We have moved house. Just sort of happened, and we cannot believe how quickly it all came about.

We were thinking of someday moving into a retirement village.

A little explanation of how this works in New Zealand is in order. Here, you normally never own the unit you move into, but pay money to a large firm that specializes in these for a "right to occupy".

The money you pay is put into a trust account, and is not accessible by that firm.
When you die, the money is taken out, and most will go to your heirs, but the company takes it cut at that time.

Usually, the company takes about 20 percent. So what does the twenty percent go towards? Part of it is the company's profit, and part of it goes towards building new villages. So suppose if your unit price was $500,000, then the company's cut would be $100,000.

So if you managed to live for say five more years, the price to you is around $20,000 per year. What you get for this is the following:

The outside maintenance of grounds and building.
A lounge.
A library.
A media room, showing movies several times a week.
A cafe with subsidized food and drink.
A bar, where every Thursday are free drinks.
A gym.
A swimming pool.
A men's shed.
A hairdressing salon.
A restaurant, with subsidized food.
Round the clock security, with monitored alarms.
A bowling green.
A craft room.

The popularity of all this is in the fact that by the time you spend all your dough on this, you are dead anyway, so who cares! The only losers are your heirs.

There is a fee, payable weekly, in our case $129, which covers water, council rates, and insurance of the building, plus waste management. In our case this fee is fixed for the whole of your stay.

One of the things I thought I would absolutely hate doing is living in an apartment. But so far, it seems to be working out fine. The area where we came to has a beach a kilometer away, which is nice to go for swims in the summer time.

We have visited other retirement villages and the outlook is always of another unit, or a roadway, so the big attraction of this one is the view of bush out the window.