“Getting Plastered”

Posted on July 11, 2016 by john graham

It’s been a lovely week, the weather has been good and I have been out in the garden catching up on all the weeding, pruning, tying back and pottering. These are the constant everyday challenges of the cottage gardener.

It is good exercise and not generally a hazardous occupation. Just a few scratches from the thorns on the roses. No need to call out the air ambulance!

Although, after a few days your hands and arms do look a bit like you have been in a serious fight with a rabid animal that stalks the garden jungle. In my childhood days I would have got a sweet for the injuries sustained in my battles in the garden. Still, the wounds heal over with crisp dark scabs after a day or two.

Then, like all little boys, you can’t resist picking off the scabs. That’s where my story begins………

I am off to a business meeting – no more scruffy garden clothes – today is a day for my suit and a freshly pressed clean white shirt. Washed, shaved and about to get dressed, I notice one last time I remaining scab on my arm. Nobody would see it under my shirt sleeve, but the little boy in me can’t resist.

I pick off the scab like it is the last chocolate in the box. Surprise, surprise it starts to bleed. Just a drop at first, but enough to mark my clean white shirt, then more of a raging torrent. At this rate I will soon look like a returning war hero. Not quite the appearance I want at my business meeting.

I go looking for a plaster. We have a house full of plasters. Boxes of them everywhere, but nowhere when you’re in a hurry. The first box I find is a Sainsbury’s washproof dressing strip. Ideal if you want to wrap yourself in 30 feet of continuous plaster like an Egyptian Mummy. But useless if you can’t find a pair of scissors!

So I hunt down another box in the kitchen cupboard leaving a few drops of blood in a trail behind me. The forensic team will have no trouble finding out what happened if I don’t survive. The box I find is Marks and Spencer who usually can be relied on for good quality, but not for plasters evidently. Each individual plaster is wrapped in an outer paper protective cover designed to stop people getting into it. At least the outer cover works, especially when you only have one useful arm. I give up on M & S before I bleed to death.

At last, I find the brand leader – Elastoplast. A new box full of “water-resistant plasters with non-stick pads” which seems a bit of a contradiction. But still I wrench open the box, although I have to use my bloody hand so the box now looks as if it has been in an accident. Inside the plasters are just like the M & S ones, all double wrapped, hermetically sealed, water-resistant, childproof, adultproof. No safecracker has even been able to break into them – they will probably be around and unused for the next thousand years!

I finally resort to every shaver’s tried and tested solution…….a piece of toilet paper stuck to the wound soon dries it up. Then all you have to do is put all the boxes of unused plasters away, clean the blood off the carpet and

DON’T PICK THAT SCAB AGAIN!!

Posted in SMILES | Tagged packaging | 4 Comments

“Assisted Living”

Posted on July 3, 2016 by john graham

This is an American term applied to retirement housing, which I have never fully understood. It tends to be associated with grab rails, hoists, Zimmer frames, mobility scooters and emergency call systems. That’s all good stuff but it doesn’t go even half way to providing the assistance many older people need in later life. Most everyday things that become problems may be only little issues individually, but their cumulative effect can be a debilitating reminder of how old you are getting.

A small amount of assistance could go a long way to keeping people more independent and create a host of new jobs for young people. Here are a few ideas to be going on with:-

Childproof top safecracker assistant – to open all those pills you get from the chemist. The ones you haven’t taken as prescribed because you can’t open the plastic pill-box 😦
Impossible package opener assistant – to remove all the hermetically sealed, vacuum packed, double shrink-wrapped plastic film used on almost everything. To keep it fresh for years to come or to ensure it is tamper-proof, even by the customers who bought it in the first place. Goodness knows how many injuries have happened when you take a pair of scissors or a sharp knife to your weekly shopping. I wonder if you can claim compensation for over-wrapped goods?
Sealing resealable packages assistant – to put your cheese back into the packet – if you managed to open it in the first place.
Jam jar and fruit can opening assistant – for those easy to open tops where all you have to do is press down with the strength of an Olympic weight lifter and the top just pops off. More old people need to take up weight-lifting otherwise marmalade sales will plummet.

(For other blogs about my trials with “Packaging” click on it in the TAG CLOUD).

It is not all about packaging. Here are some other everyday tasks where assistance might help:-

TV Remote Control switching assistant – to master the three different TV controllers and two video thingy’s, oh and the sound bar operator widget. Also to navigate the 150 channels – most of which we never watch. There will, no doubt, be a £10 call out charge for this service and an extra charge by the hour if you have already pressed all the buttons and the TV has to be “reset again. There will also have to be a special emergency call out service, obviously costing a lot more if you need the assistant to arrive within 5 minutes – say for instance if the football is about to kick off or maybe your favourite detective programme is about to start and you don’t want to miss the beginning in case you don’t understand the plot for the next two hours 😦
Finally, a reading assistant and gobbledygook translator – initially to read aloud the unreadable 10 point font that all newspapers have adopted these days. No wonder less and less people are buying daily newspapers. They could also speed read the news scrolling across the bottom on the screen on the 24-hour news channel or scrolling up the screen at breakneck speed, with the credits at the end of the film. The translator part of the job is not about a foreign language, it’s about the latest politically correct “buzzwords” and the computer geek language of “new speak”. The first is to ensure you are “on trend” whatever that means – using words like sustainable, counter-intuitive or even intuitive if you are talking about computers. The techy stuff is designed to ensure that only a few hundred people in the whole world understand how computers and the internet works. Everyone else either just pretends to understand or has given up trying. Bits and bytes and gigabytes seem to be important since you have to pay more for more of them. Band speed is also significant, which I think has something to do with how fast musicians play? I am not even going to talk about clouds, I gave up on them after learning about Cirrus, Cumulonimbus and Cumulo Stratus in A-level geography. Phishing is no longer fishing for fish, it’s now about phishing to catch people on-line. The tech jargon is never-ending, always trending and for older people, mind-bending.

So there will probably never be enough assistants to support older people in assisted living.

A better way would be to design products with the elderly in mind !

(See earlier posts on this subject by clicking on “Small Prints” and “Old Geek” in the TAG CLOUD).

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | Tagged packaging, Small Print | 3 Comments

“Retirement Housing Review – Churchill Retirement Living”

Posted on June 26, 2016 by john graham

I started this thread about retirement housing when I wrote a post a few weeks ago on a very upmarket scheme in London. Following that I wrote about the key issues that are driving the future of this market (you can see my earlier posts by clicking on “Retirement Housing” in the Topics list).

This is my third in-depth look at one of the major providers in the retirement housing sector:-

Churchill Retirement Living

This organisation is literally the son of McCarthy and Stone. It was set up in 1994 by Spencer and Clinton McCarthy – the sons of John McCarthy. It is still a private company run by the McCarthy family. Their product has not changed substantially in the last 40 years – it is still essentially sheltered housing for sale. They have not moved into providing an assisted living option.

The website is fairly good but it has a number of omissions which makes comparison with other providers difficult. Here are some of the key facts drawn from their website:-

They operate schemes mainly in the South of England, although they have moved into the Midlands and towards the North West. They have a highly focused product with standard one and two bedroom flat types in schemes of between 25 and 50 units.
Communal facilities are minimal with only a small communal lounge and a guest suite.
Individual properties are based on the footprints of one and two bedroom flats. They seem quite small, although there’s no reference to the overall size. The flats are generally narrow frontage which mean all the main rooms are deep and narrow. If there are balconies at all, they are Juliette type with no outside space. Kitchens are also small and wet rooms are provided with showers rather than bathrooms.
Purchase prices obviously vary with location. Here are some examples:
- Hampshire – one bed £191,950
- – two bed £318,950
- Warwickshire – one bed £228,950
- – two bed £348,950
- Dorset – one bed £246,950
- Surrey – one bed £255,950

There is no charge on exit which presumably means service charges are higher to cover long-term maintenance cost. If you wish to sub-let there is a charge of 1% of market value which seems high and difficult to justify.

They seem coy about service charges and no figures are provided on the website. This is a strange stance to take because with their “no frills product” you would assume their charges are lower than their competitors. There is also no charge for car parking, probably because they provide a minimal number of spaces on site (12 for 25 units on one site I looked at). Their design standard is to provide 1 car for every 3 residents, which is not going to be adequate for a baby boomer future.
Domiciliary care and support is not included on any of their sites, although there is a concierge. They provide a helpful location map showing the nearest medical centres / libraries / supermarkets etc.

Overall, these schemes are what they are. Basic, no frills, sheltered housing. They obviously produce schemes that are well-regarded and sell successfully. So you could say why change a winning formula?

I would say it’s rather disappointing that with all their experience they have not developed the retirement housing model any further, although to be fair many other providers are in a similar position.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 9 Comments

“Wine not ?”

Posted on June 19, 2016 by john graham

Chief Medical Officers are obviously not party animals. In November last year I was looking forward to a few drinks at Christmas, and a few more on Boxing Day, and a few more in the days that followed. Then the curmudgeonly party-poopers issued new guidelines on the intake of alcohol. The new advice reduced the recommended level to 14 units a week 😩

The advice was aimed at middle-aged people worried about dementia and explicitly warned them to reduce their drinking. Of course I am not middle-aged any more so maybe it doesn’t apply to me.

Still, to be on the safe side, I decided to shop around and see if I could find some more cheerful advice. Fortunately, researchers at the University of Reading are a happier bunch. They examined over 100 research studies and concluded that phenols, particularly in red wine and champagne, can help preserve brain cells, even when they are under attack from Alzheimer’s. They found that people who drank a glass and a half of wine every day had a lower risk of dementia than teetotalers.

I think I prefer to take their advice than listen to the Government miseries.

Posted in HEALTH, SMILES | Tagged Dementia, research | 4 Comments

“Retirement Housing Review – McCarthy & Stone”

Posted on June 12, 2016 by john graham

This is my second in-depth look at one of the major providers in the retirement housing sector:-

McCarthy & Stone

This organisation has been the private sector market leader in retirement housing for many years. They were the first house-builder to move into the sheltered housing sector over 40 years ago. What is somewhat surprising is that their market offer has hardly changed in all that time and is still essentially selling the same product. They now have sub-divided their products into three basic divisions. “Retirement Living” which seems to be their original offer and is still the majority of their schemes. Secondly “Assisted Living” which is an enhanced offer which provides some degree of support. Finally, what seems to be a re-branded model obscurely referred to as “Ortus Homes”, which although it’s claimed to be a pioneering concept, seems only to be a stripped down version of their original sheltered housing model.

Their website is very substantial which you would expect from such a large organisation. They provide a lot of the information you might need to consider purchasing one of their properties, but you do have to be fairly adept at searching the website to find it. Here are some of the key facts drawn from their website:-

Their schemes are provided over a wide area of the UK although annoyingly you can’t find a map showing you where they are all located. The retirement living schemes and the new Ortus projects are typically between 20 and 40 units. The assisted living units, which are similar to Category II sheltered housing tend to be around 50-60 units.
Communal facilities in the retirement living schemes are fairly basic but generally have a communal lounge and a guest room. The assisted living projects would also include a restaurant and lounge areas. The Ortus Homes projects seem to have taken out all these communal facilities and only offer a basic independent living option which to me appears to be a backward step.
Individual properties are generally a mixture of one and two-bedroom apartments. Strangely although they provide individual plans and room sizes, there’s no reference to the overall size of the flats. I suspect that the earlier retirement living accommodation and possibly also the assisted living flats are quite small. No doubt the new Ortus Homes which are described as luxury “right sized accommodation” are significantly larger.
Purchase prices vary with each scheme location and when they were built. Here are some of the one and two-bedroom apartments currently available:-
- Wolverhampton – one bed £160k to £200k Retirement Living
- – two bed £240k to £255k Retirement Living
- Ashby – one bed £170k to £200k Retirement Living
- – two bed £245k to £260k Retirement Living
- Swindon – one bed £205k Retirement Living
- – two bed £301k Retirement Living
- Leicester – one bed £200k to £211k Retirement Living
- – two bed £281k to £286k Retirement Living
- Leicester – one bed £143k to £163k Assisted Living
- – two bed £238k to £288k Assisted Living
- Nottingham – one bed £227k to £300k Assisted Living
- – two bed £278k to £481k Assisted Living
- Harrogate – one bed £264k to £274k Ortus Luxury Homes
- Swanage – one bed £350k to £400k Ortus Luxury Homes
- – two bed £421k to £526k Ortus Luxury Homes
- Buckinghamshire – two bed £575k to £595k Ortus Luxury Homes
- Essex – two bed £620k Ortus Luxury Homes
- Hampshire – two bed £380k to £650k Ortus Luxury Homes
- Poole – two bed £595k to £769k Ortus Luxury Homes
- – three bed £1,425k Ortus Luxury Homes

In addition you pay an annual ground rent of circa £500. They also have a 1% of capital charge on resale plus a small sales admin fee of £324.

Service charges vary from scheme to scheme but seem to average around £200 per month. One hour of domestic support is provided within the service charge for assisted living. You may also pay an extra charge for a parking space.
Domiciliary Care and Support. A firm called YourLife provides care and support in the assisted living schemes. It is provided on an individual basis but there’s no indication on the website as to how much these charges are likely to be.

Overall McCarthy and Stone still seem to be trading on their historical market leader position. Their new brand of Ortus Homes seems to have abandoned any pretension of providing of any degree of communal living so I’m rather confused as to how this accommodation can in any way be described as pioneering in terms of retirement housing. What is obvious is the intention to move upmarket with better located sites in terms of “sea views” and presumably, but not clearly, larger size accommodation.

These guys have long become followers not the market leaders they once were.

I maybe doing them a disservice so I will endeavour to go and see some of their newer schemes in the next few months and I will report back after that.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 60 Comments

“Retirement Housing Review – Audley”

Posted on June 5, 2016 by john graham

I am now going to have a more in depth look at some of the options currently on offer. My first example is one of the market leaders in the luxury end of the market:-

Audley Retirement Villages

This is an organisation I have known about and worked alongside for many years. I first met their Chief Executive – Nick Sanderson when he was developing “Close Care Housing” with Beaumont Healthcare. They had an upmarket, high quality approach to housing with care as an alternative to residential care.

They have now moved in to luxury retirement housing and currently have 12 schemes around the country from Kent through the Midlands and up to Yorkshire. They provide leasehold flats and houses, often centred around an historical building which forms the focal point of their developments.

Their website is very comprehensive and gives most of the information you might need to consider purchasing one of their properties. Here are some of the key facts drawn from their website:-

Their schemes range in size from 80 to a 100 units; they’re generally constructed in a series of phases over several years;
Their communal facilities are extensive and include a lounge, library, bistro/restaurant, fitness centre and a swimming pool;
Individual properties are mainly two-bedroom apartments of around 800 sq. ft. which is a very generous size. There are a few smaller one-bedroom apartments and some larger two/three bed flats with study/office rooms. On most sites, they also have two storey houses / cottages, which I personally don’t like because stairs are a barrier in future years;
Purchase prices vary with each scheme location and when they were built. Here are some of the two-bedroom apartments currently available:-
- Leamington Spa £410k to £435k
- Yorkshire £380k to £495k
- Derbyshire £395k to £450k
- Buckinghamshire £555k
- Berkshire £595k to £635k
- Birmingham £614k

In addition you pay an annual ground rent of £500 and a Deferred Management Charge when you leave / die, it is 1% of the resale price for every year you have lived in the scheme. So the initial capital cost is quite high for a two-bedroom flat and rises significantly in areas further south. Also there is a considerable exit price, albeit that this should enable Audley to charge a lower annual service charge.

Service charges vary from scheme to scheme but seem to average around £700 per month. You may also pay an extra charge of £100 annually for a parking space. So at £8,500 a year this is relatively expensive, although it does include an allowance which pays for some meals in the restaurant. The website has a useful price calculator that enables you to make a comparison to your current household costs.
Domiciliary Care and Support. Audley are relatively unusual in employing directly their own homecare team. They provide everything from housekeeping to personal care right through to escorting people to appointments and social activities. All of which is personalised and charged by the hour.

Overall I would say Audley has a distinctive niche at the luxury end of the market.

They have recently announced their intention to develop a “medium range offer”. It will be interesting to see how this differs from the current provision.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | 1 Comment

“BabyBoomers Housebound”

Posted on May 29, 2016 by john graham

Two weeks ago I wrote about a very upmarket retirement housing project in London. Only very wealthy people need apply because it was a money-no-object solution for downsizers with pots of gold at the end of their rainbow time working and living in London.

Now I want to look more widely at the rapidly emerging market of private providers of retirement housing, all looking to tap into the £1.3 trillion equity that older people have locked up in their family homes. The “downsizers” also more recently referred to as “rightsizers”.

The market is being driven by three key factors:-

The changing demographics of the older population. 23% of the UK population is now over 60 and as more of the baby boomer generation retire, the proportion will increase to 29% in the next 20 years. They more then previous generations have accumulated wealth through the over-inflated growth in house values in the latter half of the last century.
The lack of retirement housing options. Only 2% of the existing housing stock is made up of specialist housing for retired people, leaving aside the ever-unattractive option of last resort – residential care. Historically, most newly built retirement housing has been provided for rent either by Local Authority’s or Housing Associations. There has been some limited provision of home ownership by both Housing Associations and private developers, almost exclusively built on the 1960 model of sheltered housing. It is a model that has lasted well but is now looking tired.
The prospect of loneliness / isolation and frailty. This is the least understood elephant-in-the-room issue that few people want to face. The newly retired live in hope that it will never happen to them, so they hang to what they have got. For the majority in the early years of retirement they can happily continue to turn a blind eye to the future.

The demographics should be a major driver for transforming this sector of the housing market and it is for the lucky few who have sufficient funds to buy into the luxury end of the market or are fortunate to live near recent new build options in the social housing sector.

Sadly the other two factors are more of a drag than a driver for most people who could be players in the market.

I’ll look at some of the current options in the weeks ahead.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING, Sheltered Housing | Tagged baby boomers | 2 Comments

“Pension Discredit”

Posted on May 22, 2016 by john graham

When Pension Credit was first introduced by the Government, it was one of the least understood benefits for older people and it remains so to this day. It is supposed to ensure the poorest pensioners are guaranteed a higher level of income than just the basic state pension. However because of the confusion about who is entitled to it, pension credit is probably the most under-claimed entitlement. All Governments pay lip service to promoting benefits, but they care little about the under-claiming because it saves money on the welfare bill.

Thanks to a recently published report by Independent Age, this situation has been exposed, but I wonder how many headlines it will get. Not many I suspect, given the frequently trumpeted view that pensioners are better off than ever.

The report is entitled “The Overlooked Over 75s”. Here are some of the report’s key findings:-

Older pensioners’ incomes are on average £59 a week lower than younger pensioners and £112 a week lower than working age adults;
A fifth of those aged 75 and over are living below the poverty line;
Over 75’s are twice as likely as under 75’s to have been in poverty for the last four years.

The people this affects are often called the “silent generation” because having lived through the second world war and also for some the deprivations of the 1930’s, they don’t complain, they don’t think the world owes them a living, and they don’t like living off the state, so they often don’t claim benefits.

Nearly three-quarters of a million over 75’s have no source of income other than state pension and benefits. Nearly a quarter of single women aged 75 (400,000 women) are completely reliant on state financial support.
Over 75’s are less likely than younger pensioners to receive Pension Credit when they are eligible. Of the 1.9 million who are estimated to be eligible, around 750,000 people don’t claim it (39%).

It is hardly surprising when benefit forms are complicated, confusing and poorly communicated. When more and more information is on-line and unavailable to non-tech savvy older people.

Local Authority and Housing Association landlords, who provide the majority of the UK’s retirement housing, should re-double their efforts to ensure this often unappreciated generation get their full benefit.

Acknowledgement

My thanks to the Charity Independent Age for producing this report from which most of my blog is taken. I very much hope it gets the publicity it deserves and that my post helps broadcast it a little further.

Posted in Pensions | 2 Comments

“Baby Booming Rich”

Posted on May 15, 2016 by john graham

Last week I wrote about the option many home owning baby boomers have to cash in the equity accumulated in their house over the years and secure themselves a smaller rented home. Thereby releasing cash to buy themselves a better lifestyle in retirement.

There is an alternative to this for people who have the good fortune to live in places like London where property values have gone through the roof over the last forty years. People who moved into modest houses when they first started out and now find themselves as new property millionaires. They are opening up a new market in luxury retirement housing and investors are emerging to fund this growth opportunity.

One of the latest luxury examples, which opens this year, is a retirement community called Battersea Place in Central London. It comprises spacious 1, 2 and 3 bedroom apartments, with a range of communal facilities including a restaurant, cafe bar, a billiard room (snooker must be too down market),lounge, cinema, hairdresser, swimming pool and spa and a guest apartment. The support services offer a concierge, housekeeping, domiciliary care, a nursing suite and even a chauffeur driven car.

It is all the things offered in the ExtraCare Charitable Trust villages (except for the chauffeur driven limmo!), but a lot more expensive.

One bedroom studio flats start at £650,000; two bedroom apartments cost £800,000 and penthouse suites with 3 bedrooms cost £2.95m.

It does not stop there. Service charges are £12,000 a year to live there and extra if you need care. Furthermore when you move out or die, you or your estate has to pay 20% of the original purchase price in “deferred payments” plus 50% of the equity growth in your property.

This is only an option for people with considerable assets. It certainly gaurantees a luxury lifestyle and also a paupers funeral . Only for the lucky few.

There are more slightly cheaper options which I will talk about in my next blog.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | Tagged baby boomers | 2 Comments

“Baby Boom in Renting”

Posted on May 8, 2016 by john graham

The baby boomer generation have changed things in society all their lives. Now they may be doing it again, this time in housing. Throughout their growing up years, the Holy Grail was to own your own home. In your working age adult years, you laboured to pay off your mortgage. Then when almost at retirement age, you finally pay it off and own 100% of your home.

After a short sigh of relief —— You have a home which is too big for you, now the children have flown the nest. Your property is ageing along with you and needs regular maintenance which you are less able to do yourself. If you live in the suburbs, or even more remotely in rural areas, the supermarkets and shops seem to have moved further away. And finally, your fixed income makes you more aware of everyday costs now there is no earned income coming in.

The good news is that as an ever-lucky baby boomer, your property has increased enormously in value over the years and you did not have to do anything to make it happen. You just had to be on the property ladder. Now, you need a baby boomer paradigm change in thinking. Your house no longer needs to be a castle, now it can be a springboard to a new downsized life.

As is often the case, housing trends in the USA preceded what happens in the UK a few years later. The hippy generation of America are beginning a new trend in retirement – not just downsizing, but renting rather than owning their homes. According to the Tampa Bay Times, there has been a 42% growth in rental properties and interestingly 1 in 3 people have enough to buy but still decide to rent ! Home ownership in the US has dropped to 64% in recent years. Renting an apartment in the centre of town means you can walk to the local shops or travel easily (and in the UK often freely) on public transport. Market rents, although high, mean that property upkeep is looked after for you by the landlord.

The new ageing hippy ideal is to ‘hang loose’ and enjoy retired life to the full. Release of the equity you have accumulated in your house gives you the means to do it. ‘Far out man I’m on the road again’

There is more to life than bingo, carpet slippers and rocking chairs on the porch.

This could be the start of another baby boomer revolution in society.

Posted in RETIREMENT HOUSING | Tagged baby boomers | 3 Comments

GrumbleSmiles