AGEING is inevitable but with scientific advances we are progressively finding out how people can stay a little younger.

While most people are concerned with their looks as they age, a few are taking the necessary steps to keep their minds sharp and their bodies healthy.

Prince Court Medical Centre consultant physician and geriatrician, healthy ageing specialist Dr Rajbans Singh says our ageing population is on the increase and that the average life span is now 75 to 80 years.

“More and more people are hitting the ages of 75 to 80. If people do not age well, it will be an economic burden on the government. The focus on ageing has changed. It is now more on prevention, wellness, anti-ageing and healthy ageing,” he says, adding that it is imperative to advise the elderly to stay young and healthy. Here is Dr Rajbans’s 10-point checklist for staying young when you are old.

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This is dinner ... resident Faye Webb with what she was offered for dinner at Lifetsyle Estates at Redbank Plains Picture: Annette Dew Source: The Courier-Mail

I am often asked by worried clients whether they can be kicked out of their retirement home, mainly because of sensationalised media stories like the one featured in Brisbane’s Courier Mail today.

Essentially, the story is about residents who are living in a retirement village in Ipswich (west of Brisbane), who have been asked to move out because the village has been sold. Understandably the residents do not want to move and the newspaper has taking the sensationalist route by painting the new buyers as “greedy developers” and the residents as poor victims of the system. What is even more concerning is the comments to the article – most of them abusing the “greedy developer” and questioning why the state government doesn’t “do something”.

In case you were interested, here are the facts of the case that should have been reported by the Courier Mail, but clearly weren’t because the journalist Robyn Ironside was either a) lazy, b) stupid, or c) decided not to report the facts in case they got in the way of a good “angle” on the story.

1. This is a rental retirement village. Residents occupy their unit under a standard residential tenancy agreement and is covered by the state Residential Tenancies Legislation. If your lease agreement has expired you have no legal right to occupy and can be asked to leave. If you want security of tenure, then sign a longer lease!

2. The rental retirement village model is broken and does not work, as evidenced by the fact that most of the operators of these types of villages are struggling financially. The residents would be far worse off if the previous operator had gone broke, as there would have been no-one around to prepare the meals or run the village. Avoid rental retirement villages wherever possible – they don’t work.

3. The Seasons organisation is a good, ethical operator of aged care facilities. They are not a “greedy developer” but provide a quality alternative to aged care accommodation available through the state and not-for-profit organisations. They are doing everything they can to assist with an orderly transition for the residents, but you will never please everyone all of the time. To abuse Seasons for simply carrying out their business (albeit in the kindest and most ethical way) shows the typical ill-informed, un-educated, half-baked, spoon-fed opinions held by the consumers of popular tabloid media. Heaven save us if that hot-air haggis Alan Jones get a hold of it!

What really riles me is the comments after the article, half of which carry that familiar hand-wringing refrain – “the government should do something!”

Why? Why should the government “do something”?

Where are the comments abusing the families of these seniors for not providing them with housing, assistance or support? Oh, that’s right – their families are too busy paying off mortgages on their over-sized McMansions, or the credit they used to stuff said McMansion with Plasma Screen TV’s and Jet Skis, or filling their fat progeny with food-court fast-food.

These nanny-state nut-jobs are the first group of people to complain when the government raise taxes or sell off “their” assets to pay down debt or fund other services. So on one hand they want the government to take more responsibility, then scream like stuck pigs when they get charged for it.

If you people continue to respond in such an emotional way to poorly-researched, tabloid articles you do yourselves an injustice and guess what – you will continue to get more poorly-researched, tabloid articles from the ambulance chasers at the Courier Mail. Please try and understand that there is usually more to the story than what is published in a Courier Mail article.

By the way, don’t bother leaving any comments here.

NOTE: For the record, I am not affiliated with Seasons in any way and have never done business with them. I do however, like and support their business model.

We are continually bombarded with media articles and research about the impact of our ageing population and how it is going to result in higher taxes, over-loaded hospitals and caravan-clogged road networks. So I think it is high time that we closed the door on our dooms-day soothsayers and thought about some of the more positive aspects of an older population (not all of them serious!)…

1. The hidden economics – Figures from the Welsh Assembly Government’s Strategy for Older People show the value and cost savings that many older people are making to the Welsh economy. If those older people who take on caring responsibilities were paid it would cost at least £1 billion a year. Similarly, the value of childcare provided by grandparents is estimated at £259 million a year.
2. Volunteers – Older people are the most likely group to offer their time to volunteer – the value of which has been estimated at £469 million a year. Similarly, Carers UK have argued that if carers across the UK (the majority of whom are older people) downed tools, it would cost the economy a staggering £87 billion annually.
3. Less graffiti – Most graffiti is done at night and older Australians generally prefer ABC’s re-runs of “The Bill” to spraying tags on local fences and walls.
4. Less traffic – Many seniors don’t drive, which has to result in less traffic.
5. Cheaper suburban homes – Many empty-nesters seek to sell and downsize out of their suburban family home where they have raised their families and move to smaller digs elsewhere (retirement communities, apartments, etc). With less demand coming through for larger properties prices have to come down.
6. More re-runs of “The Bill” on the ABC!

Can you add any more suggestions as to the positive aspects of an ageing population?

Great article this morning from Lisa Pryor at the Sydney Morning Herald – how Gen Y view their baby-boomer parents!

Read it HERE.

For sale. Any buyers?

I found a great article this morning by Karen Maley on the Business Spectator website, which talks about how the ageing population will affect house, stock and bond prices. Essentially, the group of asset buyers (GenX, Gen Y, etc) is shrinking while the group of asset sellers (baby boomers, retirees, etc) is growing – you don’t have to be a trained economist to know that increasing supply and falling demand equals lower prices.

I dont blog about financial stuff as a rule as there are plenty of people out there doing it and hey, my specialty is retirement housing, not finances! I will post interesting stuff when I find it though.

What do you think? Will the ageing population lead to lower asset prices or will immigration keep us in perpetual growth?

Advertisers are still neglecting older consumers, despite the fact that spending by those aged over 55 years will grow at around twice the rate of the national average, and that the over 55’s head households that own approximately 40% of the nation’s household wealth and account for 25% of all disposable income (Access Economics – Population Ageing and the Economy, Jan 2001).

As the population of over 55’s grows rapidly, so will their expenditure, because for many mature consumers:

• Their kids have left home;
• The mortgage has largely been repaid;
• Other financial commitments are at an all time low; and
• Income is highest at this age.

In addition, strong property price growth over the past two decades means they now have access to more money than at any other stage in their lives and will increasingly dominate the growth in spending throughout Australia.

Household Expenditure Surveys by the Australian Bureau of Statistics consistently show that the people who spend the most, in aggregate and in most discretionary categories, are between 45 and 64 years old.  And the proportion of consumers aged 45 plus increased dramatically from 1990.

The baby boomer generation is not only vastly larger than earlier generations, but their inflation-adjusted earnings are also much higher.

Shoppers in the 18-49 year old demographic are far more attractive to marketers as they are often perceived as having more liberal spending habits and a greater willingness to try new products. However, a recent study in the US by Nielsen, the research firm, has suggested that customers of 50 years of age and above have considerable potential for companies which promote their products in the right way.

“There will be a huge number of people over the age of 65, 75, and 85 over the coming decade,” said Doug Anderson, Nielsen’s SVP, research and thought leadership.

While baby boomers are leaving the demographics that have been favored by advertisers for decades, Alan Wurtzel, president-research and media development at NBC Universal, said in a recent interview in the Advertising Age “their value is actually increasing in many ways and no one has noticed it. For many years, we all got along with it. Now what everyone is seeing is that a very significant portion of the audience is leaving the group.”

It always makes me laugh when I see ads for fashion from brands such as Hugo Boss, where the models are all skinny, androgenous, late teens or early 20′s children, yet the market that can clearly afford to pay $300 for a t-shirt are the 50+ age demographic. Sure there is an element of “inspiration” there, but when does inspiration just become downright insulting?

Do you feel neglected or insulted by advertisers & marketers?

Let us know your thoughts…..