Should You Ever Leave Your "Forever" House?

Hello friends, and welcome to Notes from the Road! Glad you're along for the ride. Each week, you'll get news, advice, tools, and inspiration to design your “years beyond careers,” whether you're traveling around the world or blazing a trail in your own backyard. In this issue:

• Moving out of your “forever” house (or not)

• Myths about working in retirement, from What Retirees Want.

• Weekly roundup worth reading.

• Video of a traffic jam on an Amsterdam canal.

• Wisdom from Morgan Harper Nichols.

Let’s get started!

This week, I attended a presentation by longevity expert Ryan Frederick on the importance of place as we age. Ryan is the CEO of Here and author of Right Place Right Time: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life. 

This is a hot topic for me. My husband and I have been exploring where we’ll go next (including a flirtation with moving overseas). A lot of that, for me, is entangled with all the emotions of leaving the places where I raised a family and built my career. And yet—nothing really fits anymore.

That’s because the idea of the “forever” house can be unrealistic, especially now. As Ryan put it, “Changes happen all over the place” at this stage of life. There are changes in:

• Marital status—divorcing after the kids leave, being widowed

• Job status—being laid off, reducing work hours, starting a new business, being on a glide path to retirement

• Health—increase or decrease on fitness and health

• Family needs—adult children coming home, caregiving responsibilities

• Current place—taxes, climate, local regulations

Adding to this, extended families are also changing. They’re smaller and more geographically dispersed. We can’t necessarily count on their support as we age.

And finally, you are changing! Are you the same person you were when you decided to live where you are now? What interests you now? What do you dislike now? What worries you? What excites you? What are you still dreaming of doing?

Your current place might not be the right fit.

My parents lived in the same house for over 50 years. Selling that house after they died was gut-wrenching. I’m emotionally anchored in a long-term mindset about place but know intellectually that it’s better to adapt to accommodate my changing needs.

Evidence backs this up. Surprisingly, about 70% of longevity is linked to lifestyle and environment. Only about 30% is linked to genetics. Place can enable (or not) nearly everything that helps us thrive as we age. It influences our:

• Social fitness (we talked about how critical this is in last week’s newsletter)

• Physical fitness

• Identity, sense of purpose, and meaning

Simply put, your place is the “canvas” upon which you create the rest of your life.

The big goal here is to delay a decline in our quality of life until we’re very late in life. We want to do well up until the very end. Many of us have witnessed a long, slow, painful decline of a parent that’s emotionally and financially draining. In the end, we want to avoid this. One way is to be in the right place for this chapter of our lives.

Interested in diving deeper? You can take stock of your current place with a free assessment from Here, and use that to guide your decision-making. Next week, I’ll share my own results.

Note: I’m not compensated for reviewing anything in this week’s issue; I’m sharing resources that I find interesting and useful and think you might, too.

Bite Sized Book Review: What Retirees Want

This week, we review Chapter 4: Putting Wisdom to Work, The New Role, Timing, and Purpose of Post-Retirement employment. 

For retirees who do take the leap, this often becomes a time for reinvention. Many start new businesses or go back to school. Between 1996 and 2018, entrepreneurship in the 55-64 age bracket increased 11% (from 15% to 26%).

Find your place here with us!

The Weekly Roundup

Worth your time to watch, read, and listen.

🖊️ We Are All On Borrowed Time. Beautiful essay on aging by our old pal Anne Lamott. (4 min. read, may be paywalled)

📰 Your Kids Don’t Want Your Stuff. Really, They Don’t. If this is you, start thinking about an exit strategy for your things. (6.5 min. read)

📰 The Big Question in Retirement: Who Am I When I’m Not Working? On the identity shift that comes with retirement, and resisting the irresistable pull to be your past self. (5.5 min. read)

🌟💡🌟Anything you’d like us to share in the Weekly Roundup? Comments, questions, suggestions on the newsletter? Let us know.

Just imagine how much fun it would be to read this every 1-2 weeks!