Regardless of our age or family size, and no matter how long we have lived in our homes or where they’re located, we love them and want to stay in them. It’s hard to imagine living anywhere else.
Our home of choice
Most of us live in our homes, regardless of how long that has been, because we like them. We chose them for various reasons. Maybe we thought it would be a comfortable, long-term solution for us that we would enjoy for years. Maybe we like the location. Maybe it was the only one available that was close to meeting our needs at the time. Maybe we thought it would be a temporary move until something else came along that we liked better. Maybe it was all we could afford at the time. And there are many more maybes.
Regardless of why we selected our present home, it’s ours. Largely, we like it and enjoy living in it. It may have a few things we’d like to change, but it likely has many more traits that we like. We have grown with it as much as it has grown with us. It’s a mutual relationship.
Other homes don’t compare
In most cases, we have the freedom and the ability to look for other homes to live in, but this just doesn’t appeal to us very much. We love our homes, possible shortcomings and all. We may decide to make some improvements or renovations, or we might decide to just keep things as they are.
The one huge disruptive factor that we get to eliminate and avoid by deciding to remain in our current home is the process of looking earnestly for something else. That would take a lot of time and emotional energy.
No need to move
While our current homes may not be perfect, they do provide familiarity, routine, and a relative degree of comfort and dependability. They make it easy to age in place. It’s certainly easier than trying to find a home that we may or may not like better to replace it. We know what we have now. We don’t know what we may get in exchange.
Staying put makes sense and is a huge time saver when we compare keeping our present home and aging in place where we are to finding another home and then packing up everything we own to move to another location.
The most typical meaning of aging in place is staying in our current homes.