Matthew Barber, 66, decided to do something a little different when he received his pension lump sum four years ago.
In April 2022, the doctor, who now practises as a locum GP, spent £89,000 buying five and a half acres of woodland in Somerset.
“I was a partner at a GP practice, and I received a lump sum as part of my pension. I’d done a bit of tree planting in the past and I Googled ‘tree planting’,” he says.
He ended up buying via a website called Woodlands.co.uk, which came up in his search and charged roughly £16,000 an acre.
While the price was higher than if he bought direct, Matthew found the legal process of purchasing the land ran very smoothly.
