Living in Retirement: Where to now?
Increasingly, I've been helping seniors downsize from their family home to a condo or townhouse. Some clients are excited and some are apprehensive, which is understandable. It's a new stage, a new beginning and certainly not the last chapter. I wrote a little about my interpretation of an "in between" stage of life in a blog post, We Need to Come up With a Name for This New Stage in Life. I imagine a simplified life where I have very little cleaning with a smaller home; surrounded by only the things I love because there's limited space; leaving my home for extended periods of time, not worry about leaving my house unattended and the ongoing work and expenses to maintaining a single family, detached home. Ah, simple.
So where to? There are so many options depending on the lifestyle you seek in your retirement and if you do it alone. The suburbs are wonderful if you enjoy walking in park settings, lengthy lunches where no one is waiting impatiently for a table or worry about scheduling around traffic or parallel parking your car downtown. But is it right to ward off loneliness of the single retiree?
I was reading an article in the Globe and Mail, Living in retirement: If you're single, don't move to the suburbs, and it makes a really good point:
"Living outside city centres is meant for couples and families. The spaces between people are too big for it to be otherwise and the variety of entertainment and cultural pursuits too sparse. Sure, it’s changing, but not fast enough for the single retiree. Much of what happens in suburbia is focused around the home, things like backyard barbeques, coffee klatches, family dinners and home offices."
The downtown core offers everything to support a happy & healthy retirement and opportunity to explore perhaps many activities you just never made time for. Lunch in Public Gardens, discovering to new use of a library with the new exciting site on Spring Garden Road, Neptune Theatre, dinner theatres, walking or cycling in Point Pleasant Park, restaurants serving meals from around the world, the "to do" list is endless.
Currently, there are 189 condominiums for sale in the core of HRM and downtown Dartmouth of an average list price $360,000 and 46 townhouses averaging $313,000.
Living in Retirement: Where to now? If you're curious about this option, call me and we'll go on a road of discovery together to see if this lifestyle is for you.
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