Buying a Home (when you are over 50)
Buying a Home when you are over 50 feels strangely different to buying your first or even your second or third. If you are buying your first home and you are over 50 then please be assured that the confidence you lack is felt fairly much across the board.
As mature women, we have a wealth of knowledge and experience. For goodness sake, mostly we have managed to grow children to adults, manage households, and hold down a job, yet buying a home and selling a home, we approach with trepidation. I understand and want to reassure you that you are not alone in your feelings.
I wonder if our uncertainty comes from how we are made to feel as we begin the great real estate exploration. We meet up with youthful real estate agents, brimming with confidence or older agents who seem a little world-weary. They all seem ‘nice’ but somehow we can feel a little invisible, inconvenient, and well, to be quite frank, we can feel a little stupid.
You are not stupid.
You are not inconvenient.
You are visible to me.
This cloak of invisibility starts to creep over our heads in our mid-40s. As women we are ignored in many statistics, our unpaid work is not currently included in the GDP and we are more likely to go unrecognised in the monument stakes.
We are less likely to tolerate poor behaviour this is true however play nice, be decent and so will we. (The colloquially used “Karen” is aggravating when there is no single name used for white, middle-class men). I notice this in many aspects of life, not just in real estate.
We are mature, yet the media has the temerity to call us elderly once we hit our mid-50s (this happens whether we are male or female). Our colleagues or those we meet through networking circles, ‘value our experience’ but said in a tone that they are trying to be super nice but perhaps we should sit down, be quiet, and let the bold and the beautiful speak.
I resent the hell out of this. Tempted to say that ‘back in my day’ but good grief, that is so ageing!
I want to be part of the change, where women are valued, included, respected and not looked over once we are beyond 50. Of course, it’s not universal. Amongst our own circles, we feel no different to when we were at school together, at University or in the early stages of our careers. Somewhere our value changes. Is it my perception or is it really real?
Buying a home is a nerve-wracking process at any age, buying a home when you are over 50 has financial implications too, it can be more difficult to get a loan, and it really needs to be part of your retirement strategy. Buying a home versus buying an investment property or rent vesting, we need to be thinking long-term and protecting our assets, we need to nurture our own future financial well-being, looking after ourselves and not expecting anyone to run in and save us from ourselves. We need to change the stats and change the story of women over 55 and increased homelessness.
Anyway, next time I will focus on the process of buying a home when you are over 50.
If you need assistance because you want to explore buying a home of your own then please reach out. You can book an initial free MEET UP call with me to discuss your options.
Invisible Women Articles and Publications
Invisible Women: Melbourne’s Monumental Problem
Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez
Exposing data bias in a world designed for men
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/invisible-women-9781784706289
If Women Counted by Dame Marily Waring (1988)
https://www.marilynwaring.com/publications/if-women-counted.asp
This is a revolutionary and powerfully argued feminist analysis of modern economics, revealing how woman’s housework, caring of the young, sick and the old is automatically excluded from value in economic theory.
