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Lisa and I both had several folks recently that were making some life changes, and some involved their living situations.

They were either by necessity having to make some dramatic living change or looking down the road towards their retirement and making changes related to their living environments. So, we want to talk about what all’s out there in the world of retirement living.

I always have news stories coming through my feed on seniors and retirements.

And all of a sudden what popped into my newsfeed was this beautiful, lush looking, tropical, artistic rendering of a retirement community. It had palm trees and swimming pools and kind of a cabana feel. And you know who was coming out with that retirement community? Jimmy Buffett, the ‘tropical minstrel’ himself.

Jimmy Buffett is in his 70s. He had his super-mega hit, Margaritaville. And, of course, Jimmy Buffett has his Margaritaville restaurants. He’s got casinos, restaurants, clothing, and all kinds of merchandising. He turned his one song into an industry.

Jimmy Buffett is rollin’ up into his 70s, and that means a lot of those “Parrotheads” are also rollin’ up.

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The Next Evolution of the Margaritaville Brand

The new frontier for the Margaritaville brand is now looking like it’s going to be retiree housing. Apparently the land has been purchased. The illustration that I saw was an artist rendering of what they intend for it to look like. They’re expecting to have that up and going within a couple years. Construction’s about to start.

And the article I read about this Jimmy Buffett retirement community is they’re wanting to keep that laidback vibe. Of course.

He is intending to compete with one of the most well-known retirement communities down there in Florida called The Villages. It’s pretty swanky. I’ve been there.

So, if any of you are thinking about relocating to Florida, then Jimmy Buffett's retirement community is on your list.

I saw the pool renderings and the cabana. Are they gonna have a margarita machine always on? I guess the interesting thing about this though, is that they have so many amenities--grocery stores, barbershops. Just everything. You have just this gigantic campus that has everything that you would ever need. And all you need to drive is a golf cart.

But, it brings up some interesting points.

There’s a lot to think about as you’re approaching retirement. Especially if you’re thinking about changing locations.

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As Attitudes Change, You Might Find That There’s No More Market for Them

All sorts of options are available in a lot of these communities. You can have anything from a townhome to a patio home that shares common walls. Everything to what I call standalone site-built homes. On the back of the golf course.

Swimming pools, therapy pools, shuffleboard courts, putt-putt, and radio. This was one of my favorites. The radio-controlled airstrip.

All those amenities are right there.

Yeah, there’s certainly something to be said for that. Now, obviously that’s not gonna be for everybody, and there’s certainly a lot of factors that you would want to consider.

Particularly with those sort of things, where you’re often making a very big move.

  • You’re moving many states away.
  • You’re often going to be very far away from family, which in many cases can be a fantastic thing.
  • But as needs increase and things like that, that lack of familial support around you can be a problem.
  • The other thing is that often when that person passes away, you end up with this asset in one of these communities.

As attitudes about these things change, you might find that now there’s no more market for them.

These communities, for the most part, are 55 and older communities. If the senior passes away, and all the family, they have lives elsewhere and they don’t even meet the age requirement yet.

 

So what does that asset do for them? Particularly if the market has changed, or the attitudes have changed and you can’t sell it.

Now you have an asset that you can’t use and can’t get rid of. And, you still get to pay all of the community fees to upkeep all those wonderful amenities.

That can certainly become a burden.

Destination Retirement Communities – Not for Everyone

The main topic of this article, however, is about some other choices that we want you to keep in mind.

A little closer to home. We’re talking about some different kinds of housing options or living arrangements. Things to consider.

They are not going to be for most people.

If you’ve got a little tickling of an idea, you should always go explore it. One thing about those destination retirement communities is that everybody shows up brand new.

What I learned from my dad’s experience was that you make friends pretty easily. Everybody’s new. You end up with a nice support group of friends. But, when an illness strikes or a health crisis comes along, you don’t have that family support. That’s really a deal-breaker. Also, you’re not there day-to-day to see those grandchildren or great-grandchildren grow and mature.

Destination retirement community living is not for everyone. There are some things to think about if you’re talking about looking for the right place to retire.

Lots of people have a good relationship with their grandkids, or their kids, and they wanna be a part of their grandkids’ lives. That said, almost universally, you’ve got to be very careful about following your kids.

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My Kids Live Down in Austin

If you think, “Oh well, my kids live down in Austin, that’s where they work. I’m thinking I’m gonna move to Austin so that I can be around those grandkids, and be a bigger part of their life.”

The theory behind that sounds pretty good.

The problem is, oftentimes you’re talking about moving into a major metropolitan area like an Austin, or a Houston, or something like that.

Where those high-powered jobs are. Your cost of living is going to go up quite a bit. Plus, you get a lot of the travel issues, even locally where you’re having to deal with large city traffic.

The biggest problem is mobility. One of the reasons that most advisors will tell you not to follow the children is because the working generations now are much more mobile than the generations that are retiring today. The baby boomers who are retiring worked one or two jobs throughout their working careers. They bought the house. They paid on that mortgage for 30 years and then lived in it for another 10 after that.

This is just not the case anymore. It’s likely that in any given circumstance, you follow your kids all the way down to Austin thinking that you’re gonna be there. You set up roots and then they’re getting transferred to Seattle.

I think the statistics are that a person coming out of college today or starting in the workforce can expect to change jobs something like 12 times. The likelihood that those are all in the same community are pretty slim. Even if your child gets another job in that same metropolitan area, they may end up moving because of the commute.

There’s all kinds of issues. If you are now retired and you have your fixed income sources and your savings, moving is an expense.

Selling a property and buying a property when you don’t have a company paying for it can be very difficult.

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No Support Structure Beyond Your Kids

Although it’s nice that you’ve got the kids as a support structure there, it turns out that’s the only support structure you have. You don’t have the friends and the contacts that you had back in your local community.

When the kids do leave, or something happens to them, you find yourself orphaned out there in the middle of nowhere. Someplace that you’re very unfamiliar with.

That can cause a lot of stress and a lot of strain.

It’s usually much easier for them to come back to you than it is for you to go try and chase them around.

As you contemplate retirement, you might be contemplating that you’ve always wanted to have that little piece of heaven with the fields that you could walk out on your back deck in your PJs. There's no neighbors around to see and you can view the fields and the trees.

Yeah, your nice little 40 acres or 100 acres out there, maybe with a pond on it. So you start thinking. That means a more rural choice in lifestyle and housing, and we’ve seen that choice.

It’s wonderful while someone is young enough, active enough, and able enough to take care of that property, to enjoy that property, and to be able to walk down and go fishing at the pond.

Unfortunately, we deal with families who didn’t see us during all those enjoyment years.  They were active and busy with other concerns.

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It’s All Good Until it’s Not

But now that maybe there’s a crisis. A lot of times we’re talking to families because we’ve got adult kids who live in the big city.

They’re realizing that mom and dad in the rural setting are having limitations in the services they can get there.

I visited with a family recently. They retired. They bought a farm about 40 miles outside of town. They’ve really enjoyed it, it’s on about 75 acres.

They used to run some cows and stuff. About 10 years ago, that got to be a bit much. So, they started leasing out the pasture land, and there was about a good 20 acres or 30 acres around the house that the husband was still maintaining.

The husband would get out and go brush hoggin’ and commune with nature. He was doing his little thing out there. Then he had some recent health issues.

One of the things the doctor told him was, “No more.”

No more sitting out there for hours on that tractor. No more on the tractor, not even riding the little riding lawnmower around the yard. No more of that business or somebody was gonna find him dead of a heart attack out there.

They checked in with some folks to see how much would it cost for someone else to come out and maintain their property in the same manner that they liked it. In their case, it came out to be about $15,000 a year to maintain the property in the same way they were maintaining it.

The grass keeps growing.

Their living environment was based on their income and assets. And part of their calculations in all of that had not included $15,000 for outside maintenance.

The other thing that came with this health event was routine medical checkups. Lots of coming in for cardiac rehabilitation work.

Spending time at a rehab on a routine basis, and things like that.

As I mentioned, they’re 40 miles outside of town.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful piece of country. But, man, that’s getting to be a long commute every day. Or every other day. And so, they were far away from their medical providers.

They couldn’t maintain the place. And so… It seems like this came as a surprise to them.

They had this concept that this was going to be where they were going to go. They hadn’t thought about what other alternatives are out there.

They were really kind of in a pickle now, because it’d come down to the wire. They were gonna have to make some changes, or spend a bit more money to do something.

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Do You Have the Kind of Support Structure That Can Come in and Help Maintain it, if You Can’t?

And if not, what are going to be your alternatives?

And it seems like, in their case, they had not ever gone through the concept of, “Where are we gonna go next?”

And so they were having to do it almost in a crisis scenario. And in their case, there were some differences of opinions.

The wife was saying, “Hey, why don’t we go to one of these continuing care retirement communities? Let’s just sell the whole mess off, and move into one of these places where we can have a little house. Then, we can move from there into the assisted living, and there, into a nursing home, as our life takes us.”

And, the husband… the husband was not into that.

Especially if you’re a married couple, some things you might wanna be talking about, “Hey, this is our combined dream here, at 65. But when this dream becomes… A little more than we can handle. A little more of a nightmare… Then what’s our next dream?”

Make sure you’re on the same page.

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How Much of That Parental Love Is There?

Luckily, for this family, as those challenges became more difficult, one of their children moved south to live across the street.

That was very nice of them. Now this child is thinking, “I left my friends and everything I knew and grew up with to come help mom and dad. Now they’ve been in and out of the hospital and it looks like we’re gonna need some more intense care.”

But the child was not all that happy in the rural Texas community as opposed to their home city. It was only the bonds of parental love that were holding this family member helping mom and dad. It was pretty difficult.

You better think about exactly how much of that parental love there is.

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Your Housing Choices Are Going to Directly Impact Your Remaining Years

Generally speaking, the people that we talk to want to age in their own home. They want to not be a burden on their family. They don’t want to go broke trying to get through this process.

Your housing choices through retirement are going to directly impact all three of those things. If you live in a multi-level home that has a little six-inch dropdown from the kitchen to the den and then to the family room, that place is going to become a nightmare at some point if you’re having mobility issues.

You’ve got to look around. Either you’re not gonna be able to go to that home, and you’re going to end up in an institutional setting. Or, you’re going to burden friends and family as they try to figure out how to build 15 ramps around your house so that you can get from one place to another.

A lot of people can hardly conceive sometimes of changing their housing situation. They paid off that 30-year mortgage or they’ve been very happy, they have wonderful memories, and it’s very nostalgic in that home. It’s the American Dream, of buildin’ and buyin’ that house, and gettin’ it paid for.

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You Can’t Predict How Everything Is Gonna Go

The housing choice, second maybe only to lifestyle choices like smoking, has the biggest impact on navigating retirement years.

Look at the location of where your house is. What’s your accessibility to things? How can you get to a grocery store and back? Can you get to your healthcare providers in the same way? How close are you to support structures? Not necessarily family, but friends as well. Are you in a community that you’ve had a long association with, or is this someplace new? And lastly, are you gonna be able to change this decision as life changes?

All of these things are gonna have an impact because the one thing you can’t predict how everything is going to go.

If anything, I would just encourage people to have an open mind.

Are You Looking for an Elder Law Attorney in Texarkana, TX?

If you are looking for elder law assistance, you need to speak with an experienced elder law attorney as soon as possible. Contact us online or call our Texarkana office directly at 903.223.5653. We also have offices in Tyler, Paris, Longview as well as Magnolia, AR!


To learn more about the impacts of Alzheimer’s disease on both the sufferer and her/his family and friends, we encourage you to reach out.

The article is taken in large part from a piece John Ross and Lisa Shoalmire published on the Aging Insight radio podcast What you shouldn’t have done – what you did and how badly it went wrong.

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