Life Rights Model Means Lower Daily Cost Of Liv­Ing

MOST peo­ple plan their re­tire­ment ac­cord­ing to life ex­pectancy yet more than 50% will live longer than they ex­pect to.

The Just Re­tire­ment In­sights 2019 sur­vey re­veals 53% of re­spon­dents ad­mit­ted to not cal­cu­lat­ing how much money they would ac­tu­ally need for re­tire­ment, while 48% lacked con­fi­dence their money would last their life­span.

To solve this dilemma, Gus Van der Spek of Aview prop­erty devel­op­ers, the brains be­hind the newly launched Wytham Es­tate in Cape Town’s south­ern suburbs, says peo­ple should look to save more.

They could do this by de­lay­ing re­tire­ment for an ex­tra five or 10 years or de­lay­Ing draw­ing from their re­tire­ment funds by work­ing part time.

They could also con­sider a “life rights” re­tire­ment es­tate.

“Life rights es­tates are gain­ing in pop­u­lar­ity in South Africa and are ideal for peo­ple seek­ing se­cu­rity of ten­ure with­out all of the re­spon­si­bil­ity of full own­er­ship,” Van der Spek says.

Life Rights gives the buyer the se­cu­rity of liv­ing in the prop­erty the re­main­der of their life while the de­vel­oper re­mains the sole owner of the prop­erty.

Van Der Spek adds that up­front costs as­so­ci­ated with such es­tates are gen­er­ally lower than those in a sec­tional ti­tle scheme be­cause a life right is not sub­ject to any trans­fer duty or VAT.

Speaking about Wytham Es­tate – de­scribed as a world­class, up­mar­ket es­tate in the mid­dle of an es­tab­lished sub­urb – he says the life rights model here “cre­ates a nice clean trans­ac­tion to start your stay, af­ter which our clients en­joy the ben­e­fit of re­ceiv­ing top-class ser­vices which are ren­dered at scale, mean­ing the day-to-day costs of liv­ing in our de­vel­op­ment is rel­a­tively lower than in the out­side world”.