Around 10 years ago, as they reached their early sixties, my parents made a decision that I fear will eventually ruin their lives – and, in some ways, mine too.
Almost two decades after I – their only child – left home, and even after I’d bought my own home and started a family too, they decided to move house. They put our four-bedroom family home, the beautiful cottage in which I’d lived out most of my young childhood and all my teens, on the market and decided to make a fresh start. But instead of downsizing into a smaller home, manageable in late life and easier to maintain, they did the very opposite.
After a few months of careful house hunting, my parents bought a huge five-bedroom home with two double bathrooms, four toilets, two dining rooms, and a giant garden (which, admittedly, is their pride and joy). Then, after they’d lived there a couple of years, they spent more than £100,000 of their hard-saved retirement fund adding another new room onto the back of it. Who knows why? Only two people actually live there.
When they began showing me documents about the property they had in mind to buy, I warned them, gently, that they could be making a mistake. I work in a job that touches on public health and it’s well known that downsizing early is really good for longevity and good health in late life.
The longer older people stay in properties that are too large for them to manage, the more likely their home will be implicated in a crisis moment in their lives. That could be an accident or a fall, or simply being forced to leave quickly with no choice in the matter if it suddenly becomes inaccessible due to changing mobility or illness.
And, together with death and divorce, moving home is one of the three most stressful events we experience in life. It’s so much more taxing if that happens outside of your control.
All this good advice, though, fell on deaf ears. Newly retired, relatively young and very healthy, the last thing on my parents’ minds was the bodily malfunctions they might encounter in two decades’ time. My father had worked very hard and done well in his career; he reminded me (it was true) and he deserved to enjoy the home he’d always dreamed of even if it was, objectively, far too big for the two of them.
It was made quite clear that’s the last that would be heard of my concerns. Not my money; not my business.
Except that it is. I am an only child. We are now more than a decade on from that conversation and, while still healthy and happy in their seventies, my parents are starting to visibly slow down. It’s obvious that in another 10 years, when they will be in their early and mid-eighties respectively, things will look very different again.
When it comes to it, when the difficulties crop up and the risks suddenly start to rise, I will be the one dealing with the fallout – alone. By that point I will have two teenage children to parent, as well as an older husband who will also be nearing retirement. Being in the sandwich generation doesn’t look like much fun even if you live nearby, but we are more than an hour away from my parents, and I will still need to work full-time.
Their property is a treasure trove of collections from a life well lived. The idea of being left to handle the business of sorting out their possessions is already starting to make me anxious and I can’t bear to muse on how hard it could be to convince either of them that they must move again, ideally into somewhere that could extend their independence.
Perhaps some of you are reading this and thinking I sound incredibly selfish. Maybe you think I’m just jealous, because I don’t have the luxury of a large home myself? It’s certainly true that, like so many of my “geriatric Millennial” generation, I am bringing up my own children in a much smaller house than the one I grew up in, and which requires both parents to work to fund it.
One of the reasons that housing is so expensive is that larger, family homes are scarce in the market. The majority are owned outright by people in later life who have paid off their mortgages but are not moving on.
This has had a strange effect on the entire housing market. The segment where prices are rising fastest is three-bedroom semi-detached houses, because absolutely everyone wants them: young families getting started in life, a new wave of downsizers in their fifties or even earlier, desperate to bring down their bills. According to figures from Hamptons in 2024, 40 per cent of all movers were downsizers and shifts that involve dropping just one bedroom make up 60 per cent of that market. Downward movers used to shed multiple bedrooms. Those who should be moving on just aren’t – and some of them, like my parents, are buying bigger.
But I’m not jealous. I’m worried. Very worried.
The house, which is more than 100 years old, is constantly facing small and sometimes larger cosmetic and structural problems that cost time and money to address and cause them stress. I am happy that they enjoy their home, but I am anxious about how they will cope with it when they are older and less able than they are now.
I am worried about how that will affect me too, and how much of my own life will be put on hold to deal with it. I know they have planned well in case of needing long-term care, but this planning doesn’t seem to have extended to their immediate surroundings.
I am aware, inevitably, that because my parents are choosing such a large property for their later years, there’s a high chance I will inherit a significant sum of money. But I don’t care about that. What I would prefer is that they invest that hard-earned, well-saved money now in anything that will extend their longevity and their chances of more of those years in good health. Sadly, the evidence shows that would not be in a very large home.
On this one, however, my parents and I will have to agree to disagree.
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