Moving into a smaller house once your children have grown up and flown the nest has been growing as a trend for years now, but 2017 seems to be the year of downsizing. Half of all people over the age of 65 would consider moving to a smaller home, a recent survey suggests.
This is in many ways a sensible move: If you don’t need the space to raise a family in, keeping a big home heated and it can be too expensive to justify. Without regular visits from sons and daughters who have, by now, outgrown their childhood rooms, whole areas of your house could go weeks without the door even being opened.
Downsizing is not just an economic decision: it’s also a lifestyle choice. By the time you’re looking to leave your family home, you’ll have changed a huge amount. Children will have been born, raised and left to start families of their own, and you’ll have gone from a young professional to beginning to think about retirement if you’re not retired already. Your tastes will undoubtedly have changed in the intervening decades and what was the perfect house when you moved in may now be far from your idea of heaven. Taking the opportunity to pick a new home based not just on your needs later in life but your more developed tastes and interests give you the chance to redefine your life now that it’s moving into a new phase.
For some, particularly those in retirement, this could entail a more substantial move in search of a better quality of life. If you’re free of your ties to a job and commute, your search for the life in the country you’ve always dreamed of, or perhaps move back to the city you moved out of in order to raise a family.
In a more dramatic example of downsizing, you could even choose to abandon dry land altogether and spend your retirement in cosy comfort onboard a canal boat.
One issue you will face is disposing of a lifetime’s worth of clutter: some things are easy to bin or sell, but for some more precious possessions you don’t currently have a home for but can’t face saying goodbye to forever, you may wish to look up the options for storage London has to offer. They’ll be kept safe until you’re able to accommodate them again.
