{"id":13312,"date":"2025-07-22T11:58:10","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T11:58:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/13312\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T11:58:10","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T11:58:10","slug":"mum-living-in-squalor-after-daughter-sells-family-home-for-1m-acreage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/13312\/","title":{"rendered":"Mum living in squalor after daughter sells family home for $1m acreage"},"content":{"rendered":"

All Nora wants is her family home back. It holds decades of memories with her late husband Raymond.<\/p>\n

“Mum’s worked her whole life to be able to retire and be comfortable now and that’s all my dad wanted, and he was worried about when he was gone, that she was going to be OK,” Nora’s daughter Sandra told A Current Affair.<\/p>\n

After Raymond’s death, Nora’s other daughter, Karen, sold the house and shut Nora inside a shoebox house.<\/p>\n

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All Nora wants is her family home back. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

“It’s not a good look,” A Current Affair told Karen.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, I admit that, but there’s reasons for everything and I know I haven’t done wrong,” Karen responded.<\/p>\n

Nora is in her 80s, widowed and now has very little to her name.<\/p>\n

“I think [Karen] just wanted me to disappear,” Nora said.<\/p>\n

According to documents, Nora signed over authority to act on her behalf, but claims she didn’t know what she was signing.<\/p>\n

Karen sold Nora’s beloved home an hour south of Brisbane for $1.1 million six months after her husband’s death.<\/p>\n

Sandra says it’s heartbreaking seeing her mother without her beloved home.\ufeff<\/p>\n

A Current Affair contacted Karen for answers and she said it was what Nora had wanted. (A Current Affair)Karen bought an acreage in her name for about $1 million and moved Nora into the small house on the property. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

“She never wanted to leave here. She always said that she was not going to leave this house unless it was in a box,” Sandra said.<\/p>\n

“[Karen] was already going through everything in the house before [Raymond] passed away.”<\/p>\n

“My older daughter done all that. I had nothing to do with it and then I found out six weeks later she’d bought herself a house with the money,” Nora added.<\/p>\n

Karen bought an acreage in her name for about $1 million and moved Nora into the small house on the property.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, I said to her, what’d you buy this place for? [And Karen said] because I wanted the land,” Nora claimed.<\/p>\n

A Current Affair contacted Karen for answers and she said it was what Nora had wanted.<\/p>\n

Karen sold Nora’s beloved home an hour south of Brisbane for $1.1 million six months after her husband’s death. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

“Mum wanted to be out of that property,” Karen said.<\/p>\n

“You’re telling us Nora was well aware that you were selling her house?” A Current Affair asked.<\/p>\n

“Absolutely, it was her idea,” Karen responded. “Ever since her fall, she’s done a total backflip.”<\/p>\n

When Nora’s daughter Sandra and granddaughter Charly came to visit, they couldn’t believe her living conditions.<\/p>\n

“She basically had no furniture and there was nothing in the kitchen for her to cook or eat with, Sandra said.<\/p>\n

“The doors, windows were tarped up, then screwed shut so they couldn’t open them. She didn’t even have a wardrobe in a room to hang her clothes in \u2026 She just had, like, a child’s bed basically, a single bed.”<\/p>\n

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After Raymond’s death, Nora’s other daughter, Karen, sold the house and shut Nora inside a shoebox house. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

Karen told A Current Affair the windows were tarped because they were painting at the time.\ufeff<\/p>\n

Nora has a son with a disability. He’s living in a structure on the property that was once used as dog kennels.<\/p>\n

“Yeah, that was a dog grooming room. John wanted his own space when we moved out here so that was his idea, he wanted to be over there,” Karen said.<\/p>\n

Sandra and Charly have taken Nora in to live with them.<\/p>\n

“What sort of a state was your nanna in when you saw her?” A Current Affair asked Charly.<\/p>\n

“She was just continuously crying. She still doesn’t sleep,” Charly said.<\/p>\n

“I’ve seen her cry probably twice in my life before now and she cries every day now,” Sandra added.<\/p>\n

They’ve managed to get access to Nora’s bank statements and discovered thousands of dollars has been transferred to Karen and her children.<\/p>\n

“I had to close all my accounts to stop her taking it,” Nora said.<\/p>\n

Nora is in her 80s, widowed and now has very little to her name. (A Current Affair)<\/p>\n

“Yes, yes, there is truth in that, we did transfer funds from Mum’s account but it was all with her permission,” Karen said.<\/p>\n

“There was $5000 loaned to a son and that’s actually been paid back. All the remaining was moving costs and work on the new house here.”<\/p>\n

Nora has engaged a lawyer and now has a caveat over Karen’s acreage.<\/p>\n

“Nora’s in a situation where she doesn’t have that safety and security and she doesn’t have the financial resources available to her to get an alternative property,” Contested Will and Estate Lawyers’ Rebecca O’Toole told A Current Affair.<\/p>\n

“I’m hopeful Karen will do the right thing and return the property to Nora and if that doesn’t happen, we will take whatever steps we need to, to put Nora back in the position she was before this happened.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"All Nora wants is her family home back. It holds decades of memories with her late husband Raymond.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13313,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[43,44,41,39,42,40],"class_list":["post-13312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13312\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13313"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}