PAUL ROSS is best known as a host on London’s talk radio station LBC 97.3 FM. He has been showbiz reporter and film critic on ITV1’s This Morning since 2002 and is a regular presenter on Living TV’s Most Haunted.

Ross, who read English literature at Kent university before doing a journalism course at Exeter, is the elder brother of TV and radio host Jonathan. Early on in his career, Paul became editor of The Six O’Clock Show, presented by Michael Aspel, Chris Tarrant and Danny Baker, and The London Programme. He has also worked on Channel 4’s cult classic The Word, Tonight with Johnny Vaughan and Ant and Dec’s Christmas Takeaway.

He went on to present The Big Breakfast on Channel 4 and numerous game shows, including No Win, No Fee for the BBC, and Jeopardy for Sky One.

Ross, 51, who grew up in Leytonstone, east London, lives near Marlow, Buckinghamshire, with his wife, Jackie.

He has four daughters, Dolly, 16, Violet, 15, Bebe, 12, Hermione, 11, and one son, James, 26.

How much money do you have in your wallet? I have £82.45. I always like to have about £100 on me. I find it more convenient to use cash.

Are you a saver or a spender? I’m not particularly extravagant, but I don’t really manage my money in the way I should. But I’m much more TK-Max and Primark than Prada.

My car, for example, is a Mitsubishi Space Wagon for which I paid £2,500 a couple of years ago. I needed a large car to fit the family and the mastiff. My wife has a smaller Peugeot.

One of my main expenses is books, but even for a rare first edition, I’d never pay more than £200. I spent £200 on a first edition of EE Cummings’ The Enormous Room. I like collecting what I call modern poetry, anything 20th century onwards. Ezra Pound is an obsession, as is TS Eliot. I’ve got a first edition of Pound’s Homage to Sextus Propertius which is probably the most valuable book I have – but that’s only worth about £250. I’ve had that for about 20 years. It cost me £40, which was quite a lot of money in the 1980s.

Do you think collectables can be a good investment? I don’t regard them as investments. Some may go up in value in the future, like my collection of first-edition Yeats poetry, with sleeves designed by his sister. It’s probably only worth about £500 in total, though. I reckon my total book collection is only worth about £2,000-£3,000 if I’m lucky.

How much did you earn last year? I probably earned between £170,000 and £200,000. It’s mostly from radio, which I love doing. The best thing about it is that you don’t have to wear any make-up and it provides a regular income for showing off – it’s almost like a proper job.

I also do a lot of corporate work – that can earn £5,000 a night. I’ve done some very bizarre ones. I remember hosting the recycling awards and one of the categories was best use of nonorganic waste. There was another one for the best stepladder of the year.

Have you ever been really hard up? Not really. I was loaded as a student – I had a full grant and I always worked. I was a bingo caller and at Christmas times I delivered the post.

How much was in your first pay packet? As soon as I entered the real world of work, I started to feel much poorer. I qualified as a journalist in 1982 and my first real job was at the Western Times, based in Exeter. I was earning the princely sum of £5,000 a year.

What is the most lucrative work you have ever done? Did you use the fee for something special? I was on a show called Jeopardy in the mid1990s which paid £3,000 a day for five days a week. I also had a series for ITV1 called the Paul Ross Show about 10 years ago. That earned me £5,000 a show.

I didn’t really use the money for anything particular.

Do you own a property? I have a listed 14th century house in Bisham near Marlow. It’s got lots of character. It’s tiny though – like a hobbit house. It has what’s known as a flying freehold because of the way the houses are divided. Our bedroom is above our next-door neighbour’s dining room and their chimneybreast comes up through our bedroom. Our other neighbour has a bit of her loft above our stairwell.

We moved in a couple of years ago. The house cost us about £425,000 but we have a mortgage on it. We’re also thinking of buying the land at the back of our garden. We have a reasonably sized outside space but the additional land would make it about 50% bigger. It will cost about £15,000. Hopefully, next year we can put in a pool.

Do you invest in shares? Nope. I regard it as a nasty rich man’s casino – a pox on all their houses.

How are you saving for retirement? It’s quite disgraceful, but I haven’t got a formal plan. My bank manager’s been telling me off about it and I’m determined to sort it out soon. Although I’m in my fifties, in my mind I’m still 22.

Pensions or property? I know there are tax benefits with pensions, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s tax. If I do a three-hour radio show, I know that an hour and 20 minutes’ worth just goes to the taxman.

I’d rather open my wrists than give them more money – mind you, they’ll probably start sucking that dry as well.

Having said that, I’ve looked into investing in property for the future but, to be honest, there are probably more tax benefits to a pension than a second home.

What has been your worst investment? I once bought a new Saab convertible in the early 1990s. I bought it for £12,000, which was quite a lot then, but after a couple of years I could only get about £5,500 for it. I’ve never bought a new car since.

I also made a loss on a property I bought in 1989. It was a three-bedroom house in Wandsworth in south London for which I paid £185,000, but I sold it three years later for £160,000.

And your best? It’s probably property again. The house I would have made most profit on was in Petworth, Sussex, but it went to my second wife when we divorced.

What aspect of our taxation system would you change? I would dynamite every regional tax headquarters and probably execute anyone who has ever worked for the Revenue. I would scrap all national taxation and instead introduce a flat rate of 10% for everybody. I’d also have a local tax to pay for local services.

Having said that, I’d still execute everyone working for the Revenue so we can have a clean slate to start with.

What is your financial priority? It’s got to be the pension. The trouble is, at the same time, I’d love to do up my kitchen.

Do you have a money weakness? Lack of interest, to be honest. I have friends who have done lots of clever things with their money and are pretty well off, but I’ve never been into all that.

I was filming in Romania recently, where everything is cheap because it used to be run by those vile bolsheviks.

There was a five-bedroom ski lodge at the foot of a mountain overlooking a soon-to-be-demolished concrete factory. It was going for £12,000. I knew it was a great bargain, but I didn’t do anything about it.

What is the most extravagant thing you have ever bought? I would say books. Apart from the Cummings and the Pound, I also have a signed limited edition of a collection of poetry by that bonkers vicar, RS Thomas. I paid £120 for it.

I collect quite a lot of books but I’m not as bad as my brother Jonathan – he’s into American comics and he has to have all of them.

What is the most important lesson you have learnt about money? Only worry about money if you’re owed it, and not the other way round.