Retirement advice has treated downsizing like a law of physics for about forty years:
Retire → sell the big house → buy something small → invest the difference.
Clean. Obvious. And wrong often enough to be dangerous.
Because selling a $600,000 house and buying a $350,000 house does not hand you $250,000. And "staying put" is not automatically free, Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies found 7.9 million homeowners age 65+ were housing-cost burdened in 2023, spending more than 30% of income on housing. That's 27.6% of older homeowners.
Both defaults can be expensive. Let's run the actual numbers. 👇