Wealth waiver

There are job opportunities for retirees looking for work to augment their pensions.

Judy Corker, 79, from Manchester, the United Kingdom, and fellow Briton Roland Parker, 73, grabbed the chance upon reading a social media advertisement calling for senior models.

After filling in the online application form, Corker and Parker were each asked to pay a £200 attendance fee and another £200 for the pictorial in the city, BBC reports. Both sent their payments through PayPal.

When the two model applicants separately went to the Manchester studio, the staff there were unaware of a scheduled pictorial for them. The owner told them that people were turning up at his studio “expecting a shoot with a cruise line but it’s a scam on a big scale,” according to BBC.

Meanwhile, other senior citizens already have enough wealth that they don’t need to work anymore. But for Yvon Chouinard, the 86-year-old founder of the outdoor apparel company Patagonia, he did not like having so much money that he was giving it away.

Chouinard is described in the book, “Dirtbag Billionaire: How Yvon Chouinard Built Patagonia, Made a Fortune, and Gave It All Away” by David Gelles, as spending “years sleeping in his car or on dirt in the wilderness, surviving on just $1 a day and eating from dented cans of cat food,” Fortune reports.

When Chouinard was included in the Forbes 2017 billionaire list, it angered him off for widening the gap between the rich and poor, according to Fortune.

In 2022, Chouinard decided to transfer his ownership in the $3-billion Patagonia to a trust and a nonprofit organization, to be rid of his billionaire status.

“We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet,” he told The New York Times at the time.

So far, he is no longer a billionaire, but the company’s $100 million a year in profits still makes Chouinard very rich.