I’m a BDSM performer earning £225,000. My seven properties will be my pension

In our Pension Diaries series, we speak to people of all ages in the UK to find out how much or how little they have saved for retirement and the realities of putting money aside for your future. This week, we speak to Ariel Anderssen, a BDSM performer and author, who lives in Wales with her husband Hywel Phillips. Ariel, 49, earns over £200,000 a year through her work, writing and property portfolio. She reveals she never wants to retire but wants to make sure she has enough money for older age in case her health ever lets her down. Shorts Tell me about your early life I grew up in a strict Jehovah’s Witness household in Horsham, West Sussex. Jehovah’s Witnesses believe the world is about to end. When I was growing up in the 1980s, they were predicting the end of the world to be in the early 1990s. So I didn’t think I was going to grow up or that I would ever need a job. I certainly didn’t think I needed a pension. When I was 13, my parents decided to come out of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was a baffling time as my parents stopped believing the things they had believed all my life – so I needed to stop believing it too. I suddenly had to confront the fact that I was going to need a career. I spent a lot of my early adult life trying to cope with that shock and scramble to make a life for myself in a world I didn’t think was going to exist. Anderssen went to acting school but was only scraping by due to low-paid work and London rents What education did you have? I really underperformed at school, especially for my GCSEs. By the time I was in sixth form doing my A-Levels, I was academically able and got good grades. I wasn’t diagnosed at the time, but it turns out that I have dyscalculia, which is a difficulty in understanding and working with numbers. I got a place at a drama school on a musical theatre course to do dancing. But I injured my back the summer before I started, so transferred to the acting course. I loved it. I graduated and started working as a classical actress. I did lots of touring Shakespeare and made virtually no money until I was 25. I was scraping by and only managing to live in London because I was sharing a studio flat with my boyfriend at the time. How did you get into BDSM work? Anderssen says BDSM served as a good way to come to terms with her sexuality and earn a living at the same time (Photo: Hywel Phillips) I started modelling out of financial necessity. In my first week as a model, I got five jobs and one of the photographers I worked with invited me to a BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) exhibition. I suddenly realised there were a whole load of people into the same stuff and making art of it. At that point, I didn’t even think BDSM could be part of my personal life. I thought it was a very guilty secret that I must never share with anyone. I started working for bondage photographers and producers making bondage and BDSM films. I loved it. Looking back, it is rather odd that I hadn’t tried any of this stuff in real life, but was happy to do it on camera. It was a good way to come to terms with my sexuality and earn a living at the same time. Describe your BDSM work I am a submissive so I wanted to explore the idea of being a damsel in distress. I have been doing it for 25 years. I discovered there are production companies making full length movies with spanking involved. I travelled the world working on all sorts of projects. When Covid happened, I had to stop travelling, so I started producing movies at home filming myself. By accident, I created a passive income making privately commissioned movies for customers with very unusual tastes. These can be very niche and unusual, but not necessarily shocking. Recently, I was playing a yoga instructor who turns into a werewolf, starts howling and takes off all her clothes! This is really fun for someone with a theatre background because it is all improvisational acting. How much do you earn? I am making around £200,000 to £225,000 a year from my modelling and BDSM work. I also make an income from writing. My first book Playing To Lose was my whole life story, but I realised it was missing a lot of the fun detail about doing this as a job so my second book, Dirty, which will be out in November, is a zoomed-in look at a year in my life as a BDSM performer. I also run a property corporation as a limited company. When I was 29, I bought my first flat in London. Quite soon afterwards, I met my now husband Hywel, who is a BDSM photographer and we bought a house together. Anderssen with her husband Hywel Phillips, a BDSM photographer I kept my flat in case things didn’t work out and became an accidental landlord. Ten years later, the flat had gone up £100,000 in value. So I decided to buy more properties and now have seven in different parts of the UK. I don’t understand traditional pensions at all as I find numbers overwhelming and frightening. I understand properties, rent and house values as it is more comprehensible than a pile of numbers, which is what a pension feels like. So properties are my retirement plan and my goal is to carry renting them out to bring in an income. At the moment, my seven properties bring in around £35,000 a year. My plan is to buy at least three more by 55 and make about £70,000 a year. Hopefully, this will be enough for retirement if needed. What are your dreams for retirement? I don’t ever want to retire as I love my job. But I am sure I won’t be able to do as much as I do now for ever, because I might not always have the energy. But if I imagine myself being 70, I would love to still be able to shoot a couple of custom videos a week for clients who want stuff I am physically able to do. However, I want to be able to afford to retire because my job is physically demanding and I need to be flexible for bondage modelling. Any major surgery or degenerative health condition would potentially shut down my career overnight. Would you like to be featured in Pension Diaries? E-mail: Aasma.day@theipaper.com