65 (or till I drop, if the government has its way)

Unfortunately I never had the chance to benefit from a work related pension due to it not being available at my workplace coupled with long periods of self employment. Lorraine is in the same position pension-wise but in her case it’s because she has been a Mum and recently returned to work.

My parents are in their 80s and well, comfortable and happy, due to both having benefited from a kinder “earnings related government backed pension” as they were both teachers retiring 20 years ago.

Lorraine’s parents by contrast, were not so lucky. Yes they get pensions, but they can barely survive on them and seeing how they live would fill me with dread if it turned out to be the vision of our future also. I want to enjoy our retirement – not simply endure it.

We are not complete strangers to the property game as we have renovated a few properties and made a bit of money, but it’s hard. Try securing a property at a decent price from auction now, if you can get into the auction room!

We went to a free evening seminar by a well known nationally advertised company promising untold wealth through building a Property Portfolio through them with no problems, so we went along and were blasted for 2 hours by slick salesmen whose job it was to get us to sign up to their “Training course” for several thousand pounds. After this nightmare we did some research on them through bulletin boards and comments of previously involved participants found all was not as rosy as we were led to believe.

We cut our ties with them and realised that although we were still very interested in building a property portfolio to provide for our retirement – this was such a serious subject it needed some serious investigation.

We thought we had missed the “property boom” boat, where anyone with a bit of money could make a killing – some did, but that’s not true now. What you need now is a very planned and prudent approach, but crucially working with people who do this day in day out, know the right contacts can get the best deals and work out a strategy to maximise gains. It is still a great way of using “other peoples money” to fund your retirement or provide an income – and beats the heck out of pensions.