Blog Posts

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

While enduring the long and miserable winter of 2014-2015, my thoughts increasingly turned to getting out of New Jersey for someplace warm. A brief visit to Charleston, SC, in March—where I had to go out to buy some short-sleeved shirts—made me ask the question The Clash posed in 1982, “Should I stay or should I go?”

Retirement is still quite a few years away. I enjoy my work and I am not eager to give it up. But as our friends begin to retire, I’m starting to think about it more frequently.

So I did what anyone else would do. I went on Google and searched for “relocate for retirement.” Was I in for a surprise!

The very first article that came up was titled, “7 Reasons Not to Move in Retirement” from U.S. News and World Report, and it began by plainly stating, “If you’re happy with where you live, there’s no reason to relocate in retirement.”

I was surprised to learn that between 2008 and 2012, only 6 percent of people 60 and over changed residences, and that half of them stayed within the same county. Judging by the glossy brochures that started showing up in our mailbox a year or so ago, I thought moving for retirement was almost mandatory.

The author listed seven reasons why staying where you are might make sense: 

• To save money (relocating and buying a new home can be expensive)
• To stay with services you like (everything from doctors to dry cleaners) 
• To maintain your social network (most of your friends are probably going to stay put)
• To remain close to family (especially if your children and grandchildren are nearby) 
• To maintain memories (if you’ve been in one place for some time, you may not like leaving those memories behind)
• To make plans for your later years (probably easier to find services that serve the needs of advanced aging where you already live), and
• To stay someplace you like (after all, you chose your current community for good reasons—which may still be valid).

All of these points make sense to me—and they are also among the reasons my wife has been giving me to explain why she doesn’t want to move. But there’s one important reason the author didn’t cover: we would have to get rid of all the clutter and treasures we’ve been accumulating all these years! That task alone is enough to make staying put seem like a very good idea.