A story & viewpoint from a couple who moved to a retirement community.

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What is the difference between A Retirement Home & A Normal Home?

I have often been asked for the differences between a retirement home (as distinct from an old age home) and a normal home.

• A retirement home is a home for seniors only.  A normal home is a home for all age groups.
• You can own your retirement home or rent it, just as a normal home. You are not an inmate as in an old age home.
• You can either pay up the capital cost of the apartment or cottage in a retirement home and own it and bequeath it after your lifetime to your heirs or pay only a fraction of the capital cost as a deposit, to be refunded and pay a monthly charge that covers rent and living expenses. Depending on who sets up the home and runs them, both options are available. It is not an old age home where an organization that depends on donations, takes care of you if there is no one to do so.
• Anyone can invest in a retirement home but only seniors above a certain age can live in them. This age may vary. But it is usually between  55 to 60 and above.
• In a normal home, you have to do everything, including cooking, washing, house maintenance, etc. You can get a cook or cook yourself. Likewise, you can do your housekeeping chores yourself or get a maid.
• In a retirement home, there is a common dining hall, and breakfast, lunch, and dinner are served. You can avail of these services (at cost) or do your own cooking in your apartment and save on food bills. Housekeeping arrangements are made by the management to be availed by you if needed.
• In a normal home, you can accommodate any guest at any time for any length of time. There are restrictions in retirement homes regarding who can stay and for how long they can stay as visitors. Separate living lodging arrangements may be provided for them and extra will be charged if they stay beyond a limit. Some retirement homes allow a living assistant to be accommodated inside the apartment in case of the advanced age of the inmate and if he needs round-the-clock care.
• In a normal home, you don’t have a doctor on call, or even a nurse, or a paramedic or an ambulance. You have to make your own arrangement by visiting a clinic or hospital. In a retirement home, a doctor will be available for fixed hours every day, right on the premises. Nurses and paramedics, medicine shops and ambulances will be available in-house. Specialists will also visit the retirement home for fixed hours per some agreed schedule. The retirement home will keep records of your medical history, and special needs and help you. There will be emergency buttons in the bathrooms and in the bedroom which, when pressed, will alert the staff and they will come rushing to your aid in emergencies. This service will be available round the clock on all days of the year.

A physiotherapy center will be available inside the premises of a retirement home. It can have a gymnasium too. A number of large common areas are a special feature of retirement homes. Lounges, visitors                      rooms, community hall, TV watching room, mini auditorium, or an amphi-theatre may be available for group activities.

• A normal home may not be elderly-friendly. In retirement homes, the doors are extra wide and permit easy movement of wheelchairs. Ramps are provided all over so that all parts of the building will be accessible by a wheelchair. The lifts will be large enough to accommodate a wheelchair and even a stretcher. The floors will be anti-skid type. Grab bars and other elderly-friendly facilities will be provided in the rooms.
• A retirement home may have an assisted living center attached to it where for extra payment, individual and round-the-clock additional attention is provided for special cases and where the inmate is bedridden. These will cost extra.
• The management will have details of the next of kin, to be informed in cases of medical emergencies and will also have details of the insurance arrangements. They can also undertake cremation and funeral ceremonies in case of special cases after due instructions are given and recorded in writing. Contact particulars of a local relative or friend will also be available with the management.
• Maintenance in a normal home is the resident’s responsibility. In a retirement home there will be a plumber, an electrician and other technicians/helpers for all kinds of odd jobs available round the clock. They will be supervised by a manager who will have his assistants and they will take care of all the resident’s needs, including booking tickets, bank jobs, and organizing shuttle transport services, or other kinds of miscellaneous services. They will also organize extracurricular activities depending on the tastes and interests of the residents. These could be lectures, bhajans, discourses, yoga, meditation, music, classes on various subjects, or some kind of group activities.
• All administrative hassles will be taken care of by the manager and his team, including round-the-clock security, backup power arrangements, and maintenance of all the facilities including landscaping, gardening, etc. Entry of outsiders will be controlled and video cameras are located at all strategic spots.
• In a normal home, only the family gathers around the dining table. In a retirement home, all the residents will meet in a common place (dining hall, or lounge, or club) regularly about 3 times a day and there will be much more opportunities for socializing.
• In a normal home, the elderly might feel lonely and starved of company. The working group will be away all day and busy with their careers. The children will be busy with their school and college studies. In retirement homes, the elderly will have the company of their peers all day and form groups with common interests and never feel lonely,  neglected, or ignored. They will have their own space and will not be bumping into the other family members as at home. They will perhaps have better relations with their adult children particularly with the children’s spouses when they live away and allow the younger generation to live their own life.

Why we moved into a retirement home?

The joint family is dying in India. While a good joint family, living in a large house with plenty of space for everyone, with the elders well taken care of is ideal, in many cases this is not practical or is not a reality. If it is affordable, a retirement home is a convenient option today for the middle and upper middle classes. It may be the only solution for some families and in due course of time, the stigma of ‘old age home’ will be erased and the difference between an old age home where abandoned seniors are cared for and a retirement home where seniors live a life of dignity will be better understood.

About four years ago, I have myself moved from a spacious 1640 sq. feet 3 bedroom apartment in Bengaluru into a retirement home at Devanahalli (Parkside Retirement home of Brigade Orchards Devanahalli). This is a two-bedroom 1420 sq. feet apartment. We are a lot more comfortable here and feel safe. We have convinced our children that this is the best option for us in the last stages of our lives.

I have been repeatedly asked why I moved into a retirement home and whether we were not making a mistake. I had given the following detailed explanation earlier. I am quoting it here.

I will be one hour’s drive away from Bengaluru city and I hope to make monthly visits to my old house and visit friends and relatives.

I am sure to be flooded with visits from outstation friends and relatives either entering Bengaluru or leaving Bengaluru via the airport. Some may even come to our place for dinner and sleepover to catch an early morning flight out of Bengaluru.

My children have settled abroad. I don’t want them worrying about me. I remember my parents living separately from us and the constant emergency dashes I and/or brothers had to make from the distant cities to be with them when one or both of them, living alone in a large house, felt sick or were temporarily disabled. We finally had to drag them away from their house and make them live with us. They were not at all happy even though we tried our best to make them feel comfortable. In my case, I cannot expect my son or daughter to throw up everything abroad and return just for our sake. Times have changed and we must move with the times.

Like my parents, we too are not too willing to stay with the children permanently. We value our independence. We love our India, Indian food, Indian music Indian smells, Indian customs and don’t see why we should give it up and hole up permanently with our children abroad.

Besides practically every alternate day, we are in touch with our son and daughter through Whatsapp, Skype, Facetime, etc, and on weekends my wife and daughter talk for hours to each other even while keeping their Ipads on the kitchen counters. Every few minutes my little grandson peeps in to say Hi! Gampa? Hi Gammy! and proudly displays his new toy or teddy before scooting off.

The phone calls too back up this arrangement. They know that professionals will take care of us during times of need. Even if they come here, what can they do if we are living alone in our house? They can only hire professional help, make some arrangements and then go back. Let us be practical.

No, we will not be missing anything. I look forward to a better quality of life.

The dining hall here will be professionally managed and a dietitian will plan the menu keeping in mind the needs of the elderly. The entire building and internal facilities are planned to be “elderly-friendly” , with wide doors and large lifts that accommodate wheelchairs, non-slippery floors, emergency buttons, ramps for easy movement etc. A manager with his staff on board will take care of all our housekeeping needs like cleaning, swabbing etc. Security staff, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, gardeners will be available 24×7 for any help we need and the manager and his staff will oversee them.. Doctors, nurses, paramedics and an ambulance will be on stand-by all the time. Medicines will be available in house and so will a physiotherapy centre. An assisted living facility will be available next door for extreme situations where you become so old that you need constant assistance for even simple and routine daily functions. Of course this will be at additional cost.

Once the kitchen is closed at home, the wife is relieved of so many responsibilities like grocery shopping, dish-washing, cooking, vegetable cutting, garbage disposal etc. Most of the residents here are in their late sixties or early seventies. We hope to have at least 10 to 15 years of productive and high-quality living here.

Besides, this place will only be a permanent address for me. I am sure we will be making frequent visits to the places where our adult children are settled. We have multiple entry visas. We can be sponsored for Green cards but I am not considering this due to tax implications. Besides, after a few weeks in the USA, we feel homesick and want to return to India. I am not ready to spend 6 months every time I come to the USA.

Locking up our apartment and leaving the keys with the manager will take care of the apartment in our absence. No burglary or safety worries. Round-the-clock security will keep us free from crime. All monthly payments can be made online from wherever we are.

I have retired. I have plenty of time to write long posts like this.

What about my wife? I do help her in the kitchen but she too wishes to enjoy the benefits of retirement. We both have our own ways of keeping ourselves busy. This retirement home is a good solution. People wrongly confuse Retirement homes with Old age homes where abandoned seniors live out their last few years in loneliness and misery. This is far from it. It is already common in western countries. We in India are still getting used to it.

We have discussed this with our children and convinced them. Let no one feel sorry for us!

Here are a few pictures of the retirement home my wife and I are now living in. These pictures were taken by the architects of our building, Mindspace. The full set of pictures is available at their web site :

https://www.archdaily.com/901829/parkside-retirement-homes-mindspace

I have selected a few to illustrate this post.

This is the front facade of our building

This is how the rear side of the building looks like.

This is the main lobby. It is over 400 feet long and 60 feet wide.

Here is another view of the same lobby looking from the opposite end.

This is the main staircase to the first floor which we use as an amphitheater too.

This is how the lobby looks when viewed from the upper floors. There are eight floors in all.

If any person is interested in more details he/she can email me and I will respond.