CAROLE RAILTON: I’m blowing my life savings to live my last decade in luxury

For the past eight months I’ve been renting an apartment for £4,000 a month, eating out at fancy restaurants a few times a week and spending £400 on designer shoes without a second thought.

I would never have classified myself as a big spender before, but after finding out I have ten years to live, I plan to live life to the fullest – without worrying about the price tag .

My life changed after coming down with Covid in 2020. I was 69 and in the best shape of my life: I belonged to a gym and had a personal trainer. I was the kind of woman who ran past people up the escalator.

But after I got the virus, I was hospitalized and then confined to bed for five months. When I finally started to leave the house, I continued to faint despite having no history of it, and ended up in the emergency room three times.

One nurse joked that I deserved a VIP pass for being there so often, but the reason was much less funny. I had heart failure and required cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), which involves inserting electrodes into the heart, coordinated by a pacemaker.

After discovering she has ten years to live, Carole Railton plans to live life to the fullest without worrying about the price tag.

Half a million people in Britain have pacemakers, about a third of them, like me, for the most severe form of heart failure. In our case, the machine beats our heart and is the only thing that keeps us alive.

Life expectancy for people with this highly invasive device makes for dismal numbers – I’m told I have about ten years left.

Before the operation, I had decided to sell the three-storey townhouse in North London where I had lived for 32 years because I could no longer climb the stairs.

I decided to rent. With ten years to go, what would be the point of tying up all the money I had in a purchase?

The agent showed me a luxury rental property in Wapping, East London, and I fell in love. It was on the Thames, all glass, with fantastic views of the Shard and Tower Bridge. I could see boats going by, cars and planes.

Yes, it would be miles more than I’d ever spent on property – at £4,000 a month I’d be wasting almost £50,000 a year on rent – ​​but it was well worth it.

My house sold for £1 million, and I started calculating how much I would have to enjoy each year for the rest of my life. I have no family to give my money to, so I had ten years to blow my budget.

An accountant advised me: ‘I want you to spend £10,000 on yourself before you do anything else so that you get a different outlook on life.’

Carole says she spends money on things that make her feel good, and that, she admits, is mainly food

Changing my spending habits has been liberating. It’s not that I haven’t lived a boring life. On the contrary, I have visited 100 countries and worked in 47 countries, including in recruitment for companies such as IBM and Xerox.

But prioritizing my own desires without worrying about the future or how much savings I had left was completely new.

Since I don’t own a house anymore, if I have a problem like a leak, I just call the landlord to fix it. It’s one of the greatest luxuries of my new lifestyle. Just like the taxis I take everywhere: I gave up my driver’s license and almost always take taxis instead of public transport.

I got rid of all my furniture because I don’t want anyone to have to go through decades of my belongings. I toyed with getting a chef, but then realized I was out of cooking equipment and would rather eat out.

The rest of my £10,000 spend went on luxuries I never dreamed of. I ditched my tired John Lewis sheets for a Ralph Lauren set, which cost around £400, spent hundreds on exotic ferns for my balcony and had my make-up done at Nars, where I now buy all my beauty products.

And I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on fancy nightwear (the glass walls mean I can’t walk around without clothes anymore) and custom jewelry that won’t interfere with my pacemaker (I can’t wear metal).

I spend money on things that make me feel good. That’s mainly food. I go out for a delicious meal every few days; my favorite is a seafood restaurant overlooking the Thames.

I’m on track to blowing the money two years faster than I planned, but I’m not worried. If necessary, I will rent a little less elsewhere.

Before I became unwell, I was going to teach at a university in Bangkok and I would still love to make that happen. When I leave for Thailand, I’ll skip the business and go straight to first class.

Focusing on myself, along with the lack of stress I now feel about money, also makes me feel better health-wise. A month ago I couldn’t walk for five minutes. Now I can and I’m hopeful that this is a sign of things to come. I have lived a full life, but I believe the next few years will be my best yet.

• As told to Charlotte Lytton