Stay or go? This is a question that most seniors are faced with at some point during their retirement and arriving at an answer is seldom easy. Making the decision to leave your home, especially one where you’ve raised your family and that’s filled with memories, requires serious thought. Here are four reasons you may want to consider boxing your belongings and moving on.

1. You can create a new income stream
If you’ve decided to stop work, your income stream will, in most cases, be limited to your retirement savings, RAs and investments. Because the future is unknown, it’s almost impossible to predict whether your capital will cover you for the rest of your life and whether it will be sufficient to maintain your current standard of living in the years to come. Opting to sell your family home, which should have increased significantly in value over the many years you’ve lived in it (you’ll also most likely have paid your home loan off by now), affords you the opportunity to buy your next home at a lesser price and put the difference (hopefully a fairly tidy lump sum) into an interest-bearing account or investment that delivers monthly dividends.

2. You can save on maintenance
Not only does it cost a significant amount of money to keep a home well maintained year after year, it also becomes more and more expensive to do so as you grow older and rely increasingly on contractors to do the work you once did yourself. Moving to a Life Right-based retirement village, like those managed by Evergreen Lifestyle, allows you to enjoy an entirely stress-free retirement knowing that the developer is entirely responsible for all maintenance, landscaping and security.

3. You can choose to be closer to family and friends
Have your children moved to another suburb or city? If you’re no longer just around the corner from your children and grandchildren, a retirement village may be the answer. Evergreen has retirement villages in the Western Cape and Gauteng (we’re breaking ground on our KwaZulu-Natal villages soon), giving you the option to move closer to family and spend more time with your grandkids, while enjoying all the benefits that an Evergreen Life Right offers.

4. You won’t have to move again
Perhaps one of the most important reasons to move (and sooner rather than later), is the fact that big life changes become increasingly difficult as you grow older. By choosing a retirement option like Evergreen, which offers continuous care covering everything from primary healthcare to home-based care, recuperative care, frail and dementia care, and palliative care, once you’ve moved in, you’ll never need to move again.