Tag: moving

Later-Life Transitions:

Moving to a Senior Facility

In 2023/2024, the SDPA Aging Issues Committee produced six ninety minute Zoom presentations entitled Later-Life Transitions Luncheon Series. Topics covered in this series included Retirement, Loss of Physical Capabilities, Moving to a Senior Facility, Becoming Caregiver to a Family Member, Loss of a Spouse/Partner and The Final Transition. We are presenting a summary of the material covered in each of the six series presentations in installments .

The third topic Moving to a Senior Facility was facilitated by Cynthia A. Cotter, Ph.D. and Kenneth S. Dellefield, Ph.D. on June 16, 2023.

MOVING TO A SENIOR FACILITY

In this session, Drs. Dellefield and Cotter discussed the experiences of older adults who find themselves having to leave their family homes and move to senior facilities.  The transition to a senior facility can be particularly difficult for many older adults to navigate.  There are stresses leaving the living environment one has known for many years and that has been incorporated into one’s sense of identity, safety, and place in the world.  It feels as though so many memories are being left behind.  The transition can be complicated by financial and tax issues and tremendous problems in downsizing.  Desires and competitions among family members can make matters even worse.  

You may be interested to know that, currently, 80% of those over the age of 50 own their own homes. And of those, 51% have no mortgages. So it comes as no surprise that 87% of adults over 65 say they do not want to move from their homes. They want to age in place. And yet many of those will find themselves unable to do so.

Continue reading “Later-Life Transitions:”

To Move or Not to Move…


…that is the question.

Here we were, living in beautiful Del Mar in a perfect house overlooking the Pacific Ocean, thinking we would never move again…that the only way we would be leaving this house was feet first!! That was then….this is now — now we live in beautiful Boulder Colorado, in a magnificent, brand new 5 star retirement community, in an apartment almost as large as our house was, looking out to the Rockies! How did this happen??

Our decision to make this monumental move came about from the accumulation of many little and not so little things. While we loved our house, it seemed like even minor repairs were feeling like responsibilities we no longer wanted to deal with. Del Mar, and San Diego in general, had grown exponentially in the 20 years we lived there — the traffic and congestion were becoming frustrating. We were growing older (in our 80’s) and we began asking why not make our lives easier by giving up the house and going someplace we would learn to love just as we’d grown to love San Diego. We were northeasterners for the first 60 years of our lives and, unlike so many of our friends, we’ve moved around a bit. The idea of living in a new place held a sense of excitement for us.

Continue reading “To Move or Not to Move…”