Downsizing seniors need a nudge
When you’ve been in the same home for 40 or 50 years, stuff tends to pile up.
Over the years, mementoes and bric-a-brac gather in dusty corners of basements, attics, garages, spare rooms, cupboards and closets, everything from boxes of forgotten family photos to unused bins of camping equipment and children’s old toys.
One day you’ll go through it all, you promise yourself. You’ll have a big garage sale. You’ll box the best of it up and give it to the kids. You’ll donate the rest to charity. One day.
Days have a way of running out. Wait too long, and when “one day” comes, you may be physically incapable of making it down the stairs to the basement or lifting heavy boxes of books. Financial difficulties, illness, injury or death may impose new deadlines, adding another layer of stress to an already overwhelming task.
Many seniors prefer to stay in the family home as long as possible. It’s familiar, comfortable and (hopefully) paid off. But without the momentum of an impending move, it’s all too easy to put off planning for the inevitable day when circumstances force a change.
For Stefanie Cadou, one of a small but growing subset of real estate agents, who work specifically with seniors who are transitioning into retirement, the question of what to do with all that “stuff ” is all too often the elephant in the room when she first meets with new clients.
“More often than not, they still have everything,” said Cadou. “It’s much easier to close the door and ignore it than address it. They wait until they have no choice but to move, and it makes them reactive rather than proactive.”
Cadou said the average age of her clients is about 83. Many are overwhelmed by the idea of sorting through 60 or more years’ worth of stuff. In some cases they are also no longer physically able to manage it.
Cadou often brings in decluttering specialists and movers, and even home stagers to offer advice on which furniture to bring to their new home.
Home maintenance is another chore that often gets away from people as they age, Cadou said, and not always because they don’t know how to do it or can’t afford it. In some cases, physical limitations mean they can’t even see what needs fixing anymore.
“The older my clients, the more repairs we see,” Cadou said. “I have clients who haven’t been in their basement for 10 years. They don’t know what’s going on in the basement. There could be a massive leak in the foundation and they wouldn’t know.”
And then the really big job: figuring out what’s next.
For Cadou, that’s where her husband, Matt Del Vecchio, comes in. His company, Lianas Services, specializes in finding placements for seniors in retirement homes, a service that Cadou said is free in Quebec. Just as a mortgage broker is paid by the bank when a client signs for a mortgage, companies like Lianas are paid a commission by retirement residences once a lease is signed.
“In Quebec, all residences work this way,” Cadou said. “We’re not biased in any way. We really focus on finding the right residence for the client, not just who pays us, because they all do.”
But for some seniors, although they may accept the need to sell the family home for health or other reasons, they still may not feel ready to move into a retirement home. It doesn’t matter that many of these residences are more like Club Med than the stereotypical old folks’ home. They just aren’t ready to go.
“In some cases it’s a struggle because they should be in a residence for the level of care they need, but psychologically they’re not there yet,” said Cadou. “We need to respect everybody’s speed and readiness to make the move.”