Does where you live serve how you live?
When the stairs become a negotiation, when there are rooms nobody has walked into since Christmas, and when you spend more time managing upkeep than making new memories, the house has stopped doing its job.
The answer is not always selling. Sometimes it is changing the house instead of leaving it.
One hundred square feet is a walk-in closet.
If the typical move at this stage barely changes the size of the house, then size was never the thing that was wrong. Something else was, and it usually has a floor plan attached to it.
Source: National Association of REALTORS®, buyer and seller research, 2025 and 2026.
Same house. The shaded rooms are the ones a couple in their sixties still uses most days. The outlined ones are entered a few times a year, and every one of them is heated, cooled, insured and taxed all twelve months.
Illustrative floor plan of a common Central Indiana two-story. Not a specific property.
A sample home, scanned in house. Drag to look, click to move, and use the dollhouse view to see the whole floor at once.
You are not living in 3,400 square feet. You are living in about 1,500 of them and maintaining the rest.
Stay. Renovate. Move. Let’s figure out what comes next.
Stay. Sometimes the house is fine and the friction is fixable. I will tell you what would have to change and roughly what that costs.
Renovate. A main-floor primary suite, a reworked entry, a single-level path through the house. Some homes take that well. Some cannot take it at any price. Reading which is which is the part I have done for 25 years.
Move. If the honest answer is move, then the work is finding a home that already does what this one would need a contractor to do.
Most agents are paid only when the answer is move. I will tell you when it is not.
The house, on the terms you live in it.
Not after. After is when it gets expensive.
When you sell a home you have owned and lived in for at least 2 of the last 5 years, the IRS lets you exclude up to $250,000 of gain if you file single, and up to $500,000 if you file jointly.
Those two numbers were set in 1997. They have never been adjusted for inflation. A house bought in Carmel or Zionsville or West Lafayette in the late 1990s, lived in for 25 years and improved along the way, can run past that ceiling without anyone at the kitchen table having done the arithmetic.
What raises your basis and lowers the taxable gain is the work you put into the house. The new roof. The addition. The kitchen. Which means the receipts in the filing cabinet in the basement are worth finding before we talk about a list price.
This is a question for your CPA and I will say so every time. My job is to make sure it gets asked in the right order, which is before the sign goes in the yard.
Source: IRS Topic No. 701, Sale of Your Home.
SRES, Seniors Real Estate Specialist.
It is a REALTOR® designation for work with homeowners 50 and over, and it covers the parts of a move that are not the house: timing against retirement, coordinating a sale and a purchase that have to line up, and knowing which questions belong to your accountant or your attorney rather than to me.
I will tell you when a question is one of those. I am not going to answer it myself.
Adult children often arrive in this decision late, and with strong opinions. That is usually care showing up as urgency. I would rather have everyone in one conversation early than answer the same question five times in five different rooms.
The decision stays yours. My job is to make sure it is made on good information instead of on whoever is loudest.
No obligation. No listing conversation until you want one.