Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? A Quiz To Help You Decide When to Move After 50.

If you’re reading this, you might be poised on the edge of retirement, and it has at least crossed your mind that you might have to make one or more moves as you grow older.

Or maybe not.

Our generation is divided on the issue. Fifty-two percent of baby boomers in a nationwide survey said that they want to age in place without moving anywhere. U.S. Census data, however, show that over 2 million people aged 65+ moved from 2018 to 2019. They weren’t going too far away, however, because 58 percent moved within the same county and 81 percent moved within the same state. When you look at the numbers, most moves were made by those in the 50 to 64 age bracket, and the annual percentage of the U.S. population moving was relatively stable after age 61:

U.S. Geographic Mobility by Age: 2018 to 2019

(numbers in thousands)

AGES	TOTAL 2018-19	NONMOVERS	MOVERS	% MOVERS	SAME STATE	SAME COUNTY
50 to 54	20,355	18,925	1,430	7%	1,165	840
55 to 59	21,163	19,961	1,202	6%	959	599
60 to 61	8,343	7,933	410	5%	335	235
62 to 64	12,249	11,721	528	4%	404	304
50 to 64 subtotal	62,110	58,540	3,570	6%	2,863	1978
65 to 69	17,356	16,654	702	4%	551	410
70 to 74	14,131	13,619	512	4%	435	290
75 to 79	9,357	9,001	356	4%	286	216
80 to 84	6,050	5,856	194	3%	148	112
85+	5,893	5,631	262	4%	225	154
65 to 85+ subtotal	52,787	50,761	2,026	4%	1645	1182
grand total	114,897	109,301	5,596	5%	4,508	3,160

Source: US Census Bureau Geographic Mobility (Table 1-1): 2018 to 2019 (November 2019)

Because the share of U.S. households age 65 and over is expected to increase from 26 percent in 2018 to 34 percent in 2038, an increase in the number of people moving is also likely.

A. A Quiz to Help You Decide Whether You Should Move or Stay

Where does that leave us? I don’t know about you, but every time that I think about the time when Howie and I are not working full time, I see a large body of water in front of me and waves. There is no yard work in my dream, just dinner parties and fun and games that someone else is in charge of organizing. I think that the beach is somewhere on the East Coast where we are both originally from and where most of our family and many good friends still reside.

What we want to do, however, isn’t always consistent with our personal realities. Some of us have finite budgets. Some of us rely on certain people for their care or have people that rely on them. Even if it’s complicated, however, I think that it is important to be purposeful, practical, and strategic about planning our future after age 50.

Why? If we are not willing to plan when and where we can live while we age, someone else will do it for us potentially glazed with a little resentment. I have had multiple conversations with friends whose parents (now in their 80s) failed to plan for the day when they would need some help getting to the hospital for procedures, shoveling the steps, or safely getting in and out of the bathroom never mind the shower. Their lack of planning has led in both cases to sibling skirmishes or all-out wars over disappointed parents who are unaware of, or ill-equipped to control, the resulting dissension. Let’s not let that happen to us or our families.

To get ourselves thinking about when we should consider our next move based on factors other than a vague desire for new horizons, I’ve created this short and, hopefully, thought-provoking quiz to help you decide whether you should move or stay where you are:

What does a perfect score mean? Well, if you scored 100 percent or anywhere close, then it is time to do some serious thinking about whether your current home/community/region is still serving your needs. I scored 30 percent, which probably means that we should consider staying in our current home/area and take long vacations on the East Coast. I think that the Texas home builders might have put the master bedrooms on the first floor to make sure that we would never feel like we had to leave our home to avoid the stairs.

Is it a perfect quiz? No, we couldn’t weight the answers because it would be impossible to know how much a terrific library or being close to your grandchildren might mean to you. It is just a quiz to get us all thinking about the following important factors in deciding whether to move (even within the same general area) or age in place.

B. Factoring in Family/Friends/Community Considerations

After they weigh the pros and cons, it is not surprising that the number one reason that people move after retirement is to be closer to family. Research shows that 25 percent of baby boomers are planning to retire near their grandchildren even if it means that they’d have to move to another state, like North Carolina (Charlotte and Raleigh), Texas (Austin and Dallas), or Tennessee (Nashville). If you or your family members have the means and stamina to travel, however, it is not always necessary or desirable to live in the same area as your family.

The data documenting what retirees do all day raise other questions. For example, one study compared the top weekday and weekend activities for full-time workers compared to middle- and high-income retirees and found that after sleeping, watching television/movies, and eating/drinking, retirees spent the most time reading:

Top 5 Weekday and Weekend Activities for Retired Individuals: 2010-12

RANK	ACTIVITY	WEEKDAY AVERAGE MINUTES/DAY	ACTIVITY	WEEKEND AVERAGE MINUTES/DAY
1.	Sleeping	520.6	Sleeping	531.9
2.	Television and movies (not religious)	223.0	Television and movies (not religious)	234.1
3.	Eating and drinking	88.9	Eating and drinking	91.0
4.	Reading for personal interest	47.5	Reading for personal interest	58.3
5.	Washing, dressing, and grooming oneself	38.7	Socializing and communicating with others	46.8

Source: 2010-12 American Time Use Survey (ATUS)

My mother in her 80s reads a book a day and uses her own library card and my brother’s card to download ebooks from the library. She is constantly frustrated by the poor offerings available and would have been much happier with access to a better public library system.

After reading, retirees tend to spend their time socializing when they are not shopping, cooking, or taking care of the house. Let’s face it — your work friends may not live in the same community as you do and may not be ready to retire at the same time. You might need to develop a new set of friends for this stage of life, so it might be important for you to consider whether your community offers vibrant and convenient senior social, educational, or cultural programming (clubs/groups/senior center) that you would be interested in joining/using. You may decide to retire with a purpose by volunteering in your community and make new friends in the process. Finally, if extreme weather frustrates your ability to be social and involved in your community or you want to pursue your dream of living on a sailboat during retirement, you might be ready to make a move.

C. Factoring in Your Health Care Needs

For adults age 65 and over, falls are the leading cause of fatal and nonfatal injuries with approximately 2.8 million trips to the emergency room in 2014 alone. For adults age 65 and older, the leading causes of death in 2017 were heart disease (25.1 percent) followed by cancer (20.7 percent). Therefore, whether you should make a move also depends on whether your current home can or should be modified to prevent falls and whether it is close enough to urgent and non-urgent medical care.

Did you know that the average length of time for an ambulance to respond to a 911 call is 7 minutes in urban areas, 7.7 minutes in suburban areas, and 14.5 minutes in rural areas? When time is of the essence in treating heart attack victims, it makes sense to consider how long it might take for an ambulance to reach the hospital from your current home plus the wait time before and after that call is made.

D. Factoring in Housing/Finances

Just like Suze Orman used to say on her television show, we should prioritize “people first, then money, then things.” I’ll let that one sink in for a second before I hit you with another pithy quote that Howie likes even better: “Never love anything that can’t love you back.” Mmm, I think that he was referring to all of the stuff in our attic.

Many of us love our current homes. It is now a documented fact that the longer you stay in your family home, the harder it will be to leave it. After the age of 55, homeowners tend to consider the emotional value of the family home to be more important than its financial value making moves less likely by the age of 65.

Retirement experts have observed that, if we’re lucky, there can be two distinct stages of life as we age: (1) stage 1 between the ages of 50 and 75 with increased freedom, flexibility, and fulfillment, and (2) stage 2 after age 75 with increased dependence on others. Therefore, it is important to ask ourselves whether we really want to experience the emotional and financial (as much as 13 percent of the sales price of your home) costs of moving twice and, if not, what is our plan for stage 2?

It is also a documented fact that, once they decide to go house shopping, 30 percent of retirees wind up buying an even bigger house and 19 percent buy the same size home! If you have very little retirement savings, you might have to make difficult decisions about where you live because housing is likely to be one of your largest expenses in retirement. Note that any budget should also account for out-of-pocket health care costs. Assuming that you retire at 65 and are eligible for Medicare, men are expected to need $133,000 to cover health care costs in retirement while women will need $147,000 because they are expected to live longer.

Finally, you might have to or want to continue working for as long as you can to cover those housing and health care costs. Over twenty-five percent of the U.S. population ages 65 to 74 years old were part of the civilian labor force during 2014-2018 compared to over six percent for ages 75 and older. Nearly a quarter of all new businesses are now started by senior entrepreneurs between the ages of 55 to 64. While some people are excited to pursue an encore career after retiring from their full-time job, others are interested in part-time work to keep busy, make ends meet, or afford an expensive trip. Have you ever been to a spring training baseball game in Arizona or Florida? Did you ever notice who they hire to sell popcorn? Those part-time jobs are perfect for retirees. Whether or not your current community offers opportunities for your encore career or to pick up part-time or seasonal work after you can no longer work full-time could make a difference in your quality of life.

Conclusion

It is time to consider moving when your current home will not serve your long-term needs. What might be the easiest course of action for you today might ultimately lead to your distraught children fighting over where you wind up. You know how the song by The Clash goes: “Should I stay or should I go now? Should I stay or should I go now? If I go, there will be trouble. And if I stay it will be double.”

We created this website to help answer these and other important questions. You can find housing, downsizing, rightsizing, aging in place, renting or buying, co-living, nomadic living, communities, and assisted living resources and articles on our HOME-DECIDE page under the Housing Decisions or Housing and Care Websites tabs.

You can also find budget and retirement planning resources and articles on our HOME-DECIDE page under the Budget tab.

If you are thinking of moving, you can find U.S. and international location resources and articles on our HOME-DREAM page and health care and weather resources under the Other Resources tab. I’ve also written a series of “best places to retire” articles that you can find in our H+A ARCHIVES.

Are you looking for something else? Try our H+A RESOURCE DIRECTORY, ask us a research question using the Q+A WITH H+A request form, and/or sign up for our newsletter (see link below) to receive website updates.