For many people, getting a foot on the property ladder is difficult enough. But buying that ‘forever’ family home – a multi-bedroomed house with garden for a growing family in which you can see yourself spending the rest of your days – is getting more difficult by the day.

Not only are house prices rising faster than wages, but time is running out because of new and tougher mortgage regulations. In short, new, stricter rules on mortgage lending mean that people as young as 40 may well struggle to buy get a 25-year mortgage to buy their dream property.

The problem is that lenders are now reluctant to advance funds if your mortgage term will creep into your retirement years. Although the state retirement age is due to rise to age 67 between 2026 and 2028, that still means (with surveys suggesting that the average age of first-time buyers is somewhere between 29 and 36), that you may have as little six years between buying your starter home and trading up to your ‘forever’ family home before finding that you are forbidden from taking another 25-year mortgage.

The startling news is a result of strict new lending criteria that mean borrowers must demonstrate that they can afford the initial repayments on any mortgage that stretches beyond statutory retirement age, and they must be able to afford these repayments with their retirement income.

Note that the rules insist that buyers must be able to afford the ‘initial’ repayments in ‘retirement’. So you won’t be able to rely on inflation to reduce down the payments by the time you reach your golden years, you need to be able to show, here and now, that you can afford today’s mortgage repayments on your forecast retirement income. That’s a big enough ask for people on reasonable working incomes today, let alone for those in retirement when incomes usually fall.

Little wonder, then, that so many people are failing this test. Not that you would know by looking at lenders’ websites or marketing materials. Officially, many lenders say that they will lend up to age 70 or 75, but what they do not say so prominently is that this is entirely dependent on borrowers meeting this ‘retirement income’ test. And our experience as mortgage brokers shows that the default position for many lenders on this issue is to say “NO”.

We have seen countless clients that have come to us after being turned down by the high street lenders for this very reason.

Proving that you can afford the repayments can be an arduous process to say the least. It is more of an art than a science. But here is where brokers can help. It means obtaining projections for any pension income and any pension lump sum entitlements, in addition to finding other pensions that you may have accumulated over your working life but lost track of.

This whole process is a continually moving target and the proposed pensions-liberation legislation throws another layer of uncertainty over the whole issue.

In fact, there may be a whole host of ways in which you can persuade a lender to give you a mortgage that you have not thought of, such as persuading your employer to give you a letter stating that you will be employed until age 68, or even aged 70. This could buy you a valuable few extra years.

This is not easy and even when you have much of the paperwork, you still need to persuade a call-centre clerk at the bank or a junior front-line salesman. What you actually need is access to the underwriters who make the decisions and that’s who mortgage brokers speak to on a daily basis.

So if you find yourself at a dead end when trying to get a loan, and the lender is kicking up about your age, try speaking to a broker who has access to senior staff who have the experience to make common-sense lending decisions instead of simply conducting box-ticking exercises which few people will meet.

Simon Tyler is managing director of Tyler Mortgage Management