Now Is the Time to Start Planning

A pitch for another activity to add into our packed agenda: planning our next move

By Marilyn L. Pinsky

It’s interesting to take a step back and see how our thinking changes about where we want to live as life moves on.

If we’re lucky, the stage we are in now is retired and relatively healthy, though doctor’s visits for many happen often enough that they’re almost considered an activity, in the same category as exercise or a social engagement.

You ask someone what they’re doing this week and it’s “well, Monday I have yoga in the morning, then my podiatrist in the afternoon. Tuesday I have a morning weight lifting class, then my cardiologist in the afternoon. Wednesday it’s Zumba, then the dermatologist … but I’m free for lunch on Thursday.”

I’m going to make a pitch for another activity to add into that packed agenda: planning our next move.

About 10 years ago I wrote an article about where people were choosing to live in their retirement years. At that point the people I interviewed were in their late 60s or early 70s and were either pulling up roots and moving south or finding a second home in a warm climate.

As this cohort is getting older, I’m seeing four different trends.

• First, after having spent 10 or so years of ‘six months here and six months there,’ managing two living situations with the twice a year packing and unpacking that involves, they just want to live in one place year-round, either north or south.

• Second, people who kept their houses in the north are either selling them and downsizing or rehabbing them to be livable for the long haul.

• Third, people who have children are moving to be near them wherever they live.

• Fourth, is moving into independent living sooner rather than later.

And that is the plan-ahead phase.

We all need to figure out sooner rather than later where we want to spend the rest of our lives. The choices are aging in place, meaning staying at home with help when it’s needed and is hopefully available and affordable, or finding a good living situation that will provide us the care that’s likely to be needed.

Life happens. Partners don’t all age at the same rate and it’s amazing how many different things can do us in. So even though your living situation works for now, we have to think ahead a few years by looking at slightly older friends and seeing what they’re dealing with and how their living choices are working for them.

Even though it’s not as much fun to think about this next step as it was our first retirement move, I’d rather plan in advance and be the one to make the decision for myself of where I want to be. Even then, where we’d like to go might not be available when we need to go there, but at least if we look at all available options, when we are at the point of having to make a choice, often within a short timeframe, at least we’ll be making a more informed decision. And we won’t have to do the running around and looking when we’re in a stressed state.

Toward that end, what my friends and I are doing now is educating ourselves about what our options will be depending on our physical and mental circumstances.

Though we are healthy now, we’re not spring chickens, so we can guess at the future. We are first looking at all the options that are in the geographical areas we’d consider. We’ve found that there are so many different financial setups and levels of care, that just gathering the information takes a lot of time, let alone analyzing it and putting it into dollars and cents to see which are realistic options or not.

We have made a social event out of visiting different living places. We check out the physical layout, ask the residents about the food, do a lot of sniffing and look over the activities calendar. Activities can include a gym, pickleball, tennis, wheelchair bocci ball, book clubs, chess, rehab. We’re also discovering that it’s not too early to make a move as a number of people we met made the decision to move into independent living in their 70s and love the carefree existence. (Also, I’m going to learn to play Canasta this year so I’ll hopefully have a ready-made group to slide into as everyone’s always looking for a fourth.)

A last thought, but an important question to ask is, “what happens if your needs change while you’re a resident there? Will they keep you or do you have to move again? And if so, to where?”

OK, that’s my cheery article for this month. After all, my column is called Aging.