Publications
Partners
- Many dream of buying an island or lake house as a retirement plan with their spouses or maybe siblings, but never with their best friends.
- However, the idea to retire with your girlfriends sounds amazing and quite ideal until you consider that some of your girlfriends might get married and change their minds and instead want to retire with their spouses.
- That isn't too much of a concern for seven Chinese girlfriends who took what started as a joke and turned it into a reality by buying a mansion in the Chinese suburb of Guangzhou two years ago.
These girlfriends have known each other for over two decades. “We’ve known each other for over 20 years. We were colleagues, and sometimes we are even closer than siblings,” one says in a YouTube video posted by Media start-up Yitiao.
The plan began as a joke in 2008; however, when one of them found a 700 square meter abandoned redbrick house, that joke became a plan in motion in 2019.
READ MORE | ‘My best friend of 30 years stole R75 000 from my family, and then she ghosted us'
READ MORE | Fewer hook-ups, more BFF: dating apps change tack to include features for meeting friends
“We said that we would get together when we were 60 and find a place to retire,” one friend says in the video.
The girlfriends put together money to purchase the abandoned home for 4 million yuan (over R9 million). After that, they began working on the house as it needed a lot of work and turned it into their dream house that features separate bedrooms for each of them.
The house is located an hour away from the nearest town, and while in seclusion, the women have plans to keep themselves entertained with some of their favourite activities.
“We’ll probably cook together, barbecue in the fields, sing and collect food in the village,” the woman says.
“We joke that each of us should practise one skill, so we won’t be lonely and fight with each other ten years later. Some can cook beautiful food, some know traditional Chinese medicine, some play instruments, and some grow vegetables.”
The house is a three-and-a-half-story house, with the upper level being the separate bedrooms.
READ MORE | 10 ways you can make new friends before the year ends
The common areas where the women will be spending time together are the tea room, which is situated on the ground floor, a long dining table, a swimming pool outside and an airy tea pavilion connected with a bamboo walkway.
The house is surrounded by fields, and the interior is of furniture imported from India and Morocco and tatami mats.
The YouTube post from 2019 made it to Reddit two days ago, and with excitement, one user said, “My girlfriends and I have been talking about this for years.” Another added, “My Golden Girls retirement dream!”
Sources: New York Post, Bored Panda, Yitiao, Reddit
