Why Kevin Ripley is putting his trust in property

Often there are several strands that connect people and businesses beneath the surface of life. For born and bred Yorkshireman, Kevin Ripley, employment drew him to Platinum Portfolio Builder. But working for the company brought an investment opportunity he wasn’t expecting. Having made a series of bad financial decisions based on the ‘wisdom’ of banks and advisers, and while watching, year on year, his pension pot dwindle, he decided to strike out in a different direction and put his trust in PPB. Here, he tells the story of why investing in property, through a company he has learnt to have faith in, has given him hope for retirement. Matt Pigott interviews.

Kevin says: ‘I’ve been working for PPB for about four or five years, I know the founder Nick Carlile well and do refurbishment work on the properties his team buys for investor-clients. Mainly, I change the locks for new tenants, and fit glass and double-glazing.

‘I’d been working for PPB for about three years before I decided that I wanted to invest. I’m now 51, and thought it would be a good way to get set up for retirement, and was better than a standard pension.

‘The investments I’d made before were all waste of time, even the longer term ones. On top of that, my pension was becoming a thorn in the side of our finances. I was getting worried about the future. My wife and I were already paying £280 a month when we got a call from our pension manager who told us that we’d need to pay another £433 a month for us to have a decent standard of living when we retire. It set alarm bells ringing for me.

‘Another time we bought a mortgage endowment, which stated that when we paid our mortgage off we would receive £13,800. Again I got a call from the lender or broker or adviser, and he said: ‘your endowment won’t meet your mortgage. What I suggest you do is take out a second endowment to cover the shortfall on the first endowment.’ I said: ‘and what should I do if the second one falls short, take out a third!’

‘Another time, some years ago, I went into my building society to put some money into an account that we never touched. There was £10,000 in it, a nice little nest egg. Well, the building society told us that we needed to invest our nest egg so that it would grow into a golden goose and lay more eggs. The proviso was that we weren’t allowed to touch it for five years, which was fine by us because it was an investment for the future. But when it got to the end of the five-year term, our nest egg hadn’t made a single penny, which is when we were told about the £800 administration fee that should to pay. After five years, our investment had lost nearly ten percent of its value. After that, I was pretty much done with pensions and banks and financial advisers and five-year schemes.

‘So it was a couple of years ago, now, that I went to fit some windows on one of PPB’s projects. They were turning one house into six bedsits for a client who was going to rent each one of those out for about £70 a week. It hit me then what I was missing out on.

‘I was so cautious about investing in anything. Investing had almost become a dirty word. But with PPB it was different. I’d got to know all of the staff, had met a number of their clients – just normal people looking for somewhere sensible to put their money ­– and I’d seen the number of properties PPB acquired grow and grow. Every time I went into their offices, there were new pictures of properties they’d bought, pinned to the wall. I knew that they’d bought all of those properties for at least 25 percent below market value, ensuring there was built in equity to leverage the purchase of the next property. I spoke to my wife and we made our minds up. We raised some money on a property we already owned to get started with PPB.

‘That was 18 months ago and so far things have gone fantastically well. They sourced our first property straightaway, which has been tenanted since we got it. PPB then refinanced that property to buy a second, which was recently rented out, too. Between them, the properties bring in a small income. We have money coming in each month, rather than going out, and over the next ten years we should see some good capital growth on our bricks and mortar.

‘If things go to plan, we’ll have about six properties by the time I hit sixty, then our dream is to sell one, live off of the other five, and go on a big cruise.’