Most adults over 55 are sitting on more wealth in their walls than in their retirement accounts—and it feels safer to just stay put “a little longer.” In this episode of Next Act Ninjas, Rachael Van Pelt, PhD, breaks down why waiting to rightsize your home until your 70s or 80s is often the riskiest move on the board.
Most adults over 55 are sitting on more wealth in their walls than in their retirement accounts—and it feels safer to just stay put “a little longer.” In this episode of Next Act Ninjas, Rachael Van Pelt, PhD, breaks down why waiting to rightsize your home until your 70s or 80s is often the riskiest move on the board.
You’ll hear the story of two similar couples who make very different choices: one defers everything until 75, the other rightsizes during their Go-Strong decade. Same starting point, completely different outcomes for stress, mobility, and money.
Rachael unpacks the hidden costs of delaying a move: rising maintenance and repair bills, creeping utilities, taxes, and insurance, plus the huge opportunity cost of keeping more than half of your net worth trapped in your walls instead of working for you. You’ll also learn how market risk, sequence-of-return risk, and the “comfort trap” can quietly crush the retirement you thought you were protecting.
Rachael walks you through practical steps to get out of passive waiting and into strategic action: how to calculate your true housing cost, assess how concentrated your wealth is in your home, and use your Go-Strong years to design a home and lifestyle that support the next 20–30 years—before a health event or crisis forces your hand.
Whether your best move is to sell and buy something easier to live in, unlock equity with a reverse mortgage, or turn your current home into an income-producing asset, this episode will help you see the real trade-offs of “rightsizing now vs. later” so you can protect both your healthspan and wealthspan.
Next steps:
👉 Take the free Rightsizing Readiness Quiz https://bit.ly/4aiIBxx
Find out where you are on the spectrum from “we’re fine for now” to “we’re cutting it close.” You’ll get tailored results plus the option to book a Rightsized Home & Health Review with Rachael to run your numbers and map out your next move.
👉Save the date for our next Rightsize Without Regret Workshop https://www.rightsizeretirement.com/
Chapters
00:00 The Risks of Waiting to Rightsize
01:39 Two Couples, Two Timelines: Rightsizing Now vs Waiting to 75
04:01 Your Go-Strong Decade: When Health and Wealth Curves Cross
04:59 The “Paid-Off” Myth: Why Your Forever Home Isn’t Low-Cost
05:23 Hidden Money Leaks: Repairs, Taxes, Insurance, and Utilities
06:51 Understanding Opportunity Costs
08:01 Market Risk and Sequence-of-Return Risk: The Double Hit of Delaying
09:34 Execution Costs: Decluttering, Moving, and the High Price of Overwhelm
10:54 Cognitive Load and Comfort Traps: Why Future You Won’t Want This Job
12:43 Passive vs. Strategic Waiting
13:37 Action Steps: Calculating True Housing Costs and Equity Concentration
17:04 Thought Experiment: Crisis Move vs Planned Rightsizing Timeline
18:59 Next Steps: Rightsizing Readiness Quiz & Rightsized Home and Health Review
Hey, hey, welcome back to Next Act Ninjas, the go-to podcast for mastering your health and wealth longevity. I'm your host, Rachael Van Pelt. Today, I want to poke at one of the most common assumptions that I hear from smart, responsible adults over 55. The assumption goes a little something like this. "We're just going to wait to move. Doesn't make sense to do anything big right now.
We'll wait until we really have to move". Now on the surface, that sounds prudent, doesn't it? It sounds conservative. It sounds like the financially responsible thing to do. But what if I told you that for many people, waiting is actually the most irresponsible and risky move on the board? What if the hidden costs of staying put quietly pile up until they start crushing the retirement you thought you were protecting. That's what we're going to unpack today, rightsize now versus later, and the hidden costs that quietly erode your freedom, your flexibility, and your finances.
But before we dive in, a quick reminder to save the date for the next Rightsize Without Regret workshop. I'm going to be offering another one next month. It's a great chance for you to take an honest look at your health, your current home fit, home equity, like it's an integrated system. So you can make a plan that supports your best Next Act. Register for free at rightsizeretirement.com and grab a free copy of my Rethinking Retirement Guidebook while you're there.
Okay, so let's start off by comparing two couples. Two couples in their mid- to late- 60s who find themselves in a similar situation. One couple says, "Let's stay put, at least until age 75. The house is paid off, the kids love it, we know the neighbors, why would we want to stir the pot"? They decide to kick the can down the road, opting for status quo.
Another couple has a similar house, similar neighborhood, the same sentimental attachments to that house. But they sit down and ask each other the uncomfortable question. They ask, "When we look forward 10 years, do we see this house still supporting the life we want"? This couple can plainly see that physically and financially, answer is probably no. So instead of waiting, they decide to "rightsize" while they are still in their Go-Strong years, while they still have the energy to make the move on their own terms.
Now when you fast-forward a few years, the first couple finally hit 75, but health issues and fatigue are now a constant in their lives. Just the thought of sorting, decluttering, making repairs, showing the home, packing, moving, all of that becomes overwhelming. So what do they do? They postpone, right? Then one more thing gets stacked on. Maybe it's a fall or a hospitalization, maybe even widowhood. Suddenly staying is no longer safe or sustainable. Now they have to move in crisis mode, under time pressure and with fewer choices and higher stress. That is exactly where costs explode, both emotionally and financially.
The second couple, meanwhile, has spent the last decade building their best life in a home that actually fits. Their housing costs are manageable, the home equity they unlocked has been working for them, their daily life has been easier to manage, so they have extra energy to put into travel or grandkids or hobbies or just finding purpose in life. They're not spending all that energy on home upkeep. These couples, they both started in the same place but created very different lifestyles.
Now the difference between the two wasn't luck, it was timing. I talk a lot on this podcast about the biology of aging, that you have a Go-Strong decade where your health has yet to decline too much and your retirement wealth is still peaking. But eventually these curves start to diverge, don't they? Your energy and strength, they decline first. Your energy for big projects and ability to handle major life stressors, like moving, it drops precipitously, doesn't it? Your cognitive bandwidth for making complex decision also shrinks. That means there's a biologically timed window where you are most capable of executing a major lifestyle and house transition, at least under your own steam power, on your own terms. So this is my question for you. If that clock is ticking and the window shrinking, what is the real cost for you to keep pretending it's not, to keep kicking that can down the road?
Let's start with the obvious financial stuff. Most people assume that once the mortgage is paid off, that staying put is the cheapest option. But paid-off doesn't equal low-cost. A larger, older home is often the most expensive "free" thing that you're going to have in your life. Older roofs don't care that you're retired. HVAC systems don't care that you're on a fixed income. Water heaters, windows, siding, driveways, all of those are fluctuating expenses. They don't show up as a tidy line item every month. They show up as, "Oh look, there goes another $10,000 we weren't planning on this year".
Property taxes and insurance, they're also not static. If your home has appreciated significantly, there's a good chance your property taxes have too. Insurance companies are constantly reassessing risk. Age of the home, wildfire hail, flooding. Many of my clients in their 60s and 70s have seen their premiums increase dramatically in the last few years.
And then there's that nagging drift of utilities and upkeep. Heating and cooling that extra square footage that you barely use. Paying for lawn care or snow removal that you no longer want to do yourself. Hiring out more and more house projects because climbing ladders or crawling under the sink stopped being a good idea somewhere around your late 60s.
Individually, none of these things scream emergency, but over a decade, they can easily add up to tens of thousands of dollars. That, my friends, is money that you could be using instead to fund your lifestyle, invest in your health, or simply extend your financial runway. But instead, it disappears into that black hole of "The house still kind-of works, so we're just going to patch it again", right?
But hey, those are just the obvious costs. Let's talk about the hidden costs because that is where the real retirement damage often happens. I think one of the most underappreciated costs of waiting is opportunity cost. The cost of keeping too much of your net worth trapped in your walls for too long. For many of us over the age of 55, as much as 60 to 70 % of our total net worth is in our home. Now that's not inherently bad, but it is a concentration of risk.
That trapped equity could be funding strategic moves in your Go-Strong decade. It could be paying off higher interest debt. It could be allowing you to delay social security. It could be building up a cash buffer so you're not forced to sell investments in a down market. It could be used to rightsize into a home that actually improves your long-term quality of life. When you say, "Oh, we're just going to unlock that equity later", what you're really saying is "We're OK postponing those strategic advantages" And the math on that is rarely as conservative as it feels.
There's also just plain old market risk. Housing doesn't always go up, markets do stall. They often correct. They also shift because of changing zoning or infrastructure, job loss in the area, or climate risk. If you plan to cash out big on your current home 10 years from now, you're betting that the future market conditions are going to support that. Now, it may not be a bad bet, but it is a concentrated risk.
You stack on top of that sequence-of-return risk, and you could get in trouble. If you delay rightsizing and as a result you have to make bigger withdrawals from your traditional retirement accounts like your 401ks, that can negatively impact your returns on those investments, particularly if the timing of those withdrawals collide with a market downturn. Moreover, if you wait until you're forced to move, it could mean that you're selling during a recession, a health crisis, or maybe both. Buyers know when you're under pressure. And in a crisis move, you don't have the luxury of saying no to a mediocre offer because you're out of time, you're out of energy, and sometimes you're out of options. In a nutshell, sequence-of-return risk can impact both your retirement account and your home equity simultaneously. So when you kick the rightsizing can down the road, you risk a double hit on those things.
But that's just the financial side of things. There are also other costs that almost no one factors in, the cost of execution and the cost of cognitive load. Execution cost is what it takes to actually pull a move off once you've waited too long. The longer you stay, the more stuff you accumulate. The more stuff you accumulate, the more complicated and expensive it becomes to declutter, to sort through things, to donate, to sell, to move, all that fun stuff. In your late 50s or early 60s, tackling a garage or a basement is a big job, but it is doable. You can break it into a series of Saturday projects very easily. But when you hit your 70s, the exact same task can feel like you're climbing Everest in flip-flops. I've had clients who literally looked at a lifetime of possessions and said, "Nope, can't do it". And that was the end of the conversation about moving. That is until their adult children were left to deal with it under duress later.
That overwhelm, that procrastination, it's not free, it? It leads to paying a premium for professional decluttering, paying for roll-off dumpsters, storage units, estate sale companies, last minute repairs at inflated prices, all of that. None of that money is going to buy you more years of health or freedom. It's buying your way out of a corner that you painted yourself into.
The cognitive load is even more subtle, but it's just as real of a cost. Big decisions require time. They require attention, emotional bandwidth. In your Go-Strong decade, you can sit down, make a plan, iterate on it, and adjust as needed. Your brain can handle the spreadsheets, the conversations, the troubleshooting. But as you move into your 70s and beyond, most people experience a decrease in their tolerance for complexity and ambiguity. Even if you're still sharp, your willingness to wrestle with big decisions goes way down. You lean harder on the familiar, even if the familiar is no longer serving you. So the decision to rightsize doesn't just become physically harder, it becomes mentally harder.
This is why I say that waiting is not neutral. Waiting is not the same as doing nothing. Waiting is making a very specific bet that your future self, is going to be more willing and able to tackle a hard decision than you are today. That's a risky assumption.
Now, I want to pause and say this very clearly. I am not anti-aging-in-place and I'm not anti-staying-put, but I am anti-unexamined-assumptions. There absolutely are situations where staying put for a while makes great sense. If you're in a home that is already relatively low cost to maintain, something that's structurally supportive of aging. like single-level home with minimal stairs, walk-in shower, safe entrances and so forth. If you have that kind of a home and you're embedded in a strong social network and community, then staying put can be a great choice, especially if you've got a written plan with a clear trigger-point for change.
The key is the difference between passive waiting and strategic waiting. Passive waiting sounds something like this. "We'll just see how it goes. We'll move when we're forced to". Whereas strategic waiting sounds something more like, "We plan to stay here for just two to three more years while we improve our health, declutter, do a few home repairs. We've sketched out exactly where we want to go next and we've run the numbers. We're confident about our plan. But if there's a signal that our health is taking a turn or the market is starting to turn, we're prepared to pivot. We can move sooner if we have to".
The passive approach assumes the future will be much more clear than the present and there's nothing that can be done now. Whereas the strategic approach respects the biological and financial realities and proactively prepares, is ready to pivot.
So, how do you start shifting from passive waiting to strategic action without blowing up your life overnight? Well first I want you to get honest about your current home's true cost. Not just the mortgage or lack thereof, but the full all-in monthly and annual expenses. That includes property taxes, insurance, utilities, routine maintenance, big projects that need to be done. If you've had a run of "no big issues" for a while, recognize that there may be some coming due. Houses age just like bodies do. They demand more attention and more money over time, not less.
Second, I want you to get honest about how much of your total net worth is sitting in that home. If your house represents 60 to 70 % of your wealth, that's a hint that housing shouldn't be the last thing on your mind when it comes to retirement planning. It should be one of the first things that you think about.
Third, zoom out and look at your Go-Strong window. If you're in your late 50s or 60s, ask yourself, "If we are ever going to rightsize, when would we want that move to be fully behind us"? I think most people, when they really sit with that, don't want to wait until their 70s or 80s. We may think we're going to age better than our parents did, but the truth is, every year we wait, it just gets harder until it becomes impossible, right?
Now imagine two parallel timelines. In one, you keep doing exactly what you're doing. In the other, you make a plan over the next few months to either rightsize your current home or move into one that fits you better for your next decade. Ask yourself which timeline gives you more control over your money, your mobility, and your mental bandwidth.
And remember, rightsizing is not always about selling and buying something else. For some of you, the right move might be unlocking equity through a reverse mortgage, while you simultaneously invest in your health and or retro-fit the home for better mobility. For others of you, staying put and treating your current home as an income-generating asset, say renting out a portion of it, might make sense for a while. The point is not that there's one size fits all. There's not just one correct move. The point is that there are costs to doing nothing. The smartest thing that you can do is look at all your options. Run the numbers, do your due diligence.
But I know this topic is an emotional one. Comfort is a powerful cage. Familiarity feels safe. It's far too easy for us to rationalize staying put with phrases like, "We're going to save money by not moving". When what we really want to say is, "I don't want to think about this right now". So I get it. If that's you, I want you to hear this with kindness. Pushing that decision off does not make it easier or cheaper. It just pushes the burden to your future self, or worse, your family down the road. You can either pay in smaller increments now, asking the hard questions, looking at the numbers, confronting your attachment to your "forever home", or you can pay in a bigger, massive way down the road, when you have fewer options, less energy.
So as you're listening to this, I'd love for you to try a simple thought experiment. Imagine two scenarios. The first scenario, you do a rightsizing review. You take an honest look at your body, your brain, your bank, your base. You run the numbers on your current home. You explore all your options. Maybe you decide to move. Maybe you decide to stay and intentionally modify. Regardless, doesn't matter. You are doing it on a timeline that works best for you, physically, mentally, and emotionally. You're not making any decisions under duress or in crisis mode.
The second scenario, you keep doing what you're doing, hoping it'll all work out. That is until something external forces your hand, a major system fails and you can't justify putting more money into the house. You or your spouse can't safely navigate the stairs or drive anymore, and suddenly the house feels too big, too remote. Now you're making a decision in an urgent compromised state. You don't want that, you?
So think about that. Which of those scenarios sounds more risky? Which more conservative? It's counter-intuitive sometimes, isn't it? Proactive, strategic change is actually less risky than passive waiting, status quo. I'm sure you've experienced this other areas of your life, in your career or parenting or investing. You've probably made decisions before you were 100 % certain. You trusted your ability to adapt. This is no different. The only twist is that the clock you're working with now isn't just financial, it's biological. And you know that already or you wouldn't be here listening to this podcast.
In fact, if this conversation is stirring something up, maybe a mix of relief and anxiety, that's actually a good sign. It means your brain recognizes there's a mismatch between the story you've been telling yourself and what you really want. And look, you don't have to figure out your entire plan today, but you can take a smart first step. Go take my free Rightsizing Readiness Quiz I think you'll love it. You'll find the link in the show notes. It takes maybe three minutes, answer a few questions about your healthspan, your home fit, and that's going to help you determine where you're at in terms of your readiness to rightsize or age in place. When you get your results, you'll even get tailored next steps. And if your score lands in the "it's time to start planning" phase or "boy, we're cutting it close" phase, you're going to have the option to book a free Rightsized Home and Health Review with me. That's where we hop on a call and just do a deeper dive on your specific situation, help you get crystal clear on your options. You'll find a link for that in the show notes as well.
Point is, every year that you're in your Go-Strong decade, that's a year where you have maximum leverage because your health hasn't yet fallen off a cliff, your wealth has never been higher. That is a season where smart retirees can make the biggest impact on their lifespan, their healthspan, quality of life. So, the question isn't can I afford to move? The real question is can I afford to wait?
Thank you for joining me for another episode of Next Act Ninjas. If this sparked anything in you make sure you share this episode with a friend or a spouse, someone who is also wrestling with the same questions. And don't forget to check out that Rightsizing Readiness Quiz in the show notes. Until next time, live well, love more, age less, my friends.