Selling home to free capital and renting in later retirement?

[MarshaMarshaMarsha]

Pondering retirement options (long way off as only 45). We have no children so don’t want to have anything left to leave anyone. We will be mortgage free in a year or so. Will then be ploughing more into pensions. Is a good option to included in our planning that we sell our home at say 70 years old to free up all that capital (worth £500k now so hopefully a fair amount more by then)… and use that as part of our pension pot and to rent a retirement property with?!

it seems to make sense as no point having assets to hand down. But am I missing anything?!

I don't really get the logic of this.

If you keep your house you have no rent to pay, you can spend your savings and pension with free abandon without worrying about housing security etc.

If you sell and rent you will be spending the free-ed up money on rent, rents can rise, you might get fed up with the retirement complex and its rules and whatever, etc etc. And the rent will be high in a retirement complex.

Maybe you will want to downsize / move to a home that suits you for retirement and that might free up some capital and reduce your overheads - but honestly it sounds as if you have enough pension and saving-time to give yourselves a good retirement while keeping the freedom and security of your own home.

Rents are higher in retirement complexes because of the services. Everything that would bother you as you start feeling the effects of age is taken care of. There are experienced teams to assess any increasing needs, get appropriate help, and to sort out care home placement if needed.

I'm having to try and do these things for myself, and it's a bloody nightmare! Services are so piecemeal and overstretched, it's hard to even get started. Everyone wants a gigantic fee for doing very little. In ageing-focused accommodations, you're effectively sharing these services with neighbours so it is at least more efficient.

My HA retirement flat was supposed to be like this, btw, but the services were withdrawn years ago. Now I get a weekly email, which is a tiny bit less support than I'd hoped for ...

As OP says, options will no doubt have improved by the time she and her husband are ready for this, as the older population increases in both size and value.

MIL has a home and had saving of around £60k, which have now run out due to care costs of £60k a year. The council have offered to pay £30k a year. That will involve her getting a very different level of care and she is genuinely very distressed about this. We will try to borrow on her house - which isn't worth much and if that runs out - dh and I will have to try to make up the £30k to fund her care.

Your option to defund yourself and rely on the social services with no family to fall back on is not a situation I would want to embrace in old age, there is no money for social care - I'd rather chance leaving the money to my favourite charity and have choice of care in my old age - you're not left with much else.

That’s a good point and thank you for sharing your experience.