What is Your Ideal Retirement Lifestyle?

If you’re deep into retirement or just preparing for it now, there is something critical you must consider.

How do you want to live during your golden years?

Lifestyle matters. Do you want to travel, lounge by the pool, stay active by volunteering or working part-time jobs? Consider this the perfect time to reflect on what an ideal retirement lifestyle looks like for you. Read on for some insights into the different retirement lifestyles available, including how to achieve these lifestyle options at retirement communities. Keep in mind you can always combine several lifestyles into one that is entirely and perfectly your own!

Active and Fitness-oriented

Stay Active, Live Longer

Many retirees seek to maintain or even enhance their physical activity levels. If this resonates with you, your ideal retirement lifestyle might include daily exercise classes, access to fitness centers, and outdoor activities. 

Perhaps you want to try yoga, or maintain a weekly Pickleball game, or spend as much time as possible on a golf course. You probably want access to a swimming pool and maybe even live close to a beach. Living within driving or train distance from a city wouldn’t be bad, either, to walk the streets and possibly also museums and other attractions. Maybe you crave proximity to a body of water where you can kayak. Or maybe you just want to find a group of friends you can walk with every morning.

Retirement communities can help with this active lifestyle option by putting as many of the amenities you need within easy access. Think morning swims, fitness classes, and walking clubs—all within steps of your door. Many retirement communities boast state-of-the-art gym facilities (sometimes with fitness trainers), swimming pools, walking trails, gardening areas, courts for Pickleball and tennis and Bocce, group classes ranging from yoga to water aerobics, and so much more.

Cultural and Educational Pursuits

Enrich Your Mind

If you're drawn to the arts, literature, and lifelong learning, you may want to enmesh yourself in a community of compatriots. Make sure you have access to museums and concert halls. You’ll certainly want to be near a well-stocked library. Maybe you want to attend community college to learn a new specialty, or even help teach classes. 

A retirement community can help here, as well. Many offer on-site libraries, lecture series, performance halls, and classes to learn new skills, painting to a new language. Several campuses of Acts Retirement-Life Communities, as an example, feature art rooms for painting and sculpting, woodworking shops, and more. Gain access to enriching educational experiences, stimulating intellectual growth and opportunities to foster your own creativity or enjoy the creativity of others.

Social and Community Engagement

Foster Meaningful Relationships

Our social circle tends to shrink in retirement. For one major reason, we aren’t interacting with all our colleagues anymore. As a result, we need to work at building and maintaining relationships.

Ongoing social interaction has been proven to improve the mind and even body, helping retirees live longer and better. Can you move near family or friends? Get breakfast at a local diner every morning? Babysit your grandkids?

The walking group or Pickleball games from earlier discussions can help with this. As can weekly card games or getting a part-time job (ever consider becoming a dog washer?), or volunteering at a local charity. Your neighborhood might have dances or events for older adults. All of these are great options.

Retirement communities again make socialization easy. You’ll be surrounded by people in your same situation, sharing many of the same interests. You can attend meals together in the community dining areas, join clubs and participate in events together, go on organized excursions together, or simply hang out with each other. Join a book club, organize an event, or lead a volunteer project. Social opportunities are the heart of retirement communities, fostering a sense of belonging and connection.

Relaxed and Serene

Well-earned Peace and Quiet

Perhaps a calm and leisurely pace is what you envision for your retirement. Who couldn’t benefit a bit from this ideal type of retirement lifestyle? Sit on a balcony with a good book, enjoy a picnic, lounge by the pool. You deserve some time to unwind and decompress and…do absolutely nothing at all. 

With meditation and yoga classes, landscaped gardens, and quiet, gated streets, many retirement communities excel at providing a tranquil retirement lifestyle. Just thinking about it may have you feeling calmer already.

Travel and Adventure

When the World is Home

Who hasn’t dreamed of exploring the world upon retirement? When people think about different retirement lifestyles, one of non-stop travel is often at the top of the most desired list. As long as you’ve secured enough of a nest egg, you can spend your golden years seeing the world, in America or in other countries or both. Day and weekend trips are also a great way to feed your adventurous spirit.

Retirement communities can help facilitate this lifestyle by allowing you to sell your house without putting those profits into a new house. If you still live in your old family home, you can sell it in this nice real estate market, and pocket most of the earnings. Add that to your nest egg and put it into travel.

Acts Retirement-Life Communities takes this a step further. With 28 campuses around the East Coast, from Florida to South Carolina to Pennsylvania, residents of one campus gain access to all the others. You can visit for a day, a weekend, or more, and feed your travel bug without having to worry about finding, booking, and paying for hotel rooms. Perfect for the true nomadic spirit.

Luxury and Indulgence

Savor the Finer Things 

They don’t call them the “golden” years for nothing. After working hard all your life, celebrate by indulging in a lifestyle of pure indulgence. Retirement communities can help with this as well, offering upscale dining, lovely villas and cottages, convenience amenities like never having to worry about landscaping or snow shoveling or even laundry every again. After all, this lifestyle is about enjoying the finer things in life with minimal effort.

Crafting Your Ideal Retirement Lifestyle

What you may have noticed while reviewing these different retirement lifestyle options is that there is a lot of crossover between them. Lounging near a pool can be relaxing and luxurious. Pickleball can keep you active and socially engaged. You never have to choose just one!

One of the great benefits to retirement communities is that you can enjoy all these lifestyles at once, deciding which you prefer at any given moment, and living exactly however you want to live whenever you want to live it.

The communities of Acts strive for this perfect blend of lifestyle. All options are available at all times, it’s up to you which you prefer to indulge in.

If you’d like to find the ideal campus for your ideal retirement lifestyle, we recommend using our helpful decision tree tool, which lets you select various preferences and presents the campuses that best connect to your choices.

Overall, we hope that your actual retirement lifestyle of what you always dreamed of.