Ernie and Val’s Retirement Village Living Experience
Ernie Moore and his wife Val Moore have lived at the Acacia Cove retirement village in Wattle Downs, Auckland, for four years.
I have been dismayed by claims made recently by some retirement village residents supposedly unhappy with village life, and I feel compelled to speak up.
The impression this small number of residents give doesn’t tally with my experiences, and a lot of my fellow village residents agree. The claims are also insulting to the many people like my wife and I who did our homework on village life and made an informed decision based on the facts.
Despite suggestions from some people who claim they speak on our behalf, we are living life on our terms.
My wife and I moved into our home in the Acacia Cove retirement village four years ago and our only regret is not doing it sooner.
We had been living in a 440 square metre house in Clevedon set in 2.5 acres. We had been there for 14 years but we had a 15 year plan to eventually sell that, move to a retirement village, release the equity and live on the interest.
We haven’t encountered any problems at all. We spent two years doing a lot of homework to find the right retirement village for us. This was the first village we looked at and we liked it immediately but we went on to look at a lot of others before we made a decision.
We did our due diligence before we signed our occupational right agreement (ORA) - the village insisted on it. We went through everything with our solicitor and we knew exactly what we were signing up to and what the fees and conditions would be.
We like everything about living here - there isn’t anything we would change and other residents seem very happy here too. We like the fact that it is secure and all the maintenance is taken care of. I can sit and have a glass of wine and watch someone else mow the lawn.
There are 33 different things you can do in this village, if you want to get involved. It’s set up so that the residents plan events and activities, with a residents-appointed activity co-ordinator, so we choose what we want to do.
We have regular social functions. I’m on the social committee and on our village’s residents’ association. There’s also a nine hole golf course just over the road, so we trundle our clubs over, play a round and then trundle back.
It’s very well run. There isn’t an aged care facility in our village, but there’s one over the road and the management help residents if they need to move.
Our family enjoy visiting us here and we like the fact that they don’t need to worry about us, we don’t want to be a burden to them.
Being on our village residents association, I’ve heard about the voluntary reforms the industry is rolling out.
That includes asking operators to stop charging weekly fees once a unit contract is terminated, paying interest on the money owed to a former resident if the unit is not resold within nine months and providing better support for residents wanting to move into another facility.
The reforms are reasonable, and while we don’t have any of those issues in our village, I can see how they would work well for other residents.
Our advice to people considering moving to a retirement village would be to do your homework, as we did, to find the right village for you and do your homework.
I’d also say, make the move while you can make the most of retirement village life and make new friends. We have a great circle of friends here - we call them our “village family”.