Phil Brown credits an “old fashioned” approach to money for helping him accumulate enough spare cash to start investing. “I hate being in debt; I hate the cost of it,” he says, explaining his determination to pay off the mortgage on his family’s 18th-century Yorkshire home ahead of schedule.
The property, near Bingley, forms part of a grade II*-listed farmhouse, he says, which was built around 1700 and later divided into cottages. Phil and his wife, Sue, bought one of the rear-facing cottages in 1993 and later an adjacent cottage, reinstating the original connecting doorways, which had been bricked up and plastered over.
