Reaching Retirement? How to Decide When to Sell Your Home

Retirement might be so close that you can practically taste the salt in your margarita and feel that wonderful, crisp ocean breeze. Instead of putting the cart before the horse and getting wrapped up in a fantasy, let's take a look at the right time to sell your home before perhaps downsizing and easing into retirement.

Seller's Market

What's wonderful about potentially selling your home before you retire is that you might be able to sell your home for much more than you initially paid for it, or perhaps more than your home has been worth over the last couple of years. 

Listing your home in a seller's market could shore up much-needed funds for retirement. You might also decide that now's the right time to sell your home based on personal factors.

Your Home is Too Big

If you look around and see a bunch of extra rooms or a home that requires too much in the way of upkeep and utility costs (e.g., heating), then it might be time to sell your home.

Personal Factors

If you could move a short distance and realize a tremendous property tax windfall by doing so, then why wouldn't you make the move? The truth is that you probably would make the move in a hurry if you only knew that such a possibility was out there somewhere. 



The thing to do is sit down and do some research. Are there retirement homes and other amenities nearby that offer lower property tax opportunities?

Financial experts say that, as long as you've lived in your home for two of the previous five years going in to a sale, you should be able to exclude $250,000 in capital gains from the sale if you're single and $500,000 in capital gains from the sale if you're a married couple.

You might want to get in touch with a realtor or financial expert who can tell you more about these potential savings if you sell your home now. Look for claims like "we buy houses" when you're shopping around for the best realtors to sell your home.

If you've been living in the same place for two of the last five years, then now might be the perfect time to sell your home and realize tremendous capital gains savings that otherwise wouldn't be possible. Think of what you could do with another $250,000 or $500,000 over the next twenty years of your retired life!