The retirement villages are ripping off retirees. As a former resident said, "It's a financial trap. It's a financial sinkhole. Once you're in, it's very hard to get out." Retirement villages are marketed as a way for older Australians to keep their independence without the burden of maintaining a property, but it's all about money: bleed them dry until they die. Read more here.
Retirement villages are home to more than 250,000 older Australians, drawn by clever marketing, but they are buying a product which, despite its financial complexity and a myriad of different schemes on offer, is excluded from the definition of financial products and therefore without any federal oversight and the corporate regulator's reach, ASIC.
It's a get-poor-quick scheme for the individual residents and a get-rich-quick scheme for the operators. I don't know why anybody would enter into such contract, which is what I told another retired German whom I met in 2011 on the Atherton Tablelands just as he was on the cusp of signing up with such an operator in Mareeba. I like to think that I saved him a good deal of money; not that he spent it wisely by making up for lost time and travelling the world. Instead, he bought himself a big house which his heirs sold for a profit when he died seven years later.
The moral of the story? There isn't one except this: whatever you do, stay clear of retirement villages. They're a cunningly disguised rip-off.
