Whether you are conscious of it or not, where you are now depends quite a lot on the values you formed in your younger years. And where you are likely to go from here, especially in terms of your housing choices, is often a function of those values as well.  That’s why, when older adults are asked about where they want to live in later life, so many of them answer that “they want to stay in their present home” rather than consider alternative housing possibilities.  

The fact is, however, in good or bad markets, nearly 50 million Americans move every year and the moving won’t be over for the baby boom generation for many years to come. Many of them will move once, twice or even three times into new places where they will say they want to spend the rest of their lives. To understand this, we’ll need first to look at the triggers that motivate all of us to want to move, and then review how boomers have been living until now.      

Our desire to move can be triggered by a life event such as changing a job, getting married, expanding our family, or retiring from the workforce. It can also be caused by some internal dissatisfaction with an aspect of your present home. Whether the reason is a life event or internal dissatisfaction, we will experience a feeling of discomfort which can range from vague to intense that will trigger a desire to move that lasts until we make our next housing decision.            

Think about it. Any decision problem, by its very nature, makes us feel uncomfortable. After we decide what to do and are satisfied with our choice, we re-establish inner comfort. To make the process simple, let’s go through the steps of a typical decision to move to a different residence:First we experience some dissatisfaction about where we live—AT this point, we can decide to move, or to make some other change in our living arrangement that will take care of our dissatisfaction. While we are deciding where and when to go, we consciously or unconsciously run through an internal checklist that consists of four sets of housing values that are all powerful inner motivators. They are:

1. Personal Values:
1. The Autonomy and Control we value in life 
2. Our desire for personal Security and Safety
3. Our Identity—the essence of who we really are (or what our home communicates about ourselves to others.)
2. Social Values, which include:
1. Our feelings about family and friends
2. And our community interests.
3. Tangible or physical values. The cliché of “feeling at home” describes this value set perfectly and includes:
1. The looks of our home
2. The easy chair by the fireplace
3. Your eat-in kitchen
4. The view from an upstairs window
5. The Jacuzzi for two
6. The garden and walkways
7. And your neighborhood or town, your commute to work, and everything else that affects your physical comfort including the state of your health, and your proximity to health care.
4. And finally Financial or Money Values—not the money you actually have in the bank, but:
1. The sufficiency of your resources or “how much do I have?”
2. The sustainability of your resources or “how long will they last?”
3. The appropriateness of the cost or expense involved.
4. And, your access to the financial requirements in life.

 Yes, housing, the biggest investment we make in our lives cannot be reduced to figures on a spreadsheet, bank balances or even good habits of earning, saving and investing. Nearly every housing decision is driven as much by personal, social, and tangible values as it is by the bottom line. In fact, it can be much less related to the bare facts of finance than you might ever imagine.