Downsizing and senior home sales

Should I sell my home first or buy the smaller one first?

Sell first if your equity has to fund the purchase; buy first only if you can qualify to carry both payments at once. When you sell first, a rent-back keeps you to one move. Your lender settles the qualifying question in an afternoon, and the timeline is built around that answer.

Your lender answers the carrying question quickly. If the destination is a community that requires a deposit or entry payment before your sale closes, we build a bridge plan around that requirement instead of hoping the dates line up.

How do I sell a house I have lived in for decades?

In four stages spread over weeks, not one weekend: sort and remove, repair what matters, photograph, then list.

1. Sort room by room — keep, family, sell, donate, discard.
2. Repair the items an inspector and a lender will care about.
3. Professional photography once the house is clear.
4. List, show and negotiate on a timeline that matches your move-out date.

What repairs are worth doing before selling a long-time family home?

Roof, HVAC, water intrusion, electrical and anything actively broken — buyers and their lenders react to those, and full cosmetic remodels rarely return their cost.

I walk the home with you and we go through what's worth doing in priority order, including what to deliberately leave alone.

Will I owe taxes on the profit from selling my home?

Federal law excludes a substantial amount of gain on a primary residence owned and lived in for two of the last five years, and your CPA confirms the number that applies to you.

The exclusion is $250,000 of gain filing single and $500,000 filing jointly, if you owned the home and lived in it as your main residence for at least 24 months out of the five years before the sale — those months do not have to be consecutive. Gain above that may be taxable.

I am a REALTOR®, not a tax or legal advisor. I provide your CPA and attorney the closing figures they need.

What senior and age-restricted communities are near Louisville?

Four kinds: age-restricted ownership neighborhoods, patio-home associations, independent living, and continuing-care campuses. All four exist in Jefferson County, the surrounding Kentucky counties and Southern Indiana.

Federal law allows the 55-and-older restriction when at least 80% of occupied units have a resident 55 or over, so an age-restricted neighborhood is not necessarily all older residents. Patio-home and villa associations are often not age-restricted at all; they are simply low-maintenance, which is what most people are actually looking for.

Entry fees on continuing-care contracts vary widely in whether any of it comes back to you, and that term lives in the contract rather than the brochure. Read it with an attorney before you sign. Which of the four fits is usually clear in one conversation — narrowing before you tour saves you from falling for a campus whose contract does not suit you.

Who helps with the physical move?

Senior move managers, estate-sale companies and haulers who work in Louisville and Southern Indiana regularly, and I can refer them.

I keep that list rather than publish it — the right estate-sale company for a house full of mid-century furniture is not the right one for a house full of tools, and I would rather match it to your house than hand you a page. Three things to ask whoever you use, mine or your own: whether the move manager carries their own insurance, what an estate-sale company's commission covers and who pays for advertising and cleanup, and whether the haul-away quote includes dump fees in writing. Those three questions prevent most of what goes wrong.