Our career/life stage will allow us to sell our current house and leave the community we raised our three kids in soon. Our oldest lives in NYC (age 28), our 23 year old lives nearby, and our youngest is headed to college, August 20. We will have the freedom to live where we want, not encumbered by job restrictions.
Our community is famous for excellent schools and high taxes. If we sell and move to a more typical community, our savings in real estate taxes would pay our son’s college tuition (state flagship). I like that part.
Plus…I want to get rid of this big old house and not have so much darn stuff.
I’d like to hear thoughts and/or experiences from others on this. I am concerned that my S20 will feel homeless when we sell. We don’t plan on being gone by the time he returns for his first Thanksgiving, but don’t want to wait much after that. My older son’s best friend’s parents moved the summer before he started college, and he stayed with us during many of his breaks because he wanted to go ‘home.’ He stayed with us more than his parents during college, really.
We probably won’t leave the area completely, but will downsize significantly and won’t be in the suburb he grew up in.
You do what you want to! The kids certainly do. My niece is accepting a job in Santiago, Chile, for crying out loud. Do you think her mother (my sister) is happy about that?
We will be moving across the country in August ahead of our youngest starting college by mere weeks. It’s a military move and out of our hands though. My kids haven’t really known a single place as home though.
I went to college on September 14; my parents moved out of our house on September 17, to a two-bedroom apartment in NYC. Like your son’s best friend, I wound up spending more time during vacations at my friend’s house than with my parents. It was not good for me at all. I was fairly traumatized.
Considering how much money you’ll save in taxes, however, that might be compelling.
I lived with my parents throughout college and only left when I moved overseas with active duty husband. My parents moved during that first tour of his. I felt kind of wistful but also happy for them.
The only part that bothered me was the dynamic behind it – my father told me that my mother kept going up to my room and crying because she missed me so much, and that it wasn’t getting better almost two years out. The change of scene was one (major) reason for the move. The new house didn’t bother me at all in comparison to the emotional pressure.
This is a great question, and a thread that I’ll be following. My wife and I are interested in moving about 1 hour away from our current home once youngest is out of HS. Like OP, no need to pay the high taxes and make the long commute to work. Our concern is exactly as stated above - what will the kid do when he comes home for breaks because he’ll know no one in/near the new town. We’re thinking maybe hold off on moving until his Jr year in college when we find that kids aren’t as included to come home as often (internships, travel, etc.).
We moved from OH to IL the day after D graduated from HS. She’s been fine with the change in houses, but she missed easily being able to see her friends the first year when she was home from breaks. This past year didn’t matter as much as she now has college friends in the area and… she’s barely been home.
I’ve repeatedly told DD we would like to move once she goes off to college (somewhere with a warmer climate and lower taxes). I get the romantic notion of coming “home”, and I do worry about how she would react when we actually do so. On some level, she realizes that the only reason we aren’t moving sooner is so she can stay in the same high school. We switched her out of a school once in elementary. She did fine with that change, but since she is doing so well where she is, we’re not going to disrupt things.
I guess if she ends up at our state flagship, we’ll stick it out a bit longer. Still, I am trying to set the expectation ahead of time.
We did this and it was terrible for our son. We sold our house in Massachusetts and moved to rural Maine right after our son’s Thanksgiving break his sophomore year. So he flew back to college after Thanksgiving and came home at Christmas to a different house.
This is not a reason not to do this, but it is possible, even likely, that it will be difficult.
I agree that if you’re really concerned you should get some input from your son. I wouldn’t put pressure on his opinion - just say you and your H are moving some thought/consideration. If his friends and old neighborhood are still pretty accessible (is the suburbs a reasonable drive/public transportation ride to the current neighborhood?) he may be ok with that.
My DH grew up overseas, and his parents decided to move back to the states when he, the youngest, was a college freshman or sophomore… Back then it was hard to make overseas calls and for quite a while (several months) he didn’t know where his parents were! So this sounds like a first world problem!
I’ll paraphrase my grandmother…never base your life choices on anyone else, they’re not going to give you a thought when it’s their turn to make a life choice. This was in relation to me and my then 3 year old moving 50 miles from my own mother who we were very close with. A year after we moved SHE moved 3,000 miles!
We had actually planned to try and move this past summer after S19 graduated HS. He was going to stay with friends on visits so these breaks are bonus time for him since we are still around. All 3 of our kids are 1000 miles away now. I was pretty vocal that we stayed through HS but have been making plans for a few years.
DH’s job search is taking longer than hoped but everything else is ready to fall in line immediately after that. Storage unit has several packed boxes and extra furniture. House fix ups almost finished. I’ve talked to realtors and researched moving companies, multiple cities, housing and teaching openings for me.
D25 is married and S18 is a college sophmore. This will probably be our last Christmas here. Little bittersweet but really excited to move someplace warmer and closer to kids and family.
We are both ready to start new jobs and begin a new lifestyle. This is the first time we have ever been together with no kids. D25 was 3 when we met. I am also ready to downsize from the extra rooms we don’t need anymore.
My s20 has heard us chat about a big move for a long time, mainly because he, his sibs, and my husband are all Italian citizens and the idea has been to shed the big house here and get a place in Italy for us all to use a few months a year. He is the only one not into that, simply because he hates the long flight there. But he may shake that once he matures and appreciates travel more.
He’s a generous soul and would never stop us from doing what he thinks we want. “It’s fine” is his favorite sentence. He has told us not to consider him when we think of a move completely out of Cleveland because he seems to think he’ll end up someplace remote, like North Dakota. Who knows how that got in his head.
But he’s only 17, and has all of the lack of self-awareness most 17 year olds have. On top of that, he tends to suffer in silence and he could be miserable and would never tell us. My older two would send a daily voicemail on their misery. He would never say a word.
Thanks for the feedback; I welcome more. The timing kind of matters as it feeds decisions about what projects I take and when my husband begins his transition to semi-retirement. While I would love to get the house ready for the market all next summer, targeting a fall sale, I am leaning towards at least waiting until the spring of his first year to shake his timbers. I think his having his first summer ‘home’ would be a good idea.
What triggered this query was my asking him what to do with a pair of hockey gloves which have been sitting on my entrance table for six months. They have holes on the finger tips and are obviously unusable. I asked, expecting the answer to be ‘toss them.’ But he couldn’t part with them. I think he’s really feeling the reality of what his transition to college will be like. While his college search began with intent to go far away, his ultimate decision had a lot to do with staying close to home and going where he knows many kids. He has to live things before he realizes that he does have feelings and they matter. Even wannabe engineers need to feel at home.
Well, what about you? Are you sure you want to leave your community after all these years rather than just downsize in place? What about getting a condo in your town instead? I had to move, and I really miss that sense of community, and seeing my kid’s friends and their families.
We’ve talked about moving for years. First, I wanted my youngest to finish high school with his friends. Then, I wanted him to get settled at college. Now he’s a senior, so after we see where he ends up after graduation, we’ll revisit downsizing.
My youngest rarely shares and is easy-going and “fine” with everything. But I just had a gut feeling that moving would be a big change and he would suffer in silence. I’m glad we waited.
It would be nice if he could come home to your current house for Thanksgiving his freshman year. He WILL have to make an effort to see his high school friends after that, but so long as you are willing to share him with their on holidays, it’ll happen. Social media really seems to allow kids to organize on a dime. And if you all wanted to visit the old 'hood, you can probably find an airbnb.
My college age kid increasingly meets up with friends at a vacation home, in their college city, etc., but not where he grew up. He only spent one college summer at home!
I would make a point, in your new house, of making sure his space is comfortable and his. As a college student, he will value coming “home” even if it’s not the home he grew up in.
But your reasons for moving and downsizing a bit really make sense. Hanging onto the house for a couple of weeks a year that may not even be doesn’t make sense.