July 10, 2023
The children are gone, and we knock around in the large family home. The question arises: should we downsize? And, if so, should we buy or rent? This is an agonizing decision for seniors living in single-family homes.
If you are an empty nester, what thoughts percolate through your mind pondering these questions? Assuming that you do not have to move for financial reasons, health reasons, or because the neighborhood has changed for the worse, why should you abandon the family home, why should you downsize?
Well, one reason is that you use only half the available space. By downsizing, you would pay half the heating and air-conditioning costs and would have half the space to clean and dust. Property taxes would be less. A condo would have no grass to cut and landscape to maintain; the management company would do all of those, including snow removal. These are the advantages of downsizing to a condo. And since the management company would do all interior maintenance in a rental unit, you would also be spared that activity.
So, downsizing is a solution if house maintenance becomes too onerous, or if you do not want to do it anymore. But wait! How about hiring people to clean and work in the garden? So why downsize? Let’s do some more pondering.
What do we lose when we move into a condo or apartment? Without question, we lose privacy and space and are obliged to follow the rules and regulations of the condo and apartment unit.
We are going to lose the use of the front and back yards, the long double driveway, and the wide street in front of the house. And we have less living space. Much less space, and our friends, who downsized, confided in us that they ended up buying new furniture to fit into their new living space.
Other disadvantages could be noisy neighbors above and below, the smell from their cooking penetrating your unit, especially when windows are open, and access to the unit would be via parking in the garage and then an elevator and finally a hallway instead of just entering the current family house directly from the garage, a huge advantage when carrying groceries and stuff. Should I go any further?
I can see seniors agonizing over whether or not to downsize and then whether or not to buy a condo or rent an apartment.
All these ideas were racing through my mind when I heard good friends just sold their house and rented an apartment. But something was bothering me. My reflections concerned space, privacy, and freedom of action. But what about my lifestyle in the family home that I occupied for decades? Am I going to miss the BBQs on the deck I built in the backyard? Or, sitting on the front porch with a cup of coffee in my hand watching the traffic on the street? Or my big office in the basement where I wrote a couple of books? And the other large recreation room where I practiced yoga watching the big screen TV? All these activities have acquired a familiar aura that I would throw away if moving to another place. Would I pay too high a price for moving out of our family home?
If you have lived in your home for a few decades, you have almost certainly changed your home to your taste, to your liking. The paintings, furniture, and objects in your home are expressive of your personality. The physical house becomes part of your identity, regardless of how much of it is embedded in your memory.
We are still in our family house. If we moved, I would certainly retain the knowledge of how I lived but it will not be the same as experiencing the real thing, for example, enjoying an outdoor BBQ with friends on a deck I built. I would lose part of my identity.
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