3 Reasons to Stay in Your Home Through Retirement

Retirement is a time of great change, and many people aren't fully prepared for it. Indeed, when you stop working, your daily routine changes in ways you may not expect. Adding a massive thing like selling your home and moving to a new location, such as sunny Florida or Arizona, could add even more stress to an already complicated life transition. Here are three big-picture reasons why you may want to delay such a move.

1. You may have more financial flexibility than you think

One of the biggest reasons to move in retirement is to downsize. It is highly likely that the space you needed to raise a family is no longer being fully utilized. So, in many ways, it makes financial sense to move into a smaller home. And moving to a region with more attractive tax dynamics, such as Florida, which doesn't have a state income tax, could leave you with more spending power.

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However, if you have paid off your mortgage, you've already materially reduced your living expenses. That freed-up cash may actually make staying in your home more feasible than you think. And you avoid all of the costs of moving, from real estate agent commissions to hiring a moving company. Downsizing to a low-tax state may still make sense financially, but it may not be as necessary as you think from a financial perspective. And when you add in points two and three below, it may not be desirable even if moving can lower your living costs.

2. Moving means rebuilding your life

For some people, a big move is an exciting opportunity to become a different person. For most, however, a move will just mean living in a new place, which has material implications. For example, you likely have friends and a support network where you currently live. When you move, that network disappears. The social change of stopping work is material enough; moving away from friends adds to the complexity of the emotional transition.

However, there's more than just your friends to consider. You also have to find new stores to shop in and, increasingly important in retirement, new service providers for your healthcare needs. Depending on your health situation, moving may not be in your best interests if you have a good healthcare system where you currently live.

There are a lot of moving parts, including emotional ones, when you retire or move. Doing both at the same time could be taking on too much. At the very least, you may want to consider retiring in place for a while before deciding whether to move.

3. Aging in place is increasingly easy to do

Healthcare continues to advance at an incredible pace. Illnesses that might have put you into a nursing home decades ago can now be dealt with medically in your own home. From in-home care to improved medicine and remote monitoring, aging in place is more feasible than ever.

To be fair, depending on where you live, you may need to make some home modifications. But those, too, are increasingly common. That can mean simple things like adding safety bars to your bathroom or more complex things, like access ramps and elevator systems. But the big story is that moving to a more age-friendly home may not be as necessary as it was for even your parents. And since you are likely comfortable in the home you own, moving to ease your retirement years may not be something you want to take on right away.

There is a lot going on under the surface

From a big-picture perspective, the reasons for not moving listed above fall into the financial, social, and healthcare spaces. But each one of these topics has multiple sub-topics that you need to think about. Moving is a complex decision, let alone moving after you retire, which is itself a complex life change.

Moving may be the right decision for you. But it is one that you should make after carefully considering the implications. In the end, you may decide to delay the decision or to simply stay where you are indefinitely.

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