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As I’ve talked about recently I’m currently at my holiday home but strangely I’m thinking about my other house. I wanted to share something that’s been on my mind a lot lately, a kind of internal debate, I’m good at them! My wife, Suzie and I are in our late 50s, and we’ve reached a point where we feel it’s starting to feel important to get ahead of the curve and plan for our future living situation, rather than being forced into a decision down the road.
Our current home, in many ways, seems absolutely perfect for “aging in place.” Two of its four bedrooms and a full bathroom are on the ground floor. That’s a huge plus for peace of mind about accessibility later on. We also get to enjoy spacious living spaces including a large sunroom with a log burner, which is a fantastic spot to cozy up in the winter. Location-wise, it’s pretty ideal: we’re just minutes from a regular public transport stop and only a 15-minute walk from a hospital with a primary care facility on the same plot.
But then we have the half-acre garden. This big space, with its lawns, shrub borders, flower beds, and mature trees, was a massive selling point when we bought the place 20 years ago. It was perfect for our young girls and still gets plenty of use from the grandkids. Still, as I look ahead 15 or 20 years, the thought of the sheer maintenance demands of such a large garden is becoming concerning. It’s a lot of work that at the moment I enjoy.
Beyond the garden, there’s the age of the house itself, pushing 75 years now. Even though we’ve put a lot of effort into updating the interior over the last five years, ongoing upkeep is a constant task. And I know, deep down, that major remodeling is probably inevitable at some point. That thought alone makes the idea of a newer, smaller place with a more manageable garden (yard for our Mr Quinn 😉) sound incredibly appealing.
Despite how much we like our current home, the question of when to potentially move to a slightly smaller property with less garden keeps coming up in my head. There’s no right answer, but now feels like a good time to tackle it.
My thinking is it’s better to be proactive rather than reactive. This means we can manage any potential move in a way that suits us, without the stress of finding we need to move at a future time
There’s also the minor, but still welcome, benefit of equity release. Moving to a smaller home would free up a reasonable sum of capital. What’s not to like about extra cash?
So, essentially, I’m caught between the comfort and memories tied to our current home and the practical realities of future maintenance and our long-term lifestyle goals. I don’t envision moving before the next five years but you just never know.
I’m curious to hear from others who have gone through similar decisions. What factors weighed most heavily for you when considering a big change like this?
I sold my ranch house after the passing of my husband. It was the yard. The weeding was breaking my back. I am kind of homeless, renting. My advisor says I have accumulated enough to rent for life if that’s what I want. I love the apartment complex with its club room and swimming pool, the lovely leasing office, the concierge service and the maintenance crew that take care of my orchids when I travel (a lot). But I am getting somewhat tired of the rapid turn-over among my young neighbors. I worry that an older community might also have some turn over (the sad kind). I’d like to hear from some unfortunately single folks about their experience with moving. and with CCRC.
I have been happily single for many years. When I still had a house I employed a yard service (and a cleaner).
I spent a year in an apartment complex between selling my house and moving to a CCRC. It was a nice complex when I moved in, but was soon sold and the new management was terrible. Also, you never know what will happen with rents.
I have written before about choosing a CCRC, and my experience after the first few months. More than a year after writing the second article I am still very happy with my choice. Yes, people do die, sometimes someone you know well. This is a big CCRC, and we seem to lose two to four people a month, although at this stage there have only been a handful I knew well. They are recognized at the monthly Residents Association meeting, and information on funerals, memorial services, etc. is made available.
The advantages of a CCRC far outweigh the inevitable sadness in my view. How will you cope if you can no longer drive? Need assistance with daily living?
We had our “age in place” home built two years ago, and then my husband passed three months after we moved in. The house has plenty of room for daughters, spouses/partners and grand dogs to visit. There is some light yard work. (I pay to have the lawn cut.). But I am not the gardener. My husband was. There are other things I would prefer to do with the time I have left (I am 73) than yard work. I will figure out what to do about the yard work as I go along.
Nearing retirement, we sold our home and moved to a 1100 sq ft apartment as I was still working and needed to be close to new place of work. Big surprise: Never missed the big house and garden! After that, we moved to a 55+ community and are quite happy with the social network and amenities. Plan to live here as long as we can independently manage. We will move to be close to our children if we need assisted living or memory care. Visited many of these facilities and made a short list. We plan to enjoy life for now with fingers crossed and try to run the clock out..
Your situation sounds very similar to ours except we are 75/78. We built our custom-designed “age in place” house in 2014, one year after I retired. It is basically our dream house with cathedral ceiling, sun room, and all rooms are functional (no dining or living room that never gets used). Everything is on one floor, no transitions, all hardwood or smooth tile flooring with wider hallways and doorways. We built an oversized garage for a wheelchair lift or can accommodate a (10:1 slope) ramp inside the garage with no transition into the house. While we haven’t implemented it yet, we also allocated space to install a personal elevator (large enough to accommodate a wheelchair) to get to the walk-out basement
Our previous house that we lived in for 25 years had a nice (small) garden with a 500-gal pond (goldfish only). I built a small gazebo facing the pond and added a solarium on the house so that we could enjoy the garden (with multiple bird feeders). When we built our new home, my wife wanted to recreate a similar garden. However, we overachieved. The pond is now about 5,000 gallons (with a five-foot cascading waterfall) and has over 30+ koi and goldfish. Our garden is roughly 1.5 acres and includes a 900 sq ft vegetable garden area. I designed it as a Japanese garden and also built an Oriental style (open-air) covered sitting area in the garden that overlooks the pond. There is even a rock garden. I have gravel pathways that wind through the various trees and shrubs. It is quite beautiful but controlling the weeds have definitely put a damper on having such a large garden. For the moment, I have hired a gardener to help with weeding (but it gets expensive). In the fall, I also get help with raking, although my zero-turn mower with mulching blades does most of the work. I just need help getting the leaves out between the bushes so they don’t find their way into the pond. I also get help with annual mulching, although I am systematically getting rid of mulching by planting more (controllable) ground cover and perennials.
I do wonder what would happen if I am no longer able to do the simpler maintenance. For now, hiring help has been a solution. Working in the garden is also helping me stay in shape since I typically go out, at least, three times a week. I also suffer from arthritis and not sure how much longer I can do the simpler stuff.
My wife and I have discussed what might happen when one of us passes. We both agreed that the surviving spouse will most likely move to a continuing care retirement community (CCRC). We had visited and interviewed several in our area. As we approach 80, we are seriously considering putting our names on a waitlist. If we get to the head of the list but are not ready to make the move, we can ask to be put on the bottom of the waitlist again.
… we can ask to be put on the bottom of the waitlist again.
In some CCRCs if you are at the top of the list and decline an offer, you remain at the top of the list for future offers.
I recommend joining a list soon. With so many boomers retiring, waitlists are growing fast. At my CCRC of 350 residents, I recently heard our waitlist is already over 1000.
Mine too. I recommend signing up in your mid-60s.
Hi Snak123. We had similar circumstances with our homes, and a nice garden. At 74 we made the big move and downsized from our 3000 sq ft home to our 2000 sq ft apartment at a CCRC. My suggestion is you start looking now, as they are very popular these days, we reviewed 10 different places. It is OK to make the decision earlier, making it later could cause more difficulties. CCRC’s are very comfortable, I compare it to a Cruise Ship, all the activities you would like, great friends and meeting many new ones, they feed you daily in the Dining room, and other eating choices, swimming pool, and no sea sickness, and you know your docking city. Best to you both.
Well, since we’re presently full time nomads, it’s highly unlikely we’ll age in our current place – we have none.
That said we do think about this. If and when we do get a fixed home again, we’ll think about ability to age in it, but that won’t be the driving factor. We could be prepared to buy a place knowing we wouldn’t live there permanently. We’ve also gotten ourselves on two CCRC lists. That’s not a decision to live there, just insurance.
We think about this because of our parents too. We have two who are settled into CCRCs and two more who will barely talk about it.
We married at 74; now we celebrate our 82nd birthdays this year just after we make our third move together. Having said that, I believe at mid 50s you can delay for a few years making decisions about what to do with your existing home – enjoy the garden and sleep soundly.
55+ home trend is not going away. We chose that community at age 80 and it has been just right. We are even downsizing within that community. I should note that neither one of us have a strong need to be within 30 minutes of our kids or grandkids. The USA is well connected with airports and 5G.
We are pleased to be able to travel and lock the door behind us as we leave. Not for everybody, but works for our lives now.
We went through the same thought process 15 years ago and decided to downsize. I was more of the driver than my husband. Our home was 30 years old with 15 acres and was requiring more and more maintenance. Still it was where we went fishing with the grandkids, built forts, and caught fire flies at night.
It took 3 years to find our lakefront property and another 4 years before we built our home. We tried to make sure everything was low maintenance, including the landscape. We added the ‘aging in place’ features (no step entry, main level bedrooms, wider hallways/doors, walk-in shower w/grab bars, etc.) in case that was an option. We also have services budgeted that we’ll need as we age (appliance maintenance, lawn care, home/window cleaning, snow removal, etc.) We live less than 10 minutes from 3 of our 4 kids, and the big perk is that we see them and the grandkids more often.
We’ve lived here for 5 years and are very grateful we made the move. We live a half mile from a 2600 park and walk a trail every afternoon. We have yet to explore all the trails. It was A LOT of work, so I’m glad we did it while we were ‘young’. And BTW, we are still selling/donating stuff… 🙂
My husband and I downsized several times before moving into my current home, which is small, with an medium-sized yard that’s easily maintained, However, I’m a two hour drive from the nearest of my three children. At 74 and in good health, I can probably stay here for another 10 years or so, if my health and cognitive abilities allow it. But I fully intend to eventually move much closer to my daughter and into a small apartment. With that in mind, I continue the process of weeding out and foremost, fine tuning financial and estate documents, should a sudden change occur.
Mark,I wrote about my dilemma here. I derive immense satisfaction from caring for my place and living in a peaceful setting. But my time here is limited without hired labor to help with the upkeep. My 19-year-old daughter also loves our home,and I’d love to turn it over to her, but who knows where her life will lead? I’m still working on the answers myself.
That’s such an enjoyable read, thanks for the link. The joys of aging loom closer by the day.
Thanks for the kind words. I’ve heard some say the greatest joy of an aging body is moving our mind toward the point of finally letting go.
A tale of two sisters:
I lived alone in a three bedroom house with the full baths upstairs. The year I spent on the couch after my rheumatoid arthritis came out of remission reminded me that aging in place would involve too many stairs. I’d also be stuck if I couldn’t drive. Add in the age of the house and the constant maintenance and I started looking at options. Four years later I moved into my retirement community.
My elder sister, in England, lived alone in a four bedroom house with all full baths upstairs after her husband died. Three years ago, in her eighties, she had a stroke, but refused to move. She was unable to cope properly with her house or her finances. She wound up back in the hospital recently and finally agreed to move to more suitable housing, but my younger sister and her husband are having a lot of trouble cleaning up the house and sorting out her accounts and her taxes. If she had moved even three years ago things would be much simpler.
Aging in place may work for a time, but it is liable to burden other people.
My grandmother lived alone in a large Edwardian home in a remote corner of Devon. Before my grandfather died, they looked at moving, but never pulled the trigger. By the time my grandmother died, the house was in such bad shape — mold, damp spots on the ceiling — that the buyers tore down the place and built an entirely new house. It was a sad end to a home that held so many memories.
That is sad. I don’t think my sister’s house is too bad, but it sounds like a new fridge would be a good idea. A worse problem is five years of not filing taxes.
We’re at the thinking-about-it stage now. While I like our house, and we’ve been here for 24 years, it’s too big for the two of us, and I’d rather live somewhere I can easily access hiking and biking trails. It’s also a split-level, so there are a lot of steps.
At first, I was thinking we’d pick a location we both liked and buy a house, but now I’m thinking we may just rent. We could sell our house, invest the proceeds, and pull 4-5% of it every year to pay rent while preserving the capital.
Renting has its advantages. If we end up not liking a place, we won’t be locked into it for more than a year. We could pick up and go if we want to. We could also just start house hunting if we really like the area and decide to buy.
Stuff is an issue. For me, it’s mostly books. I’ve been going to the attic and boxing up at least ten boxes of books every few months and donating them to our local library’s book sale, and I guess I’ll keep doing that until I go through all the shelves at least once.
We moved from our home of 20+ years where we’d raised our kids in 2019 when we were 59. We had similar reasons—our house was getting older and needed (even more) work—and we wanted less household maintenance and responsibility, including the yard. A new condo development was opening in our town, and everything was new and up-to-date and beautiful. We weighed the cost, effort, and disruption of updating different parts of our house or simply moving into a brand-new place where everything was already done.
Similar to you, we didn’t have to move. Our house was one-story and on a quiet cul-de-sac and not overwhelmingly large. We could have aged in place there. It really was about wanting something newer and lower-effort for our go-go years.
Striking how much our motivations for moving align. Age-specific drivers, I guess.
One thing that MAY influence your is how much ‘stuff’ you have.
Our kids wanted very little of what we had. Which, I understand is normal for boomer couples.
We ended up donating a huge amount of ‘stuff’ to local charities would accept it.
Other ‘stuff’ ended up costing us money to be removed … likely just to a local landfill.
We had to cull our books. That was the hardest thing for me.
My wife went through our cooking ‘stuff’ which was, I think, tough for her.
My unasked for advice to anyone planning to move from their forever home to a smaller, single level residence, … start throwing ‘stuff’
out RIGHT NOW!
This is really good advice. When we moved six years ago, we spent several months getting rid of stuff in the house we’d lived in for over 20 years. We were moving from a 4BR house with a two-car garage and lots of storage to a 3BR condo with more limited storage. We decided from the beginning that we were not getting a storage unit and that the only stuff making the move would have to fit comfortably into the condo. We got rid of tons of stuff and made our adult daughters come and take what they wanted to keep. It was a lot of work at age 59, and I thought more than once how much harder it would have been at 15-20 years older.
I’m like your wife. I want all the cooking stuff and don’t want to get rid of any of it. That’s my next project as a newly retired person—pare down the cooking stuff. I like books, too, and I brought home from my university office one copy each of my own books and edited collections that I have a chapter in. As for other books, unless it’s got some special significance (e.g., the first editions of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Little House books that I received as a child), I read on my Kindle.
One of my tasks at the small college I worked at was to ‘clean out’ the offices and laboratories of the professors once they retired. It might sound a bit heartless but I was pretty good at doing it because I didn’t have any attachment to the papers, books, file folders, equipment, etc. that were left behind.
I can’t even begin to count the number of times I would come across pieces of equipment–stuffed away in the far corners of cupboards and shelves–that had pieces of tape on them reading, “DOES NOT WORK”. It was clear some of the items had been hidden away for decades.
During our last move 20 years ago we threw so much “stuff” away. Now we try to be mindful of what we accumulate.
Yes! We see so many garages in our community that are filled with ‘stuff’. Inevitably there is an estate sale followed by the delivery of an extra-large dumpster. “Stuff” is only worth something if someone is willing to pay for it. It seems to me like most people seriously overestimate how much their own stuff is worth.
If one of you had a sudden change in your mobility, it sounds like you could remain in your present home without difficulty while looking for a one level home. In my case, we love our home but the bedrooms are on the second level and bathrooms are not accessible. We have casually looked at some other properties in our city, but ironically those we like cost more not less. I think we should do it, but inertia is powerful.
I had that problem with my mum. Because of needs we decided on an actual elevator. Solved the problem but was a bit of an eyesore.
We’ve already decided on an elevator, if and when I need it. We took our house plans to an installer and picked out the location in the corner of the dining room. It should be affordable and it will satisfy my determination to NEVER MOVE AGAIN.
While my parents were still alive, they installed a chair lift. And a different relative had an elevator. Both were a bit of an eyesore, but it was worth with it to them.
I’ve written a few pieces about our choice to move to a 55+ community when I retired. We purchased the home in 2019 and moved in full-time in 2022.
At the time we purchased the house, I didn’t fully realize all the ‘benefits’ that it came with. There were obvious things at first–all the houses in the community (about 18,000 or so) are single level. All were built with accessibility in mind–all the showers came with grab bars and the hallways and doors could be accessed with wheelchairs, etc.
The yards are all low maintenance (we live in Arizona). Gravel is the land-covering of choice. Most of the lots are fairly large (ours is 10,000 square feet). The community itself has three grocery stores, three fire stations, a full-service hospital with ER service and numerous restaurants, shops and medical offices. There’s a library, four dog parks, four recreation centers and a volunteer Posse who provide a neighborhood watch program.
What I’ve only recently learned about is the amount of community support that exists. For those who want to age in place, there are plenty of resources available to them. Transportation services. Welfare check services. Meals on Wheels programs. There’s even a “Community Fund” that will cover the bills/expenses for residents who can’t financially cover emergencies.
If someone needs help moving something or doing yard work, a single post on one of the various community Facebook pages inevitably ends up with multiple residents offering to help. Even the mail-delivery folks watch out for residents. Our mail-person stopped to talk to us the other day because she was concerned that our neighbor hadn’t picked up his mail for a few days.
It’s been an interesting transition for us since where we came from, we had neighbors who would hide if they saw us walking by. We also don’t miss the sound of screaming children, garage bands and construction noise that permeated our old neighborhood.
Sounds like a wonderful community. Well thought out and planned. Your in a great position, excellent forward planning Kristine.
Not in the same position but it’s a fair question to be able to avoid too much property drag late in life.
I can base my perspective on looking at my mother who still lives in our old family house of a very similar era to yours and which is almost certainly too big for her. It has a lovely garden (which has substantially recovered over the decades since 2 boys routinely destroyed grass and smashed floral borders with footballs and cricket/tennis balls) and while she has a contractor who helps out 2 X monthly in summer she still keeps active doing stuff there.
Our overall family perspective is that there would be a lot of stress to declutter and sell/move to somewhere probably not as nice to probably release not much equity which she doesn’t need anyway. Probably easier at this stage to just rent some skips when she is gone.
And it is pretty future proofed thanks to a stairlift we put in for my dad in his final year, good neighbours who look out for her etc.
My conclusion – even leaving it too late to move is not fatal. You are far too young IMV to proactively take a downsize yet unless your home was only ever a geographic convenience for work. You don’t write about planning globetrotting 6 months per year nor moving to your holiday home permanently (which would be perfectly logical reasons to sell up now). I’d keep it going, perhaps with a commitment that you wouldn’t spend on a major remodel (after all buyers like to have their own things to do to “add value” and if you don’t need the stress why bother)? . But obviously opinions on these things vary.