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This article was originally published in The Telegraph.
Tax breaks alone won’t persuade older people to move. The real obstacle is saying goodbye to the place where a lifetime of memories was made.
A major think tank has urged Andy Burnham to cut stamp duty for the over 65s to encourage them to downsize. It’s a welcome intervention from Radix Big Tent, given that 70 per cent of this age group live in properties with more bedrooms than they need. The group’s housing commission concluded that expanding stamp duty relief to pensioners could bring nearly 900,000 of these homes back on to the market, arguing stamp duty fees discourage older home owners from upping sticks.
But while I agree that we need a downsizing revolution, I’m not convinced the only holdup for most people is cost. Having just “right-sized” (as I prefer to call downsizing) myself, I found stamp duty was the least of my concerns. In theory, moving out of our family home of two decades to be mortgage-free was going to be great.
With our children grown up, we no longer needed a four-bedroom house in the catchment area for excellent schools and with useful transport links to central London. Our home was built for a life we no longer led, and my husband and I found ourselves rattling around within it – not to mention increasingly irritated by the cost of heating it each winter. So we thought we were more than ready to depart. The reality of moving, however, was hard.
We viewed more than 50 flats before settling on a new property – and many felt depressingly small. It was difficult to imagine ourselves not living in bright, large, spacious rooms. Of not having an office or a spare bedroom when people came to stay. Then there was the wrench of preparing to leave the home where our children had grown up, and where their drawings and poems had adorned bedroom walls.
And, of course, we also had mountains of stuff to confront; clothes, furniture, ornaments and papers which had accumulated over the years to fill the space available. Downsizing means getting rid of lots of it, which is emotionally draining and physically exhausting, too.
It is far easier to stay put than to deal with these difficulties. And that’s before you pause to consider status, which in our culture is often linked to the size and location of our homes. Downsizing can feel like a diminishment, a hit to the ego. But what I have learnt is that it doesn’t have to be doom and gloom, because moving house also means an exciting new beginning.
My advice to anyone going through the process, or considering doing so, is that you have to keep your eyes on the eventual prize. For us, downsizing has been worth it. We’re buying a mansion flat in our dream location which will give us money in the bank and a home exactly where we want to be, one which is still near to friends and family and our old neighbourhood.
So yes, moving can be hard to navigate and leaving family homes behind, in particular, can often invoke a strange but very real sense of grief, not to mention administrative and financial headaches.
But just because it is difficult, doesn’t mean it isn’t worth it.