AIBU to wonder why a pensioner struggling financially would not use housing equity?

The under 25 person has the possibility of getting a job with their whole life in front of them.

A pensioner has worked their whole life paying tax and NI and won’t work again.

@StealMySunshining

Its much easier to find a new community when you are young 'ish' and in good health.

Imagine you are 82 and effectively housebound like my mum.
Or 62 and housebound after multiple strokes like the man in my community who I visit a few times a week. As Ive been visiting for nearly 4 years we have developed a friendship but initially it was an hour a week organised by a charity.

I do think the lady in the article is being a bit daft about the driving- she should at least ask her friends to contribute to the petrol so she can go shopping

It’s a reasonable question. If the house desperately needs work then it makes sense. But there are a lot of dodgy deals out there, so extreme caution is needed.

£12000 a year plus free buses. Rolling in it 🙄

What a measured and caring post. Focusing on the actual needs of your MIL and not worrying about inheritance. If only more posters thought like this.

And I find the service charge thing quite strange because all homes need ongoing maintenance. Isn’t it recommended that you should expect to spend around 1% of your home’s worth on standard maintenance each year? So on a house worth £300k that’s £3k before any upgrades, so spending even double or triple that in service charges on a place you have to do absolutely nothing to is a pretty good deal in my book. No calling tradespeople, no gardening, no worrying about structural issues etc.

Apart from pension, there should be no benefits if you have equity above the threshold (£23k?) in property.
Equity Release can be stepped at say 5k or 10k per year, preserving equity for inheritance.

If she’s running a car she isn’t hard up.

I’m 38 and have already had to deal with selling a property after a death. Why are you assuming that trauma only happens to pensioners?

This woman is a serial moaner. She’s always on something moaning she can’t afford x, y or z. She was forever on morning telly moaning about the winter fuel payment being removed, but then miraculously got a phone call from the DWP to say she was entitled to pension credit.

Nothing about her adds up. She reckons she can’t afford to eat properly but she’s spending £50 a week driving her friends about so they can go shopping? She parks up and sits outside so they can buy clothes but she doesn’t? I’m sorry but I don’t believe her, however if it is true her son, the one who paid for her husband’s funeral allegedly, needs to have a word with her and her so called friends.

My MIL is rattling around in a very large bungalow since FIL passed away. She can afford to stay there but she doesn’t want to so it’s on the market. The costs of moving are astronomical. Something needs to be done about them imo because there will be people stuck in houses they can’t afford but unable to afford the moving costs either.

What do you expect anyone to do or say? The woman has the same money as all people on the state pension get at least. She’s spending £50 a week running pals to the shops but moaning she can’t afford to heat up a tin of beans. Seems like a lot of her problems are caused by her own decision making. She has to take the consequences of that, not look for more handouts.

The article also says she sits outside a clothes shop instead of just going in, even if you aren’t buying you could have a look. Which to me seems like “oh look at poor church house me” martyr behaviour.

I mean her state pension is £1k a month and she can only use an air fryer once every 3 weeks?

Either she lives in a palace (hence high council tax with 25% discount so even more reason to sell surely?) or is driving around in a top of the range brand new Audi!

This I am a cold hungry pensioner in my unsuitable home just doesn’t wash.
If she has children they need to look at her bills, and help her make savings or throw her £50 a month to pay for electric, if she doesn’t so doesn’t need to leave something for the children then equity release. No point being the richest corpse in the graveyard.

But this “I will sit outside the clothes shop and try and gain a calorie or two from the smell of a passerby’s takeaway” nonsense does make you think “suit yourself”

£1k a month is enough to heat up a tin of soup. It is.

But clearly in your case you’ve come up with a viable solution which means you don’t have to move home. If the alternative, however, was that you either move house or starve, would you genuinely stay put? We all have to make difficult decisions in life. I’ve moved quite a few times and each time have had to develop a new community for myself. It’s not easy but if it’s a necessity then it needs to be done.

Cost of equity release is exorbitant. It’s why more people opt to downsize, but that can be distressing if you have lived in a property most of your life or very stressful and overwhelming in terms of selling/conveyancing/packing/moving if you are alone and have no family.

It’s no wonder so many struggle - they’d rather struggle in familiar surroundings, than leap into the unknown. And most probably started by just cutting the heating down, skipping one meal. It’s a gradual process until they come to realise they are living on one or two meals a week, no heating, and making do with toast and water the rest of the time.

All depends what newspaper you saw in this sounds like a daily mail story who likes to perpetuate this myth about pensioners struggling on bread and margarine. (With their glorious triple lock and free transport.)

@op "Why do people continue to hold onto what is essentially an asset, not matter the emotions attached to it, and complain about not being able to eat or heat?"

Presumably because they feel like they worked hard for it and want to keep it forever regardless of how the world has changed around them. Some people feel that once you are old life should never be hard again, even though that's not how life works. It may not be "fair" but there is no difference between a 20 something and a 70 something having a hard time financially (through external factors) - yet the younger generation are constantly told to just suck it up and get on with it.

@StealMySunshining

Downsizing really isnt that easy for everyone. We don't all live in large detached/semis worth in excess of £500k

I live in a bog standard 3 bed terrace, similar houses in the surrounding streets are on the market for approx £200- 225k.
Retirement flats are on the market for £200k plus. Financially it doesn't work for me.
If my health deteriorated further, as I have a downstairs bathroom, all I would need to stay in my home is a stair lift.
It makes no sense to move from a home where I have lived for over 30 years, where I am part of the community and have all the facilities I need on my doorstep.

I remember my nan being moved from the home she had rented all her married life. She hated the newer, nicer flat because she was taken out of her community, her family was no longer 10 mins walk away but a bus trip. She needed help with all sorts of things she didnt need before like shopping and getting to the GP/hospital. She was isolated, lonely and miserable as hell.
Its not just about old people being stubborn

I mean, that’s not what the article says. She needs a car because she suffers from arthritis and can’t walk far.

Look, just do some googling and you will find her history and see it's not quite like you think.

Unlike many pensioners who are living ONLY on a state pension she ought to have other assets from her late husband's pension. He had one- it's in other features on her.

There is nothing about if she has children and is leaving her house to them- that's your imagination.

Around 15% of pensioners are below the poverty line.
Around 30% are millionaires, 90% of personal wealth for pension aged people is tied up in residential housing.
The solution is to move, and it doesn't really matter if it is "hard" life doesn't owe you becoming easier simply because you are old.
I get that lots of people want to "leave something" for the next generation, but that's not a right. The sensible thing to do is to downsize before you are "too old" to manage it.

In my case it's partly inertia about getting the place ready to sell. I know I need to move, both the stairs and the garden are getting very hard for me to manage.

At 70 and arthritic, the prospect of a massive decluttering exercise, endless trips to the tip and getting a decorator in to make the house less shabby is really daunting. Every time I think about it, it seems like a bigger problem than it did last time I thought about it. In the last month, all I've managed to do is get rid of around 100 books and 2 sacks of crap. I can't even get into my loft, because it has a very awkward access and a steeply sloping roof, so you need to crawl the first few feet and I can't put any weight on one of my knees!

It's also hard to find something suitable for me to move to. I don't really want to leave the town where I've lived for nearly 40 years to somewhere where I won't know anyone, and bungalows here are rare things and are consequently at a premium. Finding one that would be affordable after moving costs appears to be impossible.

I've also considered flats, but it would have to be ground floor or in a block with a lift, and they seem to be very rare here (it's a historic town, so no tower blocks!). And then there are the service charges, many of which are (imo) exorbitant. They seem to be around £3k for little more than cleaning the common areas and "grounds maintenance", even when the grounds are just a car park.

A flat in a block for older people here has a service charge of £6k pa, plus ground rent on top. I'd have around £150-180k of equity after fees and costs, but the income from that wouldn't leave me with much more to live on after paying those charges.

It's bloody hard to leave a place you've lived in for almost half your life, especially when it's the last place you shared with a much loved partner.

We moved MIL from her owned home up north to a retirement flat (down south) which has support, a ready made social scene and very near us, she now sees her (only) grandchildren all the time.

Service charge isn’t unmanageable and it was half the price of her previous, increasingly unmanageable family home.

So it’s possible, even as a single (she was a little younger than you when she moved but not much).
Regardless of how much it cost, we don’t look at her money as inheritance, it was a much better move.

And no social housing isn’t for homeowners, of course it’s not. You have a huge asset to play with.

We aren’t worried about selling it as and when, it’s more important that her later life is better quality.