Home Means More Than a House
I don’t want to move. There, I said it. I suspect I’m not alone. For me, home actually means two places right now. We have a condo in the city that I love for the convenience, the amenities, the socialization and the ease of having everything well maintained. I’m proud of where we live, and I love the life we have there.
We also have a lake house that means something entirely different to me. Our daughter, her husband and their four children live across the street. The rest of our family is within a reasonable drive, which means this is a place where family can gather and where we get to be part of one another’s everyday lives.
I love both places, but for different reasons. And maybe that’s why I’ve been thinking more about this idea we call “ageing in place.” I’m not particularly interested in ageing in place. I’m interested in living in places I love. There’s a difference.
Why Staying Home Matters
Because when you really think about why people don’t want to move, it usually isn’t about the real estate. It’s about everything attached to it: family, community, familiarity, independence and connection.
It’s walking through the door and having that unmistakable feeling: I’m home. My circumstances may be different from yours. Your home may be the house where you raised your children, a condo you moved into five years ago or a small house in a community where everyone seems to know your name. The particulars don’t really matter. The feeling does.
But it’s important to remember that you home should also adapt to make it more comfortable as you age.
Andrew Pyke made a point that I loved about designing your home around how you live in it. “Know how you don’t want to use your space is just as important as knowing how you want to use it,” he told us. Your home should work for you, not the next buyer. From better lighting, including motion sensor lights and wider doorways are both attractive and practical. Andrew also gave a simple piece of advice that I loved: “Starting the process of thinking and talking about how you want to live NOW.”
And that brings me to a question many of us will eventually have to ask: Is wanting to stay where I love a reasonable financial goal? I believe it is.
Can You Afford the Life You Want?
But wanting something and being able to afford it can be two very different things. I’ve spent most of my career talking about money, so I’m not going to suggest we ignore the numbers. Can we comfortably afford the life we want? Will our money last as long as we do? What happens if our circumstances change?
Those aren’t pessimistic questions. They’re planning questions. Perhaps that’s one of the opportunities we have in retirement: to stop thinking only about how much we’ve accumulated and start thinking about what we want everything we’ve accumulated to do for us.
We’re living longer, and many of us are healthier, more active and more engaged than generations before us. That is something to celebrate. But longevity changes the financial equation. Our money has to last longer, too, as everyday life has become more expensive. You don’t need an economist to tell you that. You live it.
And that creates an interesting contradiction for many Canadians: you can have considerable wealth tied up in your home and still worry about cash flow.
Your Home Is Part of Your Retirement Plan
For most of our working lives, the financial playbook was fairly straightforward: work hard, save, pay down the mortgage and build equity. For many Canadians, owning the home outright was the finish line.
But perhaps owning the home was never really the finish line. Maybe the real goal was to create choices.
Financial security, at least to me, isn’t simply about how much you have. It’s about having the ability to make decisions about the life you want to live.
That’s why I think all of our retirement assets deserve to be part of the conversation, including the equity we’ve built in our homes.
For some homeowners, a reverse mortgage may be one option worth exploring. For others, a home equity line of credit might make sense. Someone else may decide that selling and downsizing is exactly what they want to do.
Pensions, investments and savings all form part of the picture.
There is no single right answer because personal finance is exactly that, personal. What matters is understanding your choices and making the decision that works for the life you want to live.
How Home Equity Can Support Your Retirement Choices
I think many of us still mentally separate our homes from the rest of our retirement assets. We have our savings, our investments, our pensions and our retirement income, and then, somehow, over there is the house.
But your home is part of your financial picture, too. You worked for it. You paid for it. You built the equity. And just like your other assets, it deserves a place in the conversation about what comes next.
The goal isn’t necessarily to borrow against your home, sell it, or leave it untouched. The goal is to understand what role your home can play in your overall financial plan.
When you understand all of your options, you have more choices.
What Do You Want the Next Third of Your Life to Look Like?
And maybe what comes next is the most interesting part.
I sometimes think we underestimate the potential of the next third of our lives. We talk so much about preparing financially for retirement that we can forget to ask the bigger question:
What are we preparing for?
This can be an incredibly powerful and fulfilling stage of life. We may have more freedom over our time. We know ourselves better. We know what matters to us and, perhaps just as importantly, what doesn’t.
So, what do you want your life to look like?
Because the next third of your life doesn’t have to be about winding down. It can be about opening up.
More time with the people we love. More experiences. More purpose. More connection. More freedom to decide what matters.
Maybe that’s what all the planning was really for, not simply to arrive at retirement with a collection of assets, but to have those assets support a life that still has a great deal of living in it.
Final Thought
So perhaps the question isn’t simply, Can I afford to stay in my home?
Perhaps the better question is: What do I want the next third of my life to look like, and how can everything I’ve worked for help me live it?
For me, part of the answer is pretty simple.
I don’t want to move.
Not because I’m afraid of what’s next, but because I really like the life I’m living now.