Arizona Retirees Call Their Pool the Most Expensive Thing They Never Used
The house with the pool was the most expensive thing the Arizona retirees ever bought. They never used the pool.
The house with the pool was the most expensive thing the Arizona retirees ever bought. They never used the pool.
That detail sits wrong. It is not a wild splurge on a sports car or a second home in the mountains. It is a feature baked into the one purchase that is supposed to simplify the rest of life. A pool is sold as part of the view, part of the climate, part of the plan. Then the plan changes, or the body changes, or the summer heat makes the water feel like a bath nobody wants. The bills do not change.
I have seen this pattern before. It shows up whenever a fixed cost gets wrapped inside a lifestyle upgrade. The upgrade feels like freedom at the signing table. The fixed cost feels like gravity later.
The math that keeps arriving
Current reporting on Arizona retirees with pools points to a simple, uncomfortable arithmetic. A backyard pool in the Phoenix area can run about $5,370 a year in ongoing costs once you count service, chemicals, power, and repairs. At a 4 percent withdrawal rate, funding that stream takes roughly $157,000 of portfolio capital set aside just for the pool. Over 25 years, that is about $134,000 in today’s dollars, not counting the equity sunk into the concrete itself.
That number lands differently when the pool sits idle. Many owners use it heavily the first spring, then watch the water climb past comfortable by July. Grandkids visit. The rest of the year, the pool is a line item that shows up whether anyone swims or not.
This is where the precedent bites. In 2008 and the years after, a wave of homeowners discovered that a mortgage could outlast their income. The pain was loud and public. What I am watching now is quieter. It is not a foreclosure notice. It is a monthly invoice for a feature that no longer fits the life being lived. The damage is slower. It is also harder to reverse.
There is a related pattern in retirement housing choices. Real estate agents say nearly 40 percent of buyers aged 60 to 74 remove their backyard pools within five years because of the upkeep. Some retirees who leave Arizona altogether cite water risk, rising insurance, and utility bills on pool homes as the real shock, not the summer heat. The pool does not cause those problems. It amplifies them.
Where the pattern holds, and where it breaks
The hold is easy to name. People buy for the life they expect, not the life they get. A pool makes sense on paper when you picture long summers, visiting family, and a body that wants to be in the water. It makes less sense when the calendar fills with travel, when the heat makes midday swimming unappealing, or when maintenance becomes one more thing to manage.
The break is also real. A pool can add resale value in some neighborhoods. In 55 plus communities, shared pools and clubhouses are bundled into HOA fees, which changes the math. If you use them, the cost per visit can be reasonable. If you do not, you are still paying.
I keep returning to the retirees who called their pool the most expensive thing they never used. That phrase is not about regret alone. It is about misalignment. The house was the right size. The location worked. The pool was the piece that did not age with them.
There is a precedent in other unused amenities. Vacation homes bought for retirement that sit empty most of the year. Spa tubs that become laundry baskets. Lofty ceilings that drive up cooling bills. The common thread is not foolishness. It is optimism about future use, paired with a fixed cost that does not care about actual use.
What comes next is not a forecast. It is a pattern speaking. If more retirees treat pools as optional rather than essential, demand may shift toward homes without them, or toward communities where the pool is shared and the maintenance is not on one household. If utility costs and water risk keep rising in parts of Arizona, the pool could move from a selling point to a negotiating line. That does not mean pools vanish. It means the price of owning one becomes more visible in the listing, not just in the monthly bill.
For the retirees in this story, the pool is already paid for in the purchase price. The question is what they do with the ongoing cost. Sell the house and reset. Fill in the pool and reduce the bill. Rent it out when they travel and let someone else use what they do not. Each path has tradeoffs. Each path acknowledges the same fact. The pool is not a mistake. It is a mismatch.
Quiet disappointment is not a verdict. It is a signal. It says the life they wanted and the life they are living are not the same. The pool makes that gap expensive. The fix does not have to be. It just has to be honest.