Leaving or Retiring
Leaving or Retiring
NewVistas is designed to be a place people stay. But life changes — and the system has a clear, fair, and fully disclosed process for what happens when a member leaves, retires, or dies. None of it is a surprise. Every term is set out before you join.
What actually happens when you leave
When you joined, you contributed all your property to the community. That doesn’t reverse when you leave — the property stays with the community. But you don’t walk away with nothing. The value you built over your working life — your business — is yours to sell. And the money from that sale continues to flow to you after you go, paid out week by week for as long as it lasts.
There are three things to understand:
You sell your business before you leave
You don’t own the building or the equipment — the community does. But you do own your business: the customers, the reputation, the relationships, the income it produces. That is genuinely yours, and it has real value. Before you leave, you sell it to a qualified successor and receive the sale proceeds — not as a lump sum, but as an ongoing income stream that follows you out the door.
Your income continues after you leave
The sale is structured as an annuity — a percentage of your successor’s future profits, paid to you over time. Combined with the savings credit you’ve built up through years of productive work, this converts into a regular weekly payment after you depart. The amount is based on what you were earning in your final quarter, adjusted for inflation.
The terms are fixed and disclosed upfront
None of this is discretionary. The sale price formula, the payout structure, and the payment schedule are all set by community rules — not by negotiation at the time of leaving, and not subject to the community’s mood or politics. Everything you need to know about how exit works is disclosed in writing before you sign anything at entry.
How you find a buyer — and what your business is worth
This is the heart of the exit process, and it works very differently from a conventional business sale. There are no brokers, no auctions, and no private negotiations. The price is calculated by a community formula, and the buyer is found through a structured apprenticeship — not through a marketplace.
Finding the right successor
You start by bringing someone on as a full-time working partner inside your business. They learn the job by doing it alongside you — the rhythm, the customer relationships, the day-to-day decisions. You can replace them if the fit isn’t right and try again with someone else. This isn’t a weakness in the process; it’s the point. A business sale here is a long relationship, and the right fit matters far more than the speed of the deal.
Once you’re confident, your apprentice takes over completely for about six months and runs the business alone while you step back. If the business keeps producing well enough to cover both your households during that period, the sale can proceed. If not, it means the business isn’t ready to be sold at that valuation yet.
How the price is set
The price is not negotiated. It’s calculated: five times your average annual profit over the previous three years, after taxes and required contributions. The three-year average is used so that nobody can inflate the price by engineering one good year right before selling.
Say your business produces $1 million a year in profit above what you need to live on. After tax (roughly 30%) and the community’s tithe contribution, about $630,000 of that becomes kept profit each year. Your business’s sale price is five times that: approximately $3.15 million.
Your successor doesn’t pay this as a lump sum — they have no savings to draw on, because nobody in the community accumulates private cash. Instead, they pay about 25% of the business’s after-tax profit each year until the full price is met. If the business stays flat, that takes roughly 18 years. If they build it up — as most motivated successors do — it could be closer to 9 or 10 years.
Throughout those years, you receive that percentage as regular income — flowing to you wherever you are after you leave. Your household income while you’re still in the community continues exactly as it always did; the sale payment is on top of and after your own household draw, not taken from it.
The buyer pays from the business’s own profits. You receive the proceeds over time. The community’s equipment and buildings are never touched — they pass seamlessly to the successor without any transaction. What transfers is the business you built on top of them.
What you receive — and for how long
When you leave, the ongoing sale income from your successor, combined with the credit you’ve built up through years of productive work, is converted into a regular weekly payment. The starting amount is based on what you were drawing to live on in your final three months, adjusted for inflation going forward.
This payment continues until the credit runs out. It’s not a pension in the conventional sense — it doesn’t last forever regardless of what you contributed. It lasts as long as what you earned through your working life supports it. A steward with a long, productive career and a well-built business will have more accumulated credit and a larger ongoing sale income than one who left after a short time or with a smaller business.
What if I want to retire inside the community?
You don’t have to leave to retire. As your energy decreases, you can move into a lighter stewardship — less intensive, a smaller scale. The credit you’ve built up can support your household income even when current business revenue is small or absent. Many stewards transition gradually: selling a larger business to a successor, then starting something smaller and more suited to their stage of life. This is considered a normal and expected pattern, not a failure.
What happens when a steward dies?
A steward who dies inside the community doesn’t leave property to their family — because property was conveyed to the community at entry. But dependents are not left without support. Life insurance, sized to the household’s needs each quarter, covers dependents. A surviving partner who is themselves a steward continues under their own stewardship. Children and other dependents are transferred to another steward’s responsibility, with the costs covered.
Any remaining credit built up through the deceased steward’s work reverts to the community — because the community no longer owes a weekly income to someone who has died. The credit was always for living expenses, not an asset to be inherited.
How it works in common scenarios
Voluntary departure
You decide to leave. You complete the business sale process — apprenticeship, proving period, price calculation — and the ongoing income begins flowing to you. Your property stays with the community. You depart holding a regular income stream from your successor’s profits.
Involuntary removal
The community can remove a member, but only through a published process with stated grounds, the right to dispute through independent arbitration, and civil courts as a final option. Even so: your business is still sold through the normal process, and the resulting income is still paid to you in full. Removal ends your access and membership — it does not take away what you earned.
Leaving as a renter
If you’re in the early renter stage and haven’t yet become a full steward, there’s nothing complex to unwind. You simply leave. You didn’t convey property at that stage, so there’s no sale process. Your deposit and any credits are settled and you go.
Returning after leaving
If you want to return after leaving, you go through the full entry process again from the beginning — the same qualification, the same tiers, the same origination process as any new entrant. There’s no re-activation of a previous membership. Your prior property, which stayed with the community, remains with the community.
Why exit works the way it does
The exit design solves a real problem that most community systems get wrong. If people can leave and take their contributed property with them, the community’s asset base dissolves every time someone departs — which makes long-term investment in buildings, infrastructure, and productive capacity impossible. But if people leave with nothing, nobody joins in the first place.
The NewVistas answer is to separate the two things: the physical assets stay (making permanence and investment possible), while the value of the business you built leaves with you (giving you a genuine return on your working life). Your successor keeps the customers and the rhythm. You keep the income your success generated. The community keeps the land, the buildings, and the equipment. Nobody loses.
The payout is always an ongoing stream — never a lump sum. That’s not an accident. A stream is visible to civil courts. If someone left the community with unresolved obligations — a civil judgment against them — a court can attach the income stream to satisfy it. A lump sum paid into a private account is much harder to reach. Paying over time keeps the settlement honest and accountable.
Things people want to know
The full terms of the exit process — the sale requirement, the payout structure, the no-inheritance rule, and the fact that contributed property does not return — are disclosed in writing before you sign any entry agreement. Nothing here should come as a surprise. If you have questions about any of it before joining, ask them. The community’s entry documents are designed to make these terms completely clear in advance, because the agreement is binding once signed and the community wants every entrant to understand what they’re entering into.