Ask homeowners aged 55–74 when they'll move next, and the most common answer isn't “in five years” or “when I retire.” It's “never.” Staying put has quietly become the most popular retirement housing plan in America and a lot of people profit when you choose it. You are not one of them.
Ask homeowners aged 55–74 when they'll move next, and the most common answer isn't “in five years” or “when I retire.” It's “never.” Staying put has quietly become the most popular retirement housing plan in America and a lot of people profit when you choose it. You are not one of them.
In this episode, Dr. Rachael Van Pelt follows the money. She unpacks Fannie Mae's projection that 13–15 million older homeowners will leave their homes over the next decade, what “leaving” actually means (the three exit doors most people never see coming), and the inherent conflict of interest hiding inside the advice you're getting, from reverse-mortgage lenders to real estate agents to the institutions managing the housing market. None of their incentives are built around whether your home supports your healthspan.
Staying put feels like loyalty. The data says it's a bet on a body you won't have, placed at exactly the moment you still have options.
👉 Get an honest read with no agenda. Try the free Rightsizing Decision Coach at coach.rightsizeretirement.com to see where your home is helping — and where it's quietly working against your body, brain, bank, and base.
Chapters
00:00 The Most Popular Retirement Plan in America (And Why It's a Trap)
02:47 What “Never” Really Means: The Three Exit Doors
04:07 Follow the Money: Who Profits When You Don't Move
06:18 Reverse Mortgages, Agents & the “Orderly Handoff” — Whose Plan Is It?
09:08 “How Do You Get Paid?” Why an Honest Read Makes No Recommendation
11:22 The Bet You're Making With Your 80-Year-Old Body
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. And today we're talking about why 13 to 15 million older homeowners will leave their homes over the next 10 years.
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Fanny Mae, otherwise known as the Federal National Mortgage Association, ran a national survey that asked homeowners between the ages of 55 and 74, "When do you expect to move next"? The most common answer they heard wasn't in five years or when I retire. The most common answer was "never". Never! "I'm never going to move". I find that very interesting. Because underlying that answer is the myth that we always talk about on this podcast, the myth of the "forever home". This idea that staying put is the safe, sensible, responsible thing to do. Everyone around you nods along with that plan. Your neighbors are going to do it, your friends are going to do it. It just feels like conventional wisdom.
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Staying put has become the single most popular retirement housing plan in America today. And that's a problem because there's something that almost nobody in this industry is going to say out loud. A lot of people profit when you answer "never". Unfortunately, you're not one of them. Do you know who does profit? Well, we're going to follow the money. But first, let's start with the truth about the word never. It rarely actually means never. Instead, it means some future date, not of my choosing. Because what actually happens to older homeowners tells a very different story.
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Fanny Mae tracks something else called retention rate. They look at a group of homeowners and they ask how many will still be in their homes 10 years later. And then they track them over time. And what they see is that through the Go-Strong decade, roughly age 55 to 67, when health and wealth are still peaking, almost nobody leaves. In the Go-Slower decade, age 65 to 74, retention is still very high. Only about eight people out of 100 move. After that, the floor gives out. Retention drops precipitously to 66% at after age 75 and to 30% after age 85.
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You've probably seen it for yourself. Either you've watched your own parents or someone else's parents go through this. It's rarely a decision. It's a cascade of events: a fall on the stairs, a broken hip, a hospital stay, a discharged nurse who tells you that you can't go back to your two-story house alone. Suddenly, the move that you thought would "never" happen is decided quickly in crisis by other people from a hospital room. That's not rightsizing, that's aging right out of your home.
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Now I want to be clear about what "leaving" means in those Fannie Mae data, because it's not what you think it is. Fannie Mae counts three kinds of exits. Either you move to a rental, you move into a care facility, or you die. That's the list. Those are the three exit doors. So when they project that 13 to 15 million older homeowners will leave their home over the next 10 years, I want you to understand what that really means. It's not 13 million people calmly deciding it's time to rightsize. It's 13 million people walking through one of those three exits. And for the vast majority of people, the move's not going to be an intentional decision that they make at 80. It's going to be the consequence of a decision they didn't make at age 65. So the exit isn't a choice, it's a consequence. The choice was made unintentionally 15 years earlier.
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Now, if this topic is already resonating, I want you to remember that I built a free assessment tool called the Rightsizing Decision Coach to give you an honest read on whether your home is supporting your healthspan. You'll find that tool at coach.rightsizeretirement.com. The link's also in the show notes. And by the end of today's episode, you're going to understand exactly why I built the coaching tool the way that I did.
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Okay, but back to what really struck me when I read the Fannie Mae report, and I mean the real report, the whole thing, not just the headline. I thought it was going to sound the alarm. I mean, 13 million people who losing their homes in crisis, you'd think that the recommendation would be help people move sooner while they're healthy and strong, while they still have options. But that is not at all what the report says.
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The report's actual recommendation, you want to know what it is? It's to keep older homeowners in their homes longer. They want the mortgage industry to give more loans to folks so that they can make home modifications. They recommend the government spends more on community support services. And as you might expect in the age of AI, eventually they want robotic home-care aids to help us all age-in-place.
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Why? Well, they give the reason in the report. They explicitly say that they want what they call an "orderly handoff to the next generation of buyers". Because economically it would be a disaster if 13 million homes hit the market too soon, too fast. They worry that a flood of homes would tank housing prices. Supply would just outstrip demand. They even have a name for this nightmare scenario. They call it a "generational housing bubble". That's when too many older homeowners try to sell all at once and there aren't enough younger buyers to catch the fall. I want you to sit with that for a minute. The very institution that's measuring this exodus, they're not worried that you might be spending your final few good years in a house that's not working for you. It's worried about the national housing market. And its solution to the problem is to slow you down. And sadly, slowing you down also slows down home ownership for the younger generation at the same time.
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Now, I'm not saying that to make you angry. I'm telling you because it will give you a much clearer window into the forces that influence this entire market. And there's a name for this in economics. It's called the "principal-agent problem". It's what happens when the people advising you have their own stake in what you decide. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. Here's what that looks like. The reverse mortgage and aging-in-place lending world profits if you stay and borrow against your home. Their whole model depends on you keeping the home and pulling equity out slowly. They are rooting for people to say "never" when it comes to moving.
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Just think about how their products actually work. You stay in the house, you draw the equity down, and the balance quietly compounds. You feel like you're finally accessing your wealth, but what's really happening is the house is being spent down around you while you age-in-place. For the lender, the longer you stay put, the better the math works out. Your inertia is their business model.
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Now, real estate agents have the opposite incentive. They profit when you move, especially when you upsize or you have to make multiple moves because you didn't make a smart move in the first place. So they rarely recommend alternatives like downsizing, renting, or house hacking.
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And the government and institutional system behind all of this, they want you to move eventually, just not yet. They want Boomers and Gen Xers to move slowly on their timeline. One that protects the national housing market. not necessarily what's best for our health.
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All of these players have different incentives for you to stay or go, but none of the incentives are based on whether your home actually supports your healthspan. That variable, it doesn't appear on anyone's balance sheet.
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And honestly, your own inner circle is going to have their own bias. Sometimes people who love you are going to tell you to stay because it's easier for them than any sort of change. They'll say, "don't move, mom, we'll help". They may be talking out of love, but it also may be out of fear of change. Our loved ones, I think, can keep us just as stuck as any lender.
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I also have to be fair about borrowing because there are some really good reasons to borrow against your home or take out a reverse mortgage. I've talked about these on past episodes. But I want to make the distinction between using your home equity as a part of an intentional retirement plan versus borrowing just to avoid making any sort of decision. If you're funding trips and experiences and the lifestyle that you want during your Go-Strong years, that's a great strategy. If you're borrowing to kick the can down the road, however, it's just a more expensive way to stay stuck. I'm not against using your equity. I'm against using a loan as a substitute for a strategic decision.
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Here's the rule of thumb I'd use. If the equity is funding a life that you actively choose, maybe a place near the grandkids or a year of travel while your knees still work, that's your equity doing its job. But if it's funding your ability just to stay somewhere that no longer fits because you don't want to face change, the loan's not buying you freedom, it's buying you time in a trap.
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And now in the name of transparency, I do have to tell you something because if I don't, I'm just one more person contributing to the principal-agent problem. I do hold an active real estate license. So before you take a single word of what I say seriously, I want you to ask me the same question you'd ask anyone else. Rachael, how do you get paid?
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And here's the honest answer. My work, the work that pays my bills, the work this whole show is built on is coaching. I'm a healthspan scientist. My passion is helping people think holistically about their health and wealth and freedom before they make any decisions. The real estate license just keeps me abreast of the industry, it's something I'm an expert in because my husband and I are investors, but I only assist with a transaction when it objectively makes sense. In fact, if a coaching client ever does decide to move and asks me to represent them, I waive their coaching fee entirely. I don't try to convince anyone to move. My business just doesn't depend on that. If it did, then it would be the equivalent of an orthopedic surgeon recommending a surgery that you didn't need because they only get paid if you have the surgery. It'd be a conflict of interest, wouldn't it? I'm a scientist. I'm trained to be objective and to avoid conflicts of interest.
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Even the free tool that I created, the Rightsizing Decision Coach that I mentioned, it doesn't make any recommendations. It's not going to tell you to sell, it's not going to tell you to stay. It simply walks you through the four forces your home acts on: your body, your brain, your bank, and your base. And it shows where your home is helping and where it's hurting. That's it. It simply gets you started asking all the right questions.
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That's not an accident. I built it that way on purpose because what you need is not one more person with a conflict of interest. You need an honest read with no obligation. Again, you'll find that free assessment tool at rightsizeretirement.com. It was born from, not just my scientific experience studying successful aging for 25 years, but from the heartfelt discussions that I've been having with my husband about our next act, distilling the hard questions that we have to answer for ourselves to make smart, intentional next moves.
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But hey, let's say you simply do nothing. You let the system run its course. What are you actually betting on in that situation? Well, you're betting your body cooperates, aren't you? And this is where the current research gets uncomfortable. The longevity numbers, they're sobering. Fewer than 5% of homes in this country meet basic accessibility needs. Less than 20% of older adults ever modify their home to support aging-in-place. Meanwhile, the gap between how long we live and how long we live well, the gap between lifespan and healthspan, that runs about 12 years. 11 years for men, because they die a little bit younger, and more like 14 years for women.
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Taken together, that means you're likely going to spend at least a decade of your life with real physical limitations and in a house that doesn't support you. Those stairs that you don't think about today, they're going to become the reason that you stay stuck on one floor. That bathroom is going to become the biggest hazard in your home. And the part that we forget to price in is what those declines are going to cost us.
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That same research showed that roughly 80% of households with someone over 60 don't have the resources to cover a long-term care event or any other serious financial shock. So saying that "I'm never going to move", it doesn't just limit your options. It runs the risk of a serious financial hardship, one that few families can really absorb. It's why I say on every episode, "We don't just age in our bodies, we age out of our environments". I know that staying put feels like loyalty. Loyalty to your home, your memories, your independence. But the data says it isn't loyalty. It's a risky gamble. You're betting that the body you'll have at age 80 will get along with a house that you chose for a body you had at 50. And that's a bet the science says you're going to lose.
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Bottom line, there are a lot of people with a financial stake in what you do with your home. Most lenders want you to stay and borrow. Most agents want you to move. And the institutions managing the housing market want you to wait your turn. Every one of them has a plan for your home. The question is: do you? Do you have a plan? This is a decision that nobody can make for you. You have to make it with your eyes wide open. And while you're still physically and mentally healthy enough and still in a solid financial position to have options.
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Because remember what the data showed. By the time those exit doors show up, the choice was already made. That's why when you act matters as much as whether you act.
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So this week, if you do nothing else, just do one thing. Don't call an agent, don't call a lender. Just take five minutes to start asking the right questions. And you can use my tool at coach.rightsizeretirement.com to think through whether your home is supporting your body, brain, bank, and base.
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And please never say never when it comes to creating an intentional Next Act.
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Until next time, my friends, live well, love more, age less.