When is the Best Time to Start Looking at Retirement Communities?

One of the most important decisions we will ever make, whether it's for us or our parents, is what to do when living alone becomes a burden. Because all too often families wait until they're facing an emergency, and then are forced to make an immediate decision. Well, greatTRANSITIONS® is set up to help you through the process. But even now the makeup of our community is rapidly changing which is why Paul Henderson of greatTRANSITIONS® believes now is the time to start thinking about it. Our population is aging. It's the largest shift in population age in the history of this country next to the baby boomers being born. Now we're all turning 60, we're turning into seniors, so it's a huge shift in population and it's a huge impact on the communities and facilities that are available to us. There are waiting lists in all these communities. If you go to some of the retirement, I'm talking about the retirement housing communities, there's some very large ones here in Florida; they were 30,000 people ten years ago, now there are 120,000 people and they're growing like crazy. So, we need to plan ahead if we're going to go to a retirement community. look, for example, we're going to go to a continuing care retirement community-- there's waiting lists for those places, so people need to get in line on the waiting list and that can take a long time. It's not days, it's months and years to get into those communities. So how do you do that? When do you do that? I think anybody over the age of 60 should be looking very seriously at what they want to do. That doesn't mean they're going to do it today, that means maybe they're going to do it in ten years. But they need to be looking at those, and keeping an eye on the communities that they like and see what's going on with them so they're very familiar with them. There are many other considerations as well, but it is critical that everyone in your family understands the needs and wants of its aging family members. greatTRANSITIONS® can be a big help. For more information give us a call at 407-476-1808.