When sitting a financial planning exam some years ago, I nearly threw the textbook in the bin. It made me so angry, because the writer assumed that everybody’s life follows the same pattern and goes through the same stages. In your 20s, you save to buy a car and for the deposit on a flat. In your 30s, you’re married with young children, and so on. It was so old-fashioned – even straights aren’t that conventional these days, let alone lesbians.

Looking around my circle of lesbian friends and acquaintances, I don’t see many who’ve followed a conventional career path. Unless you have a hide like a rhinoceros, society’s disapproval can be hard to bear when you’re young, and that can lead to a disrupted education and career. And, questioning the materialistic values we see around us, many of us try to find alternative ways to live.

The upshot is that it’s all too easy to wake up one day in your late 30s and realise you haven’t got much to live on except your wits. That’s when you start worrying about what’ll happen in 30 years’ time if all you have to live on is a shrinking old age pension.

So what should you do? The first thing is to draw up a budget and see if you can start putting some money aside for both the short term and the long term. Short term savings are your ‘emergency’ fund, and everybody should have one. This is the money you need to cope with a crisis – redundancy, illness, etc. Ideally, you should build up a fund equal to three to six months’ salary and keep it in an account that you can access quickly. Shop around to find an instant access account paying a good rate of interest. Internet accounts often pay the highest rates, and best of all may be a tax-free cash ISA. The finance sections of the weekend broadsheets list the best rates on offer each week.

Once you’ve sorted out your emergency money, you can look at saving for the long-term future, which usually means paying into a pension scheme. First of all, check if your employer offers a scheme and find out if you’re eligible to join. If they do and you are, then it’s a very good idea to start contributing to it. Your employer may contribute to it also, so you might be missing out on free cash if you aren’t in it.

If your employer doesn’t have a scheme, or if you’re self-employed, you’ll have to make your own pension arrangements. A very good option is a ‘stakeholder’ – the Government introduced these a few years ago to encourage people on modest earnings to save for retirement, and they have low charges. They’re also flexible, so you can stop contributing for a while if you can’t afford it, with no penalties or hidden charges.

Your contributions are made net of basic rate tax. What that means is that, for every £78 you pay in, the Government pays in £22 (the tax relief), so £100 is invested in your pension fund. It’s even better if you’re a higher rate taxpayer, as you pay only £60, while the Government puts in £40. Your contributions (and tax relief), plus any contributions made by your employer, are invested by the pension company in your ‘pot’ until you decide to take a pension (an annuity) from it.

With the real value of state pensions very low (currently £79.60 per week for a single person), it makes sense to invest in a pension. But you may be put off by the fact that once you’ve put money in, you can’t get at it until you’re at least 50. If you want to retain flexibility, you may prefer an equities ISA. This invests in similar funds to pensions, but there’s no tax relief on contributions and charges may be higher. While it’s best to stay invested for a reasonable length of time (5 years plus), you can get at the money if you really need to.

Finally, I’ve had a lot of people say they’d rather invest in property than in a pension, and there’s no denying that somebody who bought an investment property 3 years ago has certainly done better than if they had bought a pension. But that won’t be the case for ever. There are now plenty of signs that the property boom of the last few years is on its last legs. With interest rates rising, and a looming oil crisis likely to push them higher, this isn’t the time to think about property investment.

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Maggie Fleming writes a regular finance column for Diva magazine. If you want to receive a free copy of these articles (produced monthly), leave your email address .