I consider both long term cost and personal enjoyment. With nearly any large home improvement project, both have a non-zero degree of influence. Whether the personal enjoyment I’d get out of it is high in relation to long term cost is an important influence on my decision.
For example, solar panels were mentioned earlier. I installed solar under NEM 2.0 (extremely favorable to solar owner over electric provider) when a 30% tax credit was available, in a sunny area of CA that has the highest electric costs in the US. The result was a ROI of only ~3 years. I expect having paid off solar with an electric bill of ~$0/year also would improve home resale value. The solar also gives me personal enjoyment for a variety of reasons. With all positives and no major negatives, getting solar was an easy decision.
However, most home improvements are not all positives and not as straightforward decisions. For example, I’ll probably be painting my house in the next year or two. My personal enjoyment will be a key consideration of which colors I choose, but I’ll also consider resale value. If my only consideration was maximizing personal enjoyment, I’d paint my home a dark blue, with black highlights for door and shutters. Including resale value, this color scheme is likely to cost tens of thousands in the long run, perhaps higher (VHCOL area). The small amount of extra personal enjoyment I’d get with this color scheme over my 2nd choice color scheme (neutral color base, with blue highlights on door and shutters) is not worth paying an extra tens of thousands to me.
That is key. For us, the decision is bigger than just money. We’ve watched other couples struggle for months (or longer) NOT enjoying the process. If you stay a long time to be able enjoy the result of the expense/work, great. We probably would, but it’s not clear yet if we will be “sheltering in place” at this house or switching to a simpler house/condo as we age.
When a neighbor was selling, I loved what their Realtor said … There are colors to dwell and colors to sell. In other words, enjoy that lime green dining room (not an exaggeration!) all you want, but when you are ready to list let’s make things a little more neutral. IMO, paint is an easy one to tailor to your tastes (my dining room is eggplant, and I love it). More expensive to go with unusual floors and then redo them to sell.
@mom60, I have done a lot of our travel planning but have gotten a bit tired of it. On our last trip to Japan/Korea, ShawD and I collaborated and found ChatGPT to be useful in suggesting itineraries. We modified them, but ChatGPT made the planning easier.
Agreed. All of the AIs are trust but verify sources on everything. I update my iPhone’s OS to iOS 26.1 (?) with no problem but could not update ShawWife’s. I asked Gemini for reasons that might prevent me from updating to iOS 26. It told me that iOS 26 did not release. I said that I had it on my phone. I asked why would Gemini get it wrong? “It must have inaccurate information.” I use ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity and all have issue and all do great stuff with supervision.
I know AI sources aren’t always accurate. I did out of curiosity put in an area I would like to see and it came up with an itinerary. I appreciate the suggestion as I hadn’t thought of it.
@jym626 I think I had 26.1 installed on my phone and used that in the prompt. Gemini said 26.1 had not been released yet. I had it on my phone. It turned out that the problem was that she was not using the latest version of iOS 18.x. Once I installed that, I was able to update to 26.1.
Nonetheless I have found ChatGPT valuable for trip planning (and many other things).
When we were purchasing our first home in Houston in 1979, there was a home with all the shag carpeting in a bright shade of green mixed with white; obviously one of those made to dwell and not sell.
Interesting information on breakdown of ‘complexities’ of people moving. I see the inbound and outbound seniors here moving to be near family - we have professional job growth, and the retired parents want to be near the grandkids. Also know some that live some months in two places. I didn’t know Colorado is losing population and Oregon gaining. Otherwise, no surprises on this article.
It’s interesting. Today many say to paint (usually neutral) - like my kid’s room is orange. Or change the 20 year old carpet. And a big one is plants - curb appeal. Today, many realtors want to stage - some pay, some don’t.
Others, like my wife believe, don’t change the carpets. The new people will. Sometimes today you see people pay the market - and still rip out the house. So she thinks - why would we spend. There’s no guarantee the next will like our choices - so it could be money wastedl
I suppose one never knows - til they try and sell. And if you do nothing, but get a lower offer….well maybe that was smarter. Maybe you get $20K less and would have spent more fixing.
I think it’s like investing in general - some are conservative and don’t want to spend. Some want to take that chance - they think more pain up front, more gain.
But that’s for selling. In the case of the OP who brought up this topic, they are going to live there long it seems - so that changes that calculus from investment to consumption - I suppose no different than eating out for dinner - just with a bigger price point.
Oregon and South Carolina are typically 1-2. SC is booming. For all everyone wants to say about Oregon and its wackiness, it’s not far from CA and much cheaper although not cheap. High taxes but no tax on groceries I believe. It’s a beautiful state too.
WV is the one that blows me away - there’s some natural beauty - but it’s not a state on the rise (IMHO) like a TN, SC, Bama - or have the other attributes - like warm weather. But there it is #2. Of course, as a small population, it might not have taken much to move that needle. And TN not being on the list surprises me too with all the growth and jobs coming - In N Out just opened its first two stores - Regional HQ coming soon with I’m assuming the company HQ in 3 or 5 years as the owner moved here. And Oracle is next to move - from Austin. So it not being on there with the crazy growth is another surpise.
I agree - people generally want things the way they want them. We did nothing but clean to sell our house - the reason we were moving was to stop having to do stuff to the house. We did have to do 2 infrastructure things, which we would never have done, but were required to do to sell because they were deemed environmental safety issues - pull out a properly abandoned old oil tank (that was not leaking) and put in a radon remediation system.
I have a friend who sold her house with a 2 year old very expensive kitchen, which the new owners gutted and redid almost immediately after buying.
We lived in our last house for 24 years. The primary bathroom was remodeled about 7 years before we moved ( we wanted to get our use out of it) and some other remodeling had been done over the years. But we still chose to update the paint colors, get new carpet, remove dated window treatments and a few other things. The house showed well and we received multiple offers way over asking. A few other houses in our community looked “ straight from the ‘90’s” and sat for a few months. Updating was worth every penny for us.
When we sold our house, the real estate agents told us that we needed to paint everything in white/gray. Several of the rooms were done by ShawWife in fresco – pigment added to the plaster with very beautiful effects. After seeing the colors, the plasterer asked ShawWife if she wanted a job. We thought the rooms were so beautiful that people would love them. Nope. We painted them white/gray and the house sold a couple of weeks later. The current generation of buyers want the house to look like what they’ve seen in a Pottery Barn catalog.
ShawWife has gotten the most unusual set of unsolicited job offers: fruit and vegetable displayer at Dean & Deluca’s in Soho (a store we called the Food Museum), HVAC installer, plasterer, designer of fiber optic chandeliers (she did one for our house and the equipment supplier asked if she would do a joint venture with them to sell high-end fiber optic lighting).
@tsbna44, agree on having a great wife. Our current house bears her touch everywhere – paintings, fiber optic chandelier, rugs that someone made from her paintings (and is now selling to others – in principle ShawWife gets a royalty), plaster relief pieces that hide pipes (these are similar to some pieces she did earlier that are in a museum someplace), Venetian plaster dining room, frescoed walls. Plus crafts out the wazoo always happening in our house.
I wasn’t clear. The house didn’t get any offers with the fresco. Only when we relented and turned the house towards Pottery Barn catalog did we get offers.
@SOSConcern, I couldn’t tell whether the numbers they were showing were net (i.e., inbound - outbound). NY state could, for instance have huge flows inbound and outbound because it is so big.
What I do see on the inbound is these are mostly warmer states (skip MN and ID) but they are also mostly lower COL states compared to the outbound states. Some exceptions, I guess. Charleston SC has gotten expensive but I’m guessing the rest of the state is not. West Virginia is extremely low cost, I think. Given the k-shaped economy, unless local incomes are highly correlated with local COL, this would make sense. I could do what I do from anywhere. But it is one of the higher costs areas in one of the higher cost states and I could cut our living costs substantially by moving to most of the places in the top 10.
