Kinsa’s story
I’ve always owned my own home until a couple of years ago. Ten years ago, in the spirit of adventure I left Opotiki where I’d been living for eighteen years and went to Queenstown. I spent the next nine years ‘wwoofing’, house sitting and working around New Zealand.
Helping out family
I sold my little house by the sea and life on superannuation became a little easier, but then family needs intervened. My son had been through a divorce, remarriage and had begun a new family. He wanted to own his own home again, but was caught in the Auckland housing market crisis.
I decided housing the new family was more important than money in the bank. I gave him his inheritance early which he used as his 20% deposit on a home. When I helped my daughter get a new kitchen in her new place I knew I’d never be able to buy again, but did I want the hassle of a mortgage, costs of R&M and rates at my age? I’d simply have to become more careful of my expenditure.
Storage and house sharing
When friends in my long-term house sit in Katikati suggested that it was time for them to settle back down, they generously offered to store my things in the shed on their property. So, I got my belongings out of storage where they’d been for nine years. I hadn’t got much left that was useable.
I found a nice elderly man who wanted someone to share his house – which was what I wanted. I rented the upstairs flat which had a downstairs bathroom and we shared the kitchen and lounge. We got on well. I found he couldn’t cook, so I did the cooking and created a vegetable garden. My grandson went flatting, so I gave him my kitchen gear – I wouldn’t need it.
Options more limited
A year later the nice man decided he wanted to live by himself. I had to go. By this time rents had risen and I couldn’t afford a flat on my own. With $360 weekly on super how could I pay $200 for a flat and live without reducing drastically the small nest egg I had to last the remainder of my life?
I put my belongings into a storage container and went house sitting again. I realise that homelessness by choice was a different thing to having it imposed upon you. After looking at several places, I decided I needed more than a bedsit or a spare room. I’m a creative – I write and paint and need room for both, and my paintings. A friend suggested we seniors go flat together and rent a four-bedroom place with enough space for us and another flatmate, so that is what I’m aiming for now!
By Kinsa Hayes
I write for this magazine to be the face of older people who urgently need safe, warm suitable housing in Tauranga.
Jenny’s Story
Old age is a challenge, no matter how much money you’ve got in the bank, and one major security is owning your own home. Though home ownership isn’t without its problems, there’s usually enough family interest not only in the elderly occupants, but in the house as an asset worth maintaining. Once the mortgage is paid off, expenses are minimised and the house itself can stand as collateral if money is urgently needed.
Things are tight
In a rented home, on a limited income, you pay as much in rent as others did on mortgage, and won’t ever own where you live. Nor is a long-term tenancy guaranteed either. A housing allowance, helps with the annual rent rise, but means you’ll never benefit from any rise in NZ Super, as it’s immediately cut from this benefit.
My own superannuation is $1,193.34 a fortnight. Rent of $640 is immediately deducted, and I have standing orders for power, life insurance, phone and Internet, third party car insurance, lawn-mowing that leave me with under $200 a week to cover all incidental expenses: food and housekeeping, clothes, water rates, transport, medical care, a Hot Pools season ticket to keep me mobile, etc.
Financial insecurity is a norm for people like me
Last year according to government statistics, the cost of living went up 11.5% and Tauranga isn’t the cheapest city to live in. It’s a constant juggling act and it’s not going to improve as the years go by. For someone like me financial insecurity is a norm.
Add to that the insecurity of living in someone else’s property. I like my unit, but I have no insulation or installed heating, mould in my bedroom and a garden that regularly floods. At 10 years post retirement age I still work the few hours legally allowed under Super, I need to work to survive.
Each year the insecurity worsens and I’m less able to deal with it. Few of us are in this situation by choice, and we don’t have the comfort, as the young do, of thinking our situation will improve.
Without understanding and action, it never will.
By Jenny Argante
I write for this magazine because the more we know about each other, the more we can put right. We all have stories that need to be told.
See Follow-up article Spring 2017 (Oct-Dec): Found – Home for Kinsa
