Retirement the Margaritaville Way
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
The thing that's striking about these communities is that they're extremely lucrative business opportunities. Obvious revenue streams come from initially selling the lots, but I'm sure they're making a ton of money from the quarterly association dues and the incidental fees and concession sales.
My mother lived near a golf course that was for many years disued. Eventually, an investment group purchase the course for low seven figures, and then turned around and developed it into a retirement community with 150 lots, selling each (with a semi-customized, templated house on it) for mid 300s. I'll let you do the math, but they made a fortune.
If you take away one insight from this article, it's that the middle class from the last 40 years needs a place to retire to that doesn't have snow or high taxes and there's a lot of money to be made from this opporunity.
Also, the middle class doesn't need those things, for goodness's sake.
It's why people accumulate wealth in high cost of living areas (typically, where wages are higher), and retire/move to low cost of living areas (pre remote work normalization). High taxes are drag on quality of life when you're on a fixed income and you’re not dependent on services high taxes would provide.
Sounds better than living in a neighborhood or building where you no longer know anyone.
I would rather blow my brains out than spend any more time there.
Max out your 401k. People are really bad about thinking in terms of exponential growth, and it kind of sneaks up on you out of nowhere.
I wish there were more places in between this sort of life (too corporate) and the communes like twin oaks (too many sacrifices for communal life imo, e.g. almost no pets, restricted housing). Maybe what I want is just an ordinary friendly small town, but if people have suggestions for places where you can find deep community that would fit an academic/tech-inclined personality-type, I'd love to hear it.
Life in Europe is not perfect by any means, but I had a better social life there and felt more in touch with people.
An anecdote: our home there was one unit in a six-plex that we owned, which is a pretty common arrangement for middle-class-ish people who live in a city rather than the countryside. Several times a year, another couple in the same building would organize a dinner where they'd put up a big table outdoors and grill up some food. Everyone else brought a dish or two, and of course there was lots of wine.
I didn’t get the impression smaller towns like Linz or Brandenburg had these either but maybe I’m wrong.
I can imagine what you describe being more common in Mediterranean Europe but I’ve never seen it in my years in Austria and Germany.
It's kind of difficult to describe what 'friendly' meant in Italy. Maybe 'social' is a better word. It's not like some movie where you chat with someone and all of a sudden they're you're best friend and invite you over for dinner. Just people are kind of 'easy going' socially where it's just pleasant and easy to have a conversation with someone.
https://www.latitudemargaritaville.com/community-gallery-day...
You know what? They kinda are. The gables are a bit much, as are the colors, but…no stairs leading up to the entranceway, no basements, seemingly an open floor plan with room for mobility devices like scooter, walk-in/roll-in showers…looks like sensible retirement design.
Just something that caught my eye, as my elderly parents are attempting to get out of their split-level home, a very Midwestern house design that almost seemed architected to kill old people with all those damn stairs. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-level_home)
It doesn’t matter if they are young or old, even if they primarily listen to hip hop, they probably have fond memories of going down to the Keyes and having the time of their lives at some point listening to some Jimmy Buffet. I can liken it to Christmas music, it’s not going to be your go to or even your favorite, but it has it’s time and place when nothing can be better.
I made an infographic about this a while back: https://egypt.urnash.com/blog/2019/12/07/ok-boomer-a-concise...
Snark aside, some of the pictures don’t break the horizontal scrolling, or force the scrolling, or whatever they do to make it so that I have horizontal scrolling when I ought not to. One of the photos doesn’t scale its embed, and so it just takes up the whole horizontal real estate of the screen on iOS, causing horizontal scroll behavior that is not ideal.
Sorry, I don’t really know how else to describe it, and the site works fine otherwise, and I like the content. I hope I’m not protesting too much. I wish I knew better how to describe the issue so I didn’t seem like I’m just nitpicking. I think presentation of the content can be improved, but it is perfectly serviceable as it is.
Someone born before 1945 can’t be a baby-boomer.
Oh wait also I did the math wrong in my reply above :)
What am i supposed to take away from this other than smouldering rage? this is an advert at best.
The initial people profiled went there for friends, not for "evermore excess":
> “In four years, we made four friends. Everyone was a part-timer. So we did some retirement math. We assessed the carrying costs.” The math, and a yearning for friends, told the Murphys to move to Margaritaville.
Is this the excess you're talking about?
> The housing stock, a range of villas and cottages, is, by today’s standards, compact and tasteful—single-story buildings with sensible layouts and patios that, typically screened in, can look like aviaries.
Or is it the community shuttle that is the excess?
> Men with guitars set up outside someone’s garage, and the golf carts appear out of nowhere. Commence the beer pong. Pool parties, poker nights, talent shows, toga parties, pig roasts. Cigar-club meeting, group renewal of wedding vows, a pub crawl in old St. Augustine.
This just sounds like a nice community-minded neighborhood. People in their mid-20s commonly miss those exact aspects once they leave college and move out into "the real world". Are those 20-somethings just yearning for excess too?
The fact that it enrages you, and you blame it on boomerdom, makes me think you're just a bigot who wants to blame others for your own failings. That's just my guess - I've never personally met a successful younger person who spews vitriol at boomers as a whole.
This paragraph made me wince. Success doesn’t qualify your opinions as valid or not. Personal failings don’t invalidate a logical argument either. I don’t like shallow dismissal or criticism either, but isn’t that what you’re doing here?
Some of the criticism is of the inequality of success itself, and the trappings of it. Those who are successful in retirement communities are perhaps too easy a target, and an unfair one in some ways, as they have had more time to invest and accumulate wealth than their critical juniors in age.
It’s fine to be critical of systems and structures that disadvantage those who are already successful, like states that don’t collect the same taxes as other states do. It’s also fine to criticize others for taking advantage of these systems. I don’t find it especially productive or convincing to direct these criticisms at an individual. Directing it at the entire group doesn’t seem ideal either, as it alienates those who may otherwise be allies.
What is the solution then? I don’t know either, but wedge issues driven between generations feel like someone’s trying to pull strings and play us all for fools, devolving into infighting.
Some of the Jimmy Buffet stuff is tongue in cheek. I mean "cheeseburger in paradise?". Everything about the song is awful, and I think everyone understands its awful, but it's juvenile and fun. The margaritaville thing is a welcoming in-group. It's "who cares, don't worry about it, live and let live." Key West certainly reflected those values when I visited. I kinda get it now.