My father was a teacher and my mother was a nurse. They were one of the first lot of immigrants back in the 1960s to come over to plug the employment gap the UK was suffering. My father was from India and my mother was from Trinidad and Tobago. They had learnt that education literally takes you places! Because of their qualifications they were able to escape the poverty trap within their own countries and join the country they believed would be better for them and their future offspring ... and boy were they right!

My father met my mother in 1964 and let’s just say it was love at first sight. In 1969 my sister was born. I arrived three days after Christmas in 1971. After I was born we moved to a council house in Harlow, Essex, where my father was offered the house at a discounted price of £4,000 if he taught in one of the secondary schools. My mother took a part-time job as a nurse at one of the industrial areas but she always made sure she was there to pick us up from school.

Both my sister and I were encouraged to study and go on to further education and this we both did. My sister went to Imperial College, London, went on to do a PhD is now a journalist for The Times. I went to The London School of Economics and then on to train and qualify as a chartered accountant with Deloitte & Touche.

Let me tell you now that my parents were very proud of us. We had pretty much gone beyond their expectations of what they wanted for us. My mother would sing our praises to all her friends that her daughter wrote for the prestigious Times newspaper (which is pretty much my sister’s dream job) and her son worked for one of the world famous ‘Big 6’ accountancy firms.

But I couldn’t share this feeling my mother had. She would proudly state ‘My son is a chartered accountant’, but I would struggle to get up in the morning, put my suit on like everyone else, and push the entrance doors below the grand, chrome ‘Deloitte & Touche’ sign to get in to work. I think my heart sank every morning, Monday to Friday.

I had been on a treadmill of exams after exams. First my GCSEs, then my A levels, then my degree, and then my chartered accountancy exams. All of which I had revised for and passed with flying colours. At age 25 I was considered a success. I had passed the Institute of Chartered Accountants final exams which have a notoriously high failure rate, and I now I was an elite member of this institute with the world at my feet. You would think I should be feeling on top of the world, but the complete opposite was true.

I desperately wished I had failed my exams.

At least then there would have been no expectation of me to progress further in the corporate world. But since I had qualified I had a real chance of rising up the ranks and becoming a senior manager or even a partner. I started to really look at the corporate world as my future as I did not allow myself to see anything else. I was a chartered accountant for heaven’s sake. I could really become king of the corporates!

I looked at how the corporate world worked. To rise up the first ranks you needed to be punctual, friendly with the right people and create the right perception of yourself to your seniors. I knew this because I had been told this by my direct bosses. ‘There is no room for mavericks Ajay’ I was told. My performance would be judged on all the things that I thought were irrelevant. I was not going to be judged on how hard I worked, how much I made the company, or how much effort I put in. I was going to be judged on whether I turned up to work at 9am, whether I stayed beyond 5.30pm with all the other managers and whether I socialised with the right crowd.

I really struggled with this. I just didn’t fit in. I couldn’t understand why it had to be so. So much so I turned to alcohol. I think having to appear to be this corporate guy took so much effort on my part I needed a release when I got home. This didn’t help things! I would start turning up late for work, other staff members would talk about my lateness (it even became an office joke!) and I would want (and often did) to leave at 5.30pm on the dot.

It got to the stage where I was always looking for ways of getting off work early (like delivering files to another office round the corner at 4pm and not coming back) or taking sick days or unannounced holidays.

Then the final blow was dealt. Another colleague of mine who was at the same level as me got promoted and I didn’t. It was no surprise. He worked hard and I didn’t. I felt embarrassed that I did not get promoted and to save further humiliation, at age 27, I handed in my resignation before they even needed to explain why I didn’t get promotion. It was funny. When I did hand in my resignation they said ‘We were expecting this!’. They could see I was a maverick and there were no places for mavericks in accountancy, as I had already been told. I’m sure if any of my superiors know of my success today they would say ‘I always knew he would be an entrepreneur’.

When I handed in my resignation I had no idea how I was going to provide for myself. All I knew was that I would NEVER work for anyone else ever again. I have to say I was close to suffering depression in the last year of my working career. Money can never be so important that it takes your mental health and wellbeing away from you.

I arranged a £10,000 overdraft before I left work to remain solvent and got the hell out of there! The first three months after leaving work in October 1999 I partied. And I partied hard. I went to Ibiza twice, went out every night and did absolutely nothing to build any kind of future for myself. Looking back, I think I gave myself this time as I felt I deserved it for putting myself through five years of corporate life.

During my drinking days I had built up quite a few friendships but I started to notice something – I was different! I had slightly more intellect than these people I knew and I also used to have creative ideas which when I presented them were dismissed quickly as nonsense. I would come up with ideas on how to make money or do something that would be different from drinking down the pub, but they were swiftly quashed.

It got to a point where I got fed up with my ideas being dismissed, and I quickly saw that these friends were happy where they were. They didn’t want change. I realised I was not happy where I was so I made the firm decision that I was going to start afresh. I cut my ties with the group I was drinking with, rented a room in a completely new area and said to myself ‘I’m going to make something of myself!’.

This was the best thing I ever did. With hindsight, I realised that the crowd I was hanging about with were preventing me to be who I really wanted to be. I now know the phrase ‘Show me your friends and I’ll tell you who you are’ is so true. This is why I no longer hang out with the corporate gang or the drinking gang but with the entrepreneur’s gang! I often find myself discussing ideas with fellow entrepreneurs and we’re always trying to change or do things differently. Its never ‘No’ but often ‘How?’. Not ‘No, you can’t do that’ but ‘How can you do that?’.

So its now the year 2000 and I’m sitting in my room, while everyone else is at work, thinking – how can I make some money? My overdraft is sitting at around £5,000 with only £5,000 left, I’m burning £1,000 every month so at this rate I’ll be bankrupt in five months and I’m going to have to go back to work! Going bankrupt I could deal with but going back to work ... NO WAY! The fear of going back to work I have to say was my biggest driver to do something and not the money. I’m not a materialistic person. Even though I can afford better I live the lifestyle of most other people. I live in a 4-bedroom house, I drive an old car and I shop in Tesco’s!

Back then in 2000 I realised I was already rich. I was rich with time. I was waking up thinking ‘What can I do today?’ I realised that working one hour for yourself was like working eight hours for somebody else. This was because I was interested in the work I was doing as I 100% directly benefited from it. Just think about it for one moment. One hour = eight hours. One self-employed hour = eight employed hours. I would work 12 hours a day which equated to 96 employed hours. Its no surprise then that I became successful very quickly. This was because I loved what I was doing.

I started doing everything and anything to make money. Premium rate numbers, people’s tax returns, the odd day of subcontracted work for a local accountant, trading cars but also investing in property.

At the time I didn’t know my property investments would be as successful as they were. It was just one of those activities I was doing as well as the other stuff. I had four properties in 2000. You see whilst my work colleagues were renting flashy apartments and burning their salary on rent, I was living in a shared house, saving up my salary for deposits and buying properties back in my home town. I had my own house in Harlow which I had bought and lived in, then briefly rented out, and three other buy to lets in Harlow rented out.

One of the key tools I found important to me was the internet. I used it at work to collect emails and search for cars to buy! I got a dial up connection installed in my room and I would use this connection to research potential money making ideas. It was at this point I stumbled across a site called rightmove.co.uk.

Rightmove were great. Instead of searching each estate agent’s database for their properties Rightmove aggregated all the estate agents databases so you could perform one search. I was used to paying £35,000 for a 1-bedroom flat in Harlow back in 2000. So I would search for properties in Harlow for less than £50,000 and see what came up. I had this formula that if it would rent out on a month-by-month basis for 1% of the purchase price then I would buy it. So if it was for £50,000 and it would rent out for £500 or more, I would buy it. I would see a deal like this once every other week. It was safe to say Harlow wasn’t overflowing with these properties which I thought were great deals.

I then asked myself the question why don’t I invest further afield? So when I searched on Rightmove I put the distance parameter at a 40 mile radius of Harlow and then pressed ‘search’. I have to say this was a turning point in my life. Remember here that I had been used to paying £35,000 for a 1-bedroom flat and these were hard to come by.

The first property that came up was a 5-bedroom, three storey house for £20,000! I thought this price must be a misprint, but then I saw next to this on the list a 3-bedroom house for £23,500 in the same area. So I rang up, spoke to someone about it and asked it if was for real and not a misprint. They confirmed that it was for real but the property had gone. I asked about rents and they all fitted my criteria of being greater than 1% of the purchase price. I had to take a trip to this ‘hotspot’. This hotspot was called Corby in Northamptonshire.

I went up there and met with the three estate agents there and was treated like a king. They had actually found someone who wanted to buy these properties in these deprived areas. I would be shown round these properties, all with price tags under £30,000. It really was a buyer’s market. My problem was there were too many properties and I didn’t have enough cash! I liken these days to being a kid in a sweetie shop with only 50p in your pocket. I wanted every sweet but couldn’t afford it.

What I did next makes me still wince when I think about it. From my bedroom I made literally thousands of applications for unsecured finance, credit cards, overdrafts and other sources of finance. Most said ‘no’ but some actually said ‘yes’. I raised £100,000 of unsecured finance, £15,000 on credit cards and £40,000 by remortgaging my then current portfolio of four properties and bought as much as I could.

I bought flats, houses and town houses. They all fitted the 1% rule (now known as a 12% yield) and some even fitted a 2% rule, meaning that the properties yielded 24%.

But then something even more strange started to happen. I thought I was the only person doing this in Corby, but other people started emerging. The prices started to be pushed up. But it didn’t happen over months, it happened over weeks! So stuff that I had agreed to buy had gone up by 50% by the time I had completed. But I would go straight for a remortgage after I completed. You would then get the absurd happening. I would buy something for say £20,000, in three months I would complete on it, and then get it remortgaged at £40,000, with a further £15,000 out of which I would buy three more properties.

I didn’t stop at Corby. I bought everywhere that fitted my 1% criteria. The closer the better. But I found that I was getting priced out. So I would just travel further north to get the properties that yielded 12%. And all the time growing in wealth as everything I was buying was rising rapidly.

I used to manage my properties myself. I would go, all 5ft 4” of me, to the roughest parts of town to collect rent from junkies, drug dealers and the serial unemployed! It still amazes me that I did that back then. But my mother was becoming extremely worried, so I took on someone who handled it for me from then on. I had 20 properties in all by 2001.

I then decided it was time to move out of my rented room and get myself a nice little pad. I bought a 3-bedroom detached house in Romford, Essex, for £132,000 and lived there while still buying up in and around the East Midlands and Essex. It was while living in this house that I had the idea to tell people about what I was doing. It was so easy – I wanted to tell other people about what I was doing and say ‘Hey – you can do this!’.

I wrote my first book, The Buy to Let Bible, and that is my bestseller. It has sold over 100,000 copies nationwide and is available in every book store including Tesco’s! I have since written nine more books on property investment and escaping the rat race. I’d like to think I have helped people realise their financial dreams and have given them back precious time that you can never get back once its gone.

Since 2002 I have moved to a 4-bedroom house with my girlfriend Hana who really looks after me so I can further my pursuits in property investing, property sourcing and internet businesses.

We have no children (yet!) but I have one niece, Rosa, whom I adore, and I fit into her life – not the other way round.

My current portfolio currently stands at £11.3m and has £1.7m worth of properties in the pipeline waiting to be added. I aim to buy one property a week over the next few years or so. I’m currently investing in Scotland, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire.

So why am I telling you all this? Well, I suppose I want to let you know it is possible to be your own boss. I’m a regular guy that wants pretty much the same as anyone else. I want to be in control of my life and I want to have an okay life. I want to be rich with my time, to have material goods that make my life comfortable and I want to build positive relationships with the people around me.

But I want you to know this: I do not possess any special characteristics compared to anyone else and neither do I consider myself as lucky. All I did was apply myself to do something that I wanted to do. This was to become financially free from an employer. I believe ANYONE can do this with the right attitude.

I wish you luck with your investments.