Downsizing Mistakes Claremont Owners Tell Me They Regret

When I talk to people a year or two after a downsize, the happy ones say different things and the unhappy ones say the same things.

That is useful, because it means the regrets are patterned rather than random, and a pattern can be avoided. What follows is what people actually tell me, in rough order of how often it comes up.

None of this is an argument for or against downsizing. It is an argument for doing it deliberately.

Going too small

The most common one by a distance.

People overcorrect. They are tired of a house that is too big, so they buy something that is definitively not too big, and they land in a home that is genuinely too small for how they live.

The specific failures are consistent: nowhere for a guest to sleep. Nowhere for two people to be apart. No storage for the seasonal things everyone owns. A kitchen that cannot host.

The fix is to stop specifying square footage and start specifying function. Two bedrooms plus a room with a door beats three bedrooms with no retreat. Write down what the house must be able to do and let the number fall out of it.

Renting storage instead of deciding

The second most common, and the one that costs money every month.

The sorting is hard, the deadline arrives, and a storage unit becomes the way to not decide. It is presented to everyone, including oneself, as temporary.

Two years later most of those units are still rented, still full, and rarely visited. People describe them with a specific kind of irritation, because it is a bill for a decision they still have not made.

Occasionally a unit is genuinely right - a short bridge between homes, a family situation still resolving. As a way of avoiding the sorting, it is a tax on procrastination.

Underestimating how long the sorting takes

Nearly universal, and it is what causes several of the other regrets.

People budget a few weekends for decades of accumulation. It takes far longer, it is emotionally heavy, and it cannot be done at speed because half of it involves decisions with feelings attached.

Starting the sorting before there is a deadline is the single best piece of process advice in this entire subject. Sorting without a closing date is a project. Sorting with one is a crisis, and crises produce storage units, rushed disposals, and things thrown away that should not have been.

The realistic version of the schedule is in how long a downsizing move really takes, and the sorting itself in decluttering thirty years of stuff.

Choosing the location on a Sunday

People evaluate neighborhoods at their most appealing hour and then live there at every other hour.

The regrets are about noise, traffic, parking, lighting, and the walk from the car after dark. None of those show up at eleven on a Saturday morning in April.

Go at night. Go in August. Go when parking is worst. Do the walk you claim you would do, carrying something.

Not testing the stairs, the shower, or the approach

A quieter category, and it arrives later.

People buy a townhome with stairs because the stairs were fine at the showing, and four years on they are not. Or a bathroom with a high tub. Or a unit whose entry is up a short flight with nothing to hold.

These are the regrets that force a second move, which is the expensive kind. The physical requirements worth insisting on are set out in the one-level living wish list.

Moving on somebody else's timeline

The regret with the most feeling in it.

Adult children who meant well, a spouse who was ready first, a market someone said not to miss, a birthday that made it feel overdue. The move happened before the person was ready, and it took years to stop resenting it.

Being ready is not a scheduling detail. A house sold over an unresolved objection is paid for slowly, and no financial result compensates.

Overspending on preparing the old house

A practical one, and it goes the other way from what people expect.

Owners of long-held homes are frequently told to renovate before selling. Sometimes that is right. Often the sensible version is much smaller - clean thoroughly, repair a short list of things that read as neglect, deal with the landscaping, and go.

The regret is spending heavily on a kitchen for a buyer who will change it anyway. Get a straight opinion on what genuinely needs doing before authorizing anything, and be suspicious of a list that resembles a renovation.

What preparation actually requires in a fully lived-in home is covered in preparing a full Claremont home for sale.

Not asking the tax questions early enough

Consistently reported as the "I wish I had known" item.

The consequences of a sale are shaped by what happens before it, and by the time a house is in escrow some options have passed. California also has property tax provisions relevant to older homeowners that are conditional and specific, and people who learn about them late sometimes learn that a small difference in sequencing would have mattered.

Talk to a CPA while you are still deciding, and take assessment questions to the Los Angeles County Assessor. Do not take either from a general article, including this one.

Selling the furniture too fast, or too slow

Both directions appear.

Too fast: things given away in a panic in the last fortnight, including pieces that mattered or had real value.

Too slow: everything kept "until we see the new place," which means moving it, paying to move it, and then dealing with it anyway in a smaller home with less room to work.

The middle is to decide early what is definitely going, measure what might, and dispose of the rest with enough runway to do it properly.

The one thing the happy ones have in common

They started early and they were not under pressure.

Not that they planned more elaborately. That they had time - to sort, to look, to change their minds, to walk away from a house that was nearly right. Time is what converts this from a stressful event into a series of ordinary decisions.

And a fair number of the people I speak to did not move at all. They ran the exercise, decided the house still worked, hired some help, and stayed. Nobody regrets that either, and it is worth remembering that it is on the list of good outcomes rather than the list of postponed ones.

For the rest of the cluster, start at the Claremont downsizing guide. If you want to think it through with no obligation attached, that conversation is always available.

Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009.