As people begin to age, various issues that may have seemed minor at first become more and more concerning. Maintaining a home can be one of them. Increasing physical limitations or children moving out may necessitate a senior to move either with family, to a facility, or simply a smaller living area. This isn’t always an easy process, though. Here are some of the issues that may arise while seniors are moving.
Physical Limitations: There’s a reason that people hire moving professionals to help get the boxes in and out of homes—moving boxes takes a lot of physical effort! Even if you don’t have a lot of heavy furniture or equipment, it’s still exhausting to move the entire contents of a home into packing boxes, bring the boxes to a new home, then unpack. Compounding the problem is the fact that many seniors may be dealing with mobility issues or other conditions that make it painful or impossible to shoulder the burden themselves.
Emotional Issues: This rarely gets talked about, but bears mentioning. If a person has lived in the same house their whole life, it can be difficult in the emotional sense to move to a new environment. A move in and of itself is stressful, and it can be compounded by leaving a familiar setting and potentially having to dispose/rehome certain items due to needing to downsize. Because of this, it may help to move at a slower pace or have a family member do a lot of the work of disposing of clutter or other items.
Smaller Networks: Many people spread the burden of a move by enlisting friends and family to help, but seniors may not have the means to do this. For example, they may live far away from grown children or other family, and many of their friends may be other seniors who have physical limitations keeping them from helping. As a result, it’s possible that seniors may have to do the bulk of handling a move on their own, compounding the issues we’ve mentioned earlier.
Logistics: Even if a senior isn’t dealing with cognitive decline, there’s a lot of planning that goes into a move. This goes from deciding how you will downsize to organizing all your items to working with the movers to pick a time and place to actually get the move done. This is both a time-consuming and stressful process for many seniors. There’s the financial aspect as well. A senior with physical limitations may need to pay more for conventional movers, which can be difficult on a fixed income.
Thousands of people move across the country every year, but when it comes to seniors, there may be specialized support needed to move the process along. At Friend Of The Family, we can provide a suite of services to help make moving easier. This includes helping families, individuals, and seniors with organization as well as asset distribution to take a lot of the legwork and difficult decisions out of a move.