There is an interesting article at NewHome Source that discusses floor plan trends, and may be useful if you are considering building or remodeling a home in an active adult community. Planning the layout of your new home is half the fun when you are making a move, and this article cites four useful pieces of information you should consider. Site Lines. Want to make your space look bigger? Then you need to consider how you can open up the views from several different key perspectives in your home. Walling off views makes a space seem smaller. There are many professional and amateur CAD-type programs on the market that will help you visualize what certain interior perspectives will be long before the first nail is pounded. Traffic Patterns. As the NewHome article states: "The success of a floor plan isn't judged by how it looks when you're standing still or seated. The true measure of a floor plan is how you move through it." This requires not only looking at the floor plan, but really walking it in your mind to understand how the space will function.

Moving. Everyone has to do it sooner or later. And while the end result is usually filled with excitement, the process itself is often faced with angst. It doesn't have to be that way. There are several ways to defang the moving monster. A good place to start is with the 12-point tip list at About.com. The lesson here seems to be if you spend a little time upfront on planning your move, it will save you a lot of time and frustration when it's time to unpack and move into your new home.

According to a story earlier this year in the Chicago Tribune, people ages 55 or more will account for 20 percent of this country's new home sales. The information comes from the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). The article points out some other surprising facts. Most people would assume that the 55+ crowd is in a downsizing mode, but the truth of the matter is that often 55+ buyers who make the move into an age-restricted community are actually looking to buy a bigger home and better quality. Other new home features that are important to buyers in active adult communities include:

Whether people use a financial planning professional or choose a do-it-yourself route, the motivating factor for at least long-term financial planning is often retirement. However, retirement can mean a lot of different things to different people. For some it means stopping work completely. For others it may mean not having to work, but choosing to continue part- or full-time work doing something else they enjoy. And yet others may opt for a lifestyle choice that dictates working beyond what is considered a "normal" retirement age. No matter what the goal or motivation, most long-term savings plans simply boil down to creating peace of mind and increasing the range of options available to you in later years.

When many people first hear about "active adult communities" their first assumption is that these are places where people buy a home strictly for retirement. While it is true that many people who do live in this type of community are retired, the fact of the matter is that quite often more than half of the people who live in these developments are still working (see Newsweek story). This makes sense when you think that everything that makes an active adult community ideal for retirees, also makes it appealing to anyone who may be roughly age 55 or more. Those benefits include more like-minded neighbors, leisure opportunities, group activities, fitness facilities, and plenty of options to help take care of yard work and other house upkeep demands.