The grass is not necessary greener - Retiring overseas

To be continued..........



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The Straits Times
25 Aug 2008

Two-thirds of S'poreans think of retiring abroad: Poll

By Theresa Tan

ALMOST two-thirds of Singaporeans have considered retiring abroad, according to a new study.

They are attracted to a slower pace of life and a lower cost of living, said the survey, which gauged how Singaporeans felt about getting older.

Dr Mary Ann Tsao, president of the Tsao Foundation, which commissioned the study, said: 'What struck me was that so many young people thought of growing old abroad. Singapore has so much to offer and it's a desirable place to live.'

The foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to helping the elderly, released the results of the online survey yesterday. It queried 300 Singaporeans aged 21 to 55.

The desire to retire abroad was highest among Singaporeans aged 21 to 34, three-quarters of whom have entertained the idea. In the 45 to 55 age group, only one in two thought about spending their golden years overseas.

But Mr Guy Hearn from research agency TNS, which did the study, said it is hard to gauge the true intentions of respondents. 'We don't know how serious those thoughts are,' he said.

Australia is a popular destination for Singaporean retirees, said agencies providing migration services. Cities like Perth, Melbourne and, increasingly, Adelaide boast large numbers of retired Singaporeans, they say.

Agencies that handle migrations Down Under say Singaporeans are attracted to the relaxed pace of life, the gentle climate and the fact that big-ticket items like houses and cars are much cheaper.

'One house in Singapore can buy you two bungalows in Perth,' said Mr Phillip Sim, one of the bosses of Ntrust Australian Immigration Specialists.

He estimates that there are tens of thousands of Singaporeans living in Perth. 'There are entire areas...that are filled with Singaporeans. People there have time to chat, cook curry fish head and invite their friends over. How many people in Singapore have time to invite people over to their homes?'

Besides Australia, Malaysia also houses a sizeable number of Singaporean retirees.



Meanwhile, the study released yesterday also found that:

# 60 per cent of respondents say they are prepared for retirement.

# 57 per cent say they are saving 'a bit' for retirement, but do not know if it is enough.

# 50 per cent feel uncomfortable with the support Singapore provides for seniors. Their worries include things like housing and social activities.

# 92 per cent of respondents said they do not expect to live with their children in their old age.

Dr Tsao said the last figure was a shock. 'This is surprising considering we are an Asian society where children have lived with their old parents for thousands of years.' She said many seniors have told her they fear becoming a burden to their children and do not expect support from them in their later years.

Sociologist Paulin Straughan is not surprised, saying values of the younger generation are very different from those of their parents. 'Children are not so much seen as social safety nets now,' she added.

The findings have serious implications for society, said Dr Tsao. For example, the state has to examine if there are sufficient services for elderly people who live alone.

'I think for many people, the cost of paying for health care in their old age is a big concern,' said Dr Tsao. The 53-year-old was born in Hong Kong, trained as a doctor in the United States and is now a Singapore permanent resident.

'I think people considering retiring abroad is a very real issue. I'm not leaving Singapore, but I have considered moving to the US to tap the social security system there, which will pay for the bulk of my medical expenses.'

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New Paper
31 Aug 2008

Retiring abroad ain't bed of roses

By Philip

THEY are day-dreaming, those young Singaporeans who said in a recent survey that they wanted to retire abroad. A make-believe Utopian world is always more pleasant than the real one.

Harmless reverie, I suppose. A form of escapism when all roads here seem to lead to ERP gantries. But we need to also get real. It ain't all hunky-dory in the US. G'days come with bad ones too in Australia. And there's no milk and honey aplenty in Canada, Malaysia or China.

Who needs this reality check? The poll result showed that a desire to live abroad was the highest among those aged between 21 and 34.

They probably had in their young minds attractive lures such as cooler climate, cheaper housing, lower cost of living, wide open spaces and so on.

Pardon me, while I burst a few bubbles.

First, housing abroad is not as cheap as we once thought, except perhaps for sub-prime property. Nor is the cost of living. And by the time these youngsters retire, costs would have soared even higher.

A change of weather? Yes, spring, summer and autumn are nice seasons, although in many countries early spring and late autumn are as chilly as winter. Winters can be so severe that old joints ache, parched lips crack and aged minds go into depression.

The last is the result of a phenomenon known as Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). This is believed to be caused by the deprivation of sunlight during the short winter days.

I was a sufferer when I lived in Vancouver for 10 years. Some are afflicted year after year and may need exposure to artificial sunlight. Some feel suicidal.

When one has reached retirement age, making new friends is not going to be easy. Set in their ways, they cannot discard their idiosyncrasies accumulated over so many years on earth.

Idiosyncrasies and new friendships don't mix. Don't believe that everyone ages gracefully. Many are cantankerous, irascible, suspicious and anti-social.

At a time when you most need the sight of the familiar faces of family and friends, you'll find yourself among virtual strangers - living in a strange land and feeling like a second-class citizen.

I know of friends who migrated to the West years ago after renouncing their Singapore citizenship, only to regret this after a few years.

Immigration: Many countries in the west and in Australia today prefer young, qualified immigrants, not oldies with money.

So the picture is not as rosy as the young imagine. Let's hope they wise up.

- The writer is a seasoned journalist with decades of experience in various newsrooms. His enduring columns have been compiled in a new book, Fridays with Philip, and it is available at Borders, Kinokuniya, MPH, Times the Bookshop and Harris.

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The Sunday Times
31 Aug 2008

THE EX-PAT FILES

Message from the dark side

By Linda Collins

Sometimes, you can tire of Singapore.

An expat starts to view his old life back home through rose-tinted glasses. He hankers for the familiarity of kith and kin. Or some Singaporeans might think the grass is greener.

Yet, leaving can be a mistake. I ought to know - I am one of those who succumbed to this feeling.

It was post 9/11, a time when Westerners felt vulnerable and unsettled. I lasted only eight months back home in New Zealand. Luckily, I was able to return to Singapore.

The weeks before my ill-fated departure were focused, not on what my new life would be like, but on buying things for it. The spending frenzy included: linen sheets (from Chinatown), value-for- money furniture from Ikea (the Swedish firm isn't there yet), and a claypot from a mini-mart.

But for my Filipino maid, homeward-bound preparations were somewhat different. One day, I found her carving a hole in a pair of wedge-heeled shoes. She comes from the strife-torn southern island of Mindanao, and explained that it is common for mini-vans to be held up by gun-toting bandits. She was planning to hide jewellery and cash in her shoes.

I thanked my lucky stars that it was unlikely anyone would shove a Kalashnikov in my face and demand money back home.

However, while that did not happen, returning to my home city of Auckland was a shock.

Within days of moving into rented landed property in an upmarket area, I received a phone call from a cop asking if I was Linda Collins. 'Yes,' I replied, puzzled. He said thieves were going on a spending spree with a credit card in my name. Copious purchases of jewellery and watches had triggered a credit alert at the bank. Turned out that my bank had posted me new cards - which had been intercepted either by a 'bent' postal worker, or by someone keeping a watch on my mailbox.

It was creepy to think of a crook staking out my home.

But that was nothing. It was the nights I came to dread. The real estate in the area may have been worth multi-millions, but the city fathers stinted on basic services like street lighting. At night, parts of the road were pitch black.

Outsiders would come over under cover of darkness, prowling around for houses and cars to break into.

As I lay in bed late at night, I could hear the guffaws and calls of teenage guys - no doubt high on drugs - as they made their way down the street, setting off car alarms. Their scampering footsteps resounded on the nearby public footpath and even past my window - they seemed to regard my backyard, in fact all yards, as handy shortcuts.

It was futile to call the police, who were usually too busy with boozy brawls and knife attacks. Problems involving just property came further down the list of their priorities. Still, I'd sometimes hear the whump-whump of a police helicopter - copper chopper, as locals called it - on night patrol, and be dazzled by its spotlight shining on our houses.

What I really came to dread, what had me awake at night with a lump of terror in my throat, was hoodlums banging on the doors and windows of the house. I would pray that the locks held.

Singapore is a haven of safety in comparison. We moved back, even managing to rent the same unit as previously. And we tracked down our same maid, who agreed to return to us.

The decision nearly killed her, though.

She had to pick up her flight ticket at Davao International Airport a week before travel. Fifteen minutes after getting her ticket, she was leaving in a mini-van when a bomb blast ripped through the airport. At least 15 people were killed.

We heard news of the blast in Singapore and were in agony before her relatives were able to tell us she was unharmed.

Six years later, we are still in the same part of Singapore, with the same maid.

In Mindanao, government soldiers battle the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. Artillery rounds are crashing into the hills directly above our maid's town as I write this. Thousands of people have been displaced.

In New Zealand, our worry now is not crime, but the effects of Mother Nature on a rural holiday cottage we own. Severe winter storms this year caused coastal erosion, and part of a main access route to it has fallen into the sea.

In Singapore, my thoughts are on the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival. The neighbourhood holds a lantern-making contest for kids. Have I kept aside enough egg cartons for my daughter?

Ah, the luxury of small concerns such as this.

The writer is a copy editor with The Straits Times and has been living in Singapore for 15 years.

The demented Iron Lady

This below article made me a little sad. Age and dementia spares no one, not even the brightest of mind, not even the Iron lady, Margaret Thatcher.

Well, I can understand and empathise with her daughter, Carol Thatcher.

My grandma had dementia in her later years. Most of the times, she could not recognise people, even her closest immediate family.

My aunt who visited grandma during one festive holiday told my mother that grandma was delirious. And that she was vulgar! Yes, grandma whom I never saw speaking any vulgarities or an unkind word to anyone was spouting vulgarities like Linda Blair on the Exorcist. It was that terrifying.

She was wheel chair bound by then and couldn't walk about. And she was just sitting there swearing and cursing like no body business.

She was living with my dad then. He had divorced my mother and moved back to his mom's place. He employed a maid to help take care of grandma.

I did not see her during the time she got demented till the day she died. I was undergoing some personal crisis that time and was in no stage to see anyone. I couldn't take that responsibility with her when my whole life was in a mess then.

Sometimes, I wondered how my dad did it. I suppose he was the not the most meticulous of all people. So I suppose that there were some negligence involved. He had to work everyday and I dun think he and the maid provided the quality of care that she really required.

During her last week of her life, she was warded to the hospital cos she had a bleeding to her leg which just couldn't stop. And she was covered with bed sores. She wasn't lucid by then. Not for some time by then.

My mother and I saw her on the last few days of her life. She was lying in hospital, shrivelled and shrunken. She was really only half the woman that she was. She was this robust, tall, stocky woman and the patient lying on the bed was almost unrecognisable. She just looked like this very skinny old man, with bones sticking out of her body. Not the tall, proud lady she was once.

It did break my heart then to see her like that. And I could see my father like that, not too long in the future. And I also could see my self, in that condition, many years later, when I was old.

I did not know if she could recognise me or my mother when we visited her in hospital. She was breathing heavily into a respirator, her eyes darting left and right.

She passed away a few days later.

At the funeral, I asked myself, if I would end up like that? With 4 children and a number of grand children, and yet in her senior years, her life was not exactly in the best of condition.

And me with no children, no close immediate family, would my condition be worse off in my latter years?

Frankly, I do not think I want to grow that old with dementia, with no one to take care of me. Life by then would be a living hell.

I shuddered when I thought of that.

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The Straits Times
25 Aug 2008

Iron Lady struggles to remember

Ex-British PM even forgets husband has died, says daughter in new book

LONDON: The daughter of British former prime minister Margaret Thatcher tells how her mother's dementia has left her struggling to remember the simplest facts in book extracts published yesterday.

Ms Carol Thatcher wrote that, on her worst days, her mother struggles to finish sentences but shows occasional glimpses of her old self, particularly when talking about her time in Downing Street. 'I had always thought of her as ageless, timeless and 100 per cent cast-iron damage-proof,' Ms Thatcher wrote in her memoir, A Swim-On Part In The Goldfish Bowl, which was serialised in the Mail on Sunday newspaper.

Mrs Thatcher, nicknamed the Iron Lady, was Britain's first and so far only female premier and was in office as head of a Conservative government between 1979 and 1990.

The book is believed to be the first time a family member has spoken publicly of her condition.

Ms Thatcher says she first noticed her mother's memory was failing over lunch in 2000 - a decade after she had left power. Mrs Thatcher, then 75, got confused between Bosnia and the Falklands during a conversation about the war in the former Yugoslavia, she wrote.

She wrote she 'almost fell off her chair' seeing her mother struggle with her words and her memory. 'I couldn't believe it,' she wrote. Ms Thatcher goes on to describe how tell-tale signs of dementia then began to emerge.

'Whereas previously you would never have had to say anything to her twice, because she'd already filed it away in her formidable memory bank, Mum started asking the same questions over and over again, unaware she was doing so.

'It might be something innocuous - such as 'What time is my car coming?' or 'When am I going to the hairdresser?' - but the fact she needed to repeat them opened a new and frightening chapter in our lives.'

Now aged 83, Mrs Thatcher gave up speaking in public in 2002 on the advice of her doctors after a series of small strokes.

Ms Thatcher described how she had to learn to be patient and that her mother 'had an illness and that it wasn't personal'. 'That's the worst thing about dementia: It gets you every time,' she wrote.

'Sufferers look and act the same but beneath the familiar exterior, something quite different is going on. They're in another world and you cannot enter.

'Much of my mother's daily life was affected. Timing became a particular concern. If I said, 'Oh, do relax, Mum. The car won't be here for 10 minutes,' she'd jump up, hook her handbag over her arm and say, 'Ten minutes? I'll go down now' as if I'd said 30 seconds.'

Ms Thatcher also wrote of how her mother keeps forgetting that she lost her husband Denis to pancreatic cancer in 2003. 'I had to keep giving her the bad news over and over again,' she wrote.

'Every time it finally sank in that she had lost her husband of more than 50 years, she'd look at me sadly and say 'Oh' as I struggled to compose myself.

' 'Were we all there?' she'd ask softly.'

Ms Thatcher also recalled how when a friend asked her mother about Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, 'she snapped back into Iron Lady mode and was utterly engaging'.

Mrs Thatcher briefly returned to the limelight in September last year when she visited Downing Street as a guest of Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He praised her as a 'conviction politician'.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE

Happy Aging

Is there really happy aging? Not all senior citizens are happy.

Are our moods and emotions based on biological genes?

Maybe. I was never a happy child and on reaching adulthood, I was not a happy adult either. For many years, I was a depressed person. I had frequent thoughts of dying. Of death. Death was like a constant companion.

I can't help it. It's like my brain was telling me to be depressed.

Some research has shown that depression is caused by some chemical imbalance in the brain.

How true is that? But depression could be due to a variety of factors. There are biological factors (including a degree of genetic vulnerability and biochemical factors), psychological factors (such as your own personal coping style and temperament), and social factors (your family atmosphere and presence of a support network).

Presently, I am in a neutral state of relative peace. And I definitely hope my genetics make-up can enable me so that I can age happily.

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New Paper
24 Aug 2008

Study on what makes 'happy' aging

HE wants to study how well people age and find out what makes some of them more resilient and 'happier', with fewer mental problems such as depression.

To do that, he will now look at children, and adults in their 50s, to find out who are the ones at risk of not coping well with life.

Professor Kua Ee Heok, a senior consultant from the Department of Psychological Medicine at the National University Hospital and National University of Singapore (NUS), will be embarking on his third and most ambitious study of aging at the end of the year.

Said Prof Kua: 'Who are the children who will be at risk during PSLE, who can't cope? Who are the boys who can't cope with national service? What are the factors that count towards building up resilience?

'To find out in my study, we will include biological markers. That means testing for genetic markers.'

That is why this study, which he estimates will take about five years, will be the most comprehensive and expensive one so far. And he is off to a good start.

A happy, elderly person who read his book, Dignity and Grace of Ageing, was so impressed that he donated $250,000 to the NUS Department of Psychological Medicine, for research.

Prof Kua said he needs about $3 million and so far he has about $500,000.

Said the donor, who wished to remain anonymous: 'I was impressed and inspired by the war stories of the elderly in Singapore (in Prof Kua's book) and hope the donation will contribute to the NUS research on 'ageing well'.'

Prof Kua's earlier two studies related to ageing in Singapore. The first, involving samsui women, was on 1,000 people living in the Chinatown area in 1987-1990, mostly in one-room flats. The second was on 1,500 people living in Toa Payoh in 2000-2003.

The elderly in Toa Payoh lived mostly in three-room HDB flats, and 40 per cent said physical comforts such as a car made them happy.

Prof Kua said, comparing the two groups: 'Those who were more well-off tended to be more isolated than those who were not so well-off.' In his study of the Toa Payoh group, he found a higher incidence of dementia and depression.

Things have been improving for the elderly,due in part to more awareness of their needs. Previously, we did not have day centres for the elderly, fewer support groups. No Sage telephone helpline. Now, they have all that and and we are improving elderly health service in primary care,' said Prof Kua.