What Is A Good New Year’s Resolution For Seniors?

This may be a loaded question, but for many seniors, retirement has probably been on your mind for some time.

Since I’m no financial planner, I can’t tell you when is the right time to quit the workforce.

Even if finances have little to do with your desire to retire or not, there are some resolutions and goals that you can make today that will impact your future retirement whenever or in whatever form that may take.

There’s more to retirement than the coveted gold watch

Retirement community

No doubt, you’ve already guessed what I’m about to suggest. We are after all, Utah’s top builder of retirement communities. It’s all we do.

So, why should you care?

Simple, just ask yourself what you want out of retirement. If I was to ask a room full of people, 55 years of age and older, what they want out of retirement, there’d be several unique things, but there’d also be several common goals.

There’s that word again:

Goals!

The New Year is, after all, the time for re-evaluating our lives and making those goals that we’re pretty sure we won’t be able to follow through on.

Making the right goals

I’m not outright saying that your goal should be to move into one of our senior communities. You already know that we’d like that. What I’m talking about, is what you want…

Making the right goal, is more than just committing to a desire that we’ll lose resolve on in just a few weeks, or months if we’re lucky.

Making the right goal involves taking steps to make it attainable and enduring. For many folks, some common retirement hopes include things like:

• Traveling the world
• Spending time with family
• Making and sharing memories with good friends
• Staying physically and mentally active
• Playing more
• Reducing stress

These are all great goals and I’m sure you could come up with several more of your own. My only question for you is: What are the steps you need to take, in order for you to accomplish these goals?

I’d suggest that your first step be to write down your goals. Put them somewhere that you can remember them.

Your next step should probably be to evaluate the current obstacles that are preventing you from accomplishing these goals right now.

Lastly, evaluate how much easier it would be to accomplish all these goals if you lived in one of our retirement communities. (Okay, so there it is, a call to move into one of our 55+ communities. But of course, you were probably expecting something like this.)

How can a retirement community help you accomplish your goals?

I hope this isn’t a hard thing to imagine. Let’s address them in order:

• Traveling the world
  • You can more safely leave your home for extended periods of time, since you have many retired neighbors who can easily keep an eye out for trouble. Also, since the yard work is all maintained for you, you won’t have a jungle growing on your lawn when you return.
• Spending time with family
  • With a great clubhouse, full of amenities like a swimming pool, billiards, gathering room, theater, there’s plenty of fun excuses for your kids and grandkids to come and visit.
• Making and sharing memories with good friends
  • Since most everyone is about your same age or stage of life, you can easily develop many life-long relationships that are so close and easy to stay in touch with. Some of our community members even meet most mornings in the clubhouse to share a coffee or a round of the latest news.
• Staying physically and mentally active
  • Would it help you to work out if you had a buddy and a place to work out? Finding friends in a retirement community are easy enough. The added exercise room at the clubhouse can help you get together and keep each other motivated to work out.
• Playing more
  • I’ve already mentioned the swimming pool, and billiards. Some of our communities have other amenities also, like pickle ball or horse shoes. Perhaps playing more just means getting away from the mundane chores that keep you homebound more often.
• Reducing stress
  • Since all the exterior yardwork is taken care of for you, that evil lawnmower can no longer taunt you with it’s incessant need to be walked. The only thing begging to be walked now, might be that dog of yours, if you have one.

I hope this article has helped you with your New Years resolutions. True, it’s a little self-serving, in that we would like to sell you a home in one of our award-winning communities, but I honestly believe that many retirement goals are better served by placing yourself in a circumstance where those goals are more easily attained. An active adult community by Leisure Villas is such a place.

Stop in today, and see if this isn’t the lifestyle choice that can significantly improve your coming retirement.