Two pensioners have decided to raffle off their forever home in Wexford…
Both David and Jane Joynes are raffling their ‘forever’ home in Wexford through a reputable raffle company, Raffall.com.
Not just that, but Worldwide Cancer Research will also benefit from the raffle.
The pair will give a maximum of 10% of the total revenue; all going to plan, that’ll be about £56,000 to the charity.
On Wednesday Jan 5th, we caught up with Jane, who provided us with more information:
“We still have a lot more tickets to sell. We are currently placing flyers up across New Ross and Enniscorthy. If we haven’t sold enough tickets to give away the house by then, then Raffall.com will give 75% of the revenue raised to the winner. Raffall.com will retain the other 25%. So, either way somebody will win a significant amount, but in that event, we would gain nothing but retain the house,” Jane said to Wexford Weekly.
Their story, submitted to Wexford Weekly by the pair, can be read below:
After working all our adult lives in the UK, I now live with my wife, Jane, three cats and two dogs, in our ‘forever’ home in County Wexford, about 13km from New Ross. We retired here five years ago, moving over from Cornwall, and, after making various improvements to our 4/5 bedroom detached house standing on land measuring 0.75 acres or 0.31 hectares, we seemed destined to happily live out the rest of our lives in this lovely rural location.
However, during our lives, we have lost several family members and close friends to cancer. Each time we lost another, we grieved and hoped for a cure before the next one left us, and then three years ago yet another close family member, my brother, succumbed to this insidious disease and we lost him just a few months ago. As he lived in France, we were unable to visit him and could only communicate by phone. When he died, we were unable to attend the funeral, due to Covid 19 restrictions, to comfort his family and say goodbye to him.
We virtually attended by Zoom and while we appreciated this resource, it felt like a shadow of what it should have been. It may seem a strange thing to say but this seemed like the final straw. I grieved when my parents died but when my brother passed on, I could not accept it as I expected him to be around for the whole of my life. He was only 71, two years older than me. This time we grieved, but also got angry. We were not angry at any person, at Covid 19 or any government. We were angry at cancer for taking away another of our loved ones. We felt that we had to do something.
As pensioners, we were unable to give a significant amount of money to cancer research, so, after extensive and heart-rending discussion we decided to raffle our most expensive possession, our house, using the well-known raffle site, Raffall. We needed to make more money than we could afford to donate for cancer research and found out that Raffall would guarantee that, for our house lottery, no matter how many tickets we sold, the Worldwide Cancer Research charity would gain 10% of the total revenue.
And then tragedy struck again.
Just as we were about to set the raffle off, we were informed that Jane’s brother had committed suicide. He left no explanation and we had no idea why he would do this. In those circumstances, it was impossible to seek closure. And so we grieved again.
As we could only give a maximum 10% of the revenue of our raffle to charity, we left that as it was but we now needed to also give a significant donation to a Mental Health charity to try to prevent other families going through what we had. Our only way to do this was to make certain that we try to sell enough tickets to allow us make a further donation from our own revenue.
However, we have kept the price of tickets down to £12.50, approximately €14.00 (it’s a UK based company), and the number of tickets down to only 50,000 to give the greatest chance for the house and land to be won by one lucky person.
In addition to that, as a further incentive, if we, hopefully, succeed in raffling off our house, we will also give the winner £5,000 to use as they will, we will pay legal costs and stamp duty and also throw in our beloved Husqvarna sit-on mower. I would point out that we have our own private well water and sewerage, and that the only payments, other than electricity and heating oil used, are just one payment a year of approximately €280 for local property tax. And all this for £12.50 a ticket for a reasonably large detached house in rural Wexford.
Our targets now are not only to make significant donations to charity, but to try to change someone’s life for the better. Should they buy tickets for the cost of a few cups of coffee, and if they then win the house, they then have the choice to live in it, to holiday in it, to rent it out, or to sell it.
The link to the raffle can be found on Raffall at www.raffall.com/winawexforddetachedhome
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