When you've spent so many years having to go to work, the thought of retirement can appear as a massively tempting box of chocolates lying at the end of a long and winding road of strict dietary control. The idea of it is wonderful, but the reality may not always be as great as it seems.

When you work full time, the few weeks of holiday that you manage to arrange throughout the year are the moments you spend catching up with all the things you don't normally get time to do, or you spend your time recuperating and often just wanting to do nothing. And before you know it it's all over and you've got to get back to the grind and carry on dreaming about the day you can retire. But trying to imagine what you will do with yourself when you eventually do retire can seem daunting. You can't imagine your holiday time being endless because what would just become boring in the end.

That's because you are thinking about it all wrong! Retirement doesn't just mean finishing work. It should mean "a change of lifestyle". You won't be stuck in a perpetual cycle of a 2-week holiday, because that is just a 2-week holiday from work. In your new lifestyle, your time will be better managed, and you will fill your old work time up with new activities that you've always wanted to do but never had the time. In fact, most people who stop working wonder how they ever had the time to go to work!

Volunteering in the community is a great way to feel useful, stay active and meet new people. Many organisations like hospitals, animal shelters, schools and churches welcome the help and experience that senior members of the society can offer. It is possible to join a club or attend classes in a subject that interests you, and community centres and libraries are great resources for such information. Learn an instrument, join an amateur dramatics society or a choir, once you start thinking about it you will find so many things to pique your interest!

Research Shows the Importance of Social Connections

Research shows that social engagements play a crucial role in our health and well-being, and a good social connection in retirement can help protect your memory and cognitive functions as you get older. Studies have shown that highly social seniors have far less cognitive decline than their less sociable peers, yet as we get older, loneliness can become a massive worry to ourselves and our family.

Having spent a lifetime building a family home and watching members of the family grow, leave and start families of their own can mean that senior members of our society get left in big, empty family homes that are no longer suitable for the purpose they once served. There are plenty of senior social activities

to participate in, but the problem can be getting there if you can no longer drive or mobility has become a problem.

Lifestyle Communities believe we have the answer. We have developed communities for over 50's living, but this doesn't mean they are "retirement villages" - in fact, 40% of our customers still work. It means we provide a more suitable environment for the next stage of your life, whether that is your retirement or just the fact that all the children have left home, and your life and finances can be put to better use. Many people hang on to the family home even when becomes too big and too expensive to maintain properly, just because they cannot imagine the alternative. Staying in their own home, needing more help to maintain it and becoming more isolated over time is a real problem, but it doesn't have to be.

Many older people have beautiful, large properties that are expensive to maintain, leaving them with no extra cash to be able to afford to do the things they wanted to do in their retirement, so often end up doing less and becoming less sociable. Or they end up being slaves to their property, having to upgrade and update the building and the decor, or working all hours on a large garden that is simply too big and too overgrown to cope with anymore.

Find Your Social Connections and Social Activities All in One Place

The idea behind community living is to provide you with a low-maintenance lifestyle, where you can enjoy beautifully landscaped communal gardens without all the hard work of having to tend them, and companionship and a sense of community with like-minded people.

Our gated retirement communities in Australia are not places where you are locked in, they simply provide 50+ people with a better sense of safety and security, where there are on-site community managers available to help if needed. It also means it is easy for you to lock up and leave your property if you want to go travelling, without the worry.

There are so many senior social activities to join in if you want to, or perhaps you'd prefer to get fit in the gym or hang out in the pool, so you can stay active in the mind and the body. Having everything in one place makes it far easier to join in these activities, arrange a social gathering in the BBQ area or pop to the cinema to watch a movie one night.

Staying socially connected in retirement, or indeed if you are still working, is important. We are socially interactive animals, and in our modern, computerised world that can be harder to find, especially as we get older and maybe lose our social connections when we stop working.

Imagine buying a new, low-maintenance retirement home in Melbourne, and releasing savings that were tied up in property, allowing you more time and money to do the things you really want to. With Lifestyle Communities you can!