Thinking About Downsizing

Why the decision to downsize is so difficult, and why most people tend to stay.

I recently heard the story of a couple who had decided to stay. They loved their house and had thought carefully about their future in it. The only obstacle they could see was a steep flight of stairs, so they installed a very neat little lift. It was a well considered decision that took the one thing that might have forced them to move and removed it.

Then he unexpectedly died. He was in his nineties but was strong and active, still on top of the garden, still doing everything that needed doing to keep a large home running. Over the years she had been the one with health problems, and they had both assumed she would go first.

She now lives there alone, in a house that was never a problem while there were two of them.

When the question of moving comes up, she says it’s too late.

Often people stay in their homes because it is too complicated to think about moving, but this couple had thought carefully about their future, they had identified the only thing stopping them staying in their home and addressed it.

But the decision rested on the assumption that they would face the years ahead as a couple, and that if one of them were left on their own, it would be him.

The stairs were a real problem and the lift answered it. What went untested was a deeper question: does this plan survive one of us? And they assumed the answer to that one, it just played out another way.

I’ve had a version of this conversation many times now. It’s not an easy one, mostly because none of us can see the future, and it’s hard to plan for a thing you can’t see.

Most people I speak to can describe their situation perfectly well. The house is too big. The garden is too much, or will be. The stairs are a potential future problem. The location means a car trip for everything. They can lay all of it out clearly, but they love their home, so the decision goes in the too-hard basket.

Because a house you’ve lived in for thirty-odd years holds things a newer, more sensible one won’t. The pencil marks up the door frame. The table that has hosted every Christmas since the children were little. It also holds proof that you can still run a large home, and the running of it is part of what keeps you active. And for some people it holds a set of conditions that are genuinely hard to find anywhere else: a view, the quiet of not being overlooked, no one else’s window facing yours.

None of that is sentiment, and it isn’t stubbornness. It’s a real reading of what would actually be lost.

The other pattern I see is couples who want different things.

Usually one of them is ready. Often they’ve been de-cluttering cupboards for years, getting rid of things that are no longer needed, downsizing the belongings as a way of avoiding the overwhelm as the years go on. The other is happy where they are, and thinks it can be made to work. The ready one makes the practical case: it’s too much, the stairs, what happens if one of us is left alone. The anchored one hears the argument and can’t see a version of the answer that would also be good for them. So the conversation goes nowhere, for years, until time and circumstance decide instead.

I saw this play out with my grandparents, even though I was young and I’m sure not aware of the whole picture. He wanted to move somewhere smaller with people around him; he was sociable and I can imagine would have thrived in somewhere like an over-fifty-fives. She was reserved and creative and needed her own space, and she loved the peace of that house. Neither of them was being unreasonable. They simply never found a third thing.

He died first. She lived with family in an arrangement that didn’t really work, and then went into care when it all became too hard. Looking back, what I notice isn’t that she wasn’t stubborn. It’s that the only two options ever put on the table were his and hers.

When someone says we can’t see ourselves moving, I think it should be taken quite literally. It’s not that they don’t want to move. It’s that they can’t picture it, there’s no image in their mind of a life that isn’t this one, so the alternative doesn’t quite exist, and nothing that doesn’t exist can be chosen.

This is where most of these conversations get stuck. Not on the decision, but on having nothing to decide between.

People tend to hold three options in their heads: stay, a village, or a unit in town. Those are the three that present themselves. If none of them fit, the conclusion is that nothing fits. But there’s usually a fourth, and nobody is selling it as a ready to go option: a smaller house on a small block, near the people you’d want to see, holding the few things you couldn’t do without. The catch is that it has to be chosen while there is still the energy, and appetite, for a renovation.

So the question isn’t where should we go. It’s what would we not give up and then, separately, where else could each of those things be found.

Years ago we lived for a while in the mountains of Extremadura, in Spain. Our only neighbour was a farmer who had grown up in the village below and spent his whole working life on the mountain. He kept goats and pigs, farmed cherries, figs, chestnuts and pumpkins, made a goats cheese every morning and hung chorizo to cure in his shed though winter. He had no interest in living in the village. But he owned a small house down there all the same, for when he might need it.

This was a very natural plan. He hadn't waited for the property to become a problem. The next chapter was already there for when he needed it. He had thought about the future while he still had every option and no need for them.

In Australia a plan like this is harder than it sounds. In Europe people live closer together, in appartments and townhouses in cities and villages where there are shops, medical centres, and friends just a walk away. If you do live on a property out of town, you move into the village when the distance or workload becomes too much. Here we have built sprawling suburbs instead: beautiful gardens, a deck, a shed to tinker in, a real connection with the outdoors and a car trip to almost everything. Unless you are willing to move into an apartment, the smaller house near everything you know is in short supply. This option does exist, but you have to go looking for it, and early.

When there’s no plan, a crisis supplies one. A fall, failing eyesight, being left living alone, something that arrives and settles the matter. But by the time that happens, the decision is being made for you, and usually quickly, by people who love you and are frightened. That’s how someone ends up somewhere nobody chose.

The real deadline is earlier: the point where you still have every option and the full say in which one you take.

None of this is an argument that you should move. Most older Australians stay where they are, and a house that suits you, in a place you love, near people who’d notice if you didn’t appear for a day, there’s no improving on that. Often the money is better spent making that house work than on leaving it.

What I’d want for anyone is simply that it was chosen. There’s a real difference between deciding to stay and never quite getting round to deciding.