What Do Retirement Communities Offer?
If you’re nearing retirement, or even if you’ve crossed the “finish line” and have started this wonderful period of your life, you may be reconsidering where you’re going to live and whether you should make a change at this point in your life. Do you stay in the home you’ve probably been in for decades, or do you plan for a new residence in a completely different area? What areas of the country are the best to retire to? What do retirement communities offer that other places don’t? Should we worry about being too far from friends and family? Those are great questions and taking the effort and doing the research to get to those answers is well worth the time.
As to finding the best area in the country to retire to, I would suggest that you first determine what’s most important to you. You can find many surveys and articles about places that offer the lowest cost of living, the best weather and even the safest environment but the key to your happiness is understanding what you want out of retirement. You need to develop your own personal retirement lifestyle. In fact, that’s most of this website is designed to do: to offer suggestions on how to make the most of this wonderful time of life. Don’t retire to a place just because it’s a bit cheaper to live because you might not find the things that make you happy. Before deciding on a 55+ living complex because some of your friends have moved there, ask yourself what do retirement communities offer that would make you choose one over the other? There is no doubt that there are advantages. A friend of ours is extremely happy with the community she moved into two years ago. Her days are filled with book clubs, card games and dinner parties. That would be the last thing I would be looking for and I would probably resent paying my monthly Homeowner’s Association (HOA) fee each month for amenities that I don’t use. We moved in a community with a lake, and it isn’t open to just retirees. We like seeing children in the community pool and, although my wife has also joined a couple of gatherings for cards and books, that isn’t the primary reason we moved here. My wife indulged me in my need to be in the mountains, and we have loved our time in the Hudson Valley (the lake was a bonus). The point is to be sure about what’s going to make YOU happy. We escape the cold each winter, so the weather became less of a factor for us.
What do retirement communities offer that other places don't? That's the key to finding out if a retirement community makes sense for you.
What about friends and family? We have found out that there’s no point in making that the top priority because they move! Many of our friends have relocated and our children have moved multiple times. We built a house big enough for everyone to visit us and we plan our vacations to make sure our visits will have quality time that fits into everyone’s schedule. Zoom calls have been great for us and retirement has given us the freedom to visit our granddaughter as often as we can. As we got ready for retirement, we used our vacations to explore the possibilities and came to a few conclusions. We liked Florida and Arizona in the winter but being full-time residents in either of those places was out of the question. Neither of us can take the heat. It is physically draining. We tolerate the cold much better and, if it isn’t too windy, a clear, dry day of twenty degrees can actually be pleasant and invigorating. When we looked at different places to live, and asked the question of what do retirement communities offer in comparison to what a separate residence couldn’t, most of the time it had to do with golf and being able to play for free or at least have your rounds covered by your HOA fees. In the end, that wasn’t that important to us, but it may be very important for you.
As you plan your retirement years, please take your time and do your research carefully. There are many different things to consider, and I would suggest taking a look at as many options as you can. Compare communities and see what you get for the money. Look at various options by vacationing in those places. Friends of ours actually rented for a year before they bought their home on a fairway. You’ll find out that there are a lot of different answers when you ask the question: what do retirement communities offer? We looked at scores of possibilities and were very attracted to college towns, quiet seaports and building a log cabin in the woods. When we came across our lakefront property, we knew we had found our home. I wish nothing but the best as you plan out your retirement years. Create the retirement lifestyle you’ve always dreamed about. It will be worth all the research and saving and when you finally move in to your new residence, you’ll know it’s time to Enjoy Retired Life!
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