These plans are essentially variations of three familiar transactions: loans, sales, and deferred payments.

In home-equity loan plans, you arrange for a reverse mortgage (or what is called an adjustable-rate reverse mortgage or reverse shared-appreciation mortgage), exchanging equity for cash while retaining title to your property and continuing to occupy your home. Each month the lender, usually a bank or a savings and loan association sends you a check. These checks are a loan that must eventually be repaid with interest. But you do not have to pay the money back until a specified period has elapsed – five or ten years or until you sell the home or die. In most cases your home is ultimately sold to repay the debt, though you can use a short-term reverse mortgage to pay living expenses until a pension or other source of income comes in. When your home is sold, any value beyond the debt goes to you or your estate.

Home-equity sale plans differ in that you lose title to your home. In one type, for instance, called a sale-leaseback plan, you sell your home to an investor who immediately leases it back to you for life. You become a renter in the home you have just sold.

The February 1987 issue of the Gerontologist described a Marin County home-equity demonstration project, recently expanded to San Francisco and eight other California counties (Alameda, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Contra Costa, Sonoma, Sacramento, Napa, and Orange). The program offers eligible applicants financial counseling and a choice of either a home-equity loan plan or a sale-leaseback plan. Most people who participate choose the loan plan to help pay for long-term home health care.

Home equity is not widely available. For instance, to be eligible for this California program, applicants must be sixty-two or over, have a low or moderate income and modest assets, own their homes outright, and live in one of the counties the project serves. Because programs are expensive to run, home equity may never be widespread, though the idea is catching on. There are now demonstration projects in Tucson, Boston, Milwaukee, and Nassau County, New York. There is even one in Musashino, Japan. From the National Center on Home Equity in Madison, Wisconsin, you can find out whether such a program exists in your community.

If you are “house rich” but not eligible for home-equity plans, you have other options. For example, suppose money is not a major concern, but the size of your house is. You feel uncomfortable living alone in a four-bedroom home, rattling around where a family would fit. Your house is unwieldy, hard to clean, heat, and maintain. You hate finding someone to mow the lawn. You are frightened of being by yourself. What would happen in a robbery or a medical emergency? Still, you refuse to sell.

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In making any move, whether to a continuing-care retirement community or not, the research suggests you should take these additional steps.

List the pluses and minuses of your new home versus your current one. Compare objective dimensions such as cost, convenience, and beauty, and concentrate on intangibles too: “Knowing myself, is this place likely to bring out the best in me?” ”With my interests and needs, would I be content living here?”

Be as clear-eyed as you can about your new home. If fleeing south to avoid the harsh northern winters seems so appealing, consider how you would cope during sweltering summer days. Visit for a week in August before you leap to pack up. If an apartment seems desirable because maintaining your house is so hard, think how it would be to lose the space, or the memories, or to pay rent each month. Balance realistically the joy of moving to be nearer your family with the pain of being parted from old friends. Be very cautious about moving for motivations like ‘ ‘watching the grandchildren grow up.” Your family may love you dearly, but their main life must be apart from you. Be reasonably confident that you will be able to make a satisfying new life apart from them in your new home.

Consider your future health. What would life be like here versus there if it becomes more of an effort to walk or drive? Your new home (ideally) should be within a few blocks of essential places – the bank, the drugstore, the grocery. Or transportation should be good and very close by. What physical barriers will you have to negotiate to get out of the house? Those stately steep steps and that lovely quality of being set back from the street might become nightmarish if they make you housebound because of a minor disability. In weighing the virtues of moving, keep accessibility and access to good health care in mind.

If your decision is to go, the research on life change offers some guidelines to planning the move.

Move during a peaceful time in your life. Minimize the risk of getting sick by not moving at a time when you are dealing with other major life changes. Don’t move to Florida the week you retire – wait a few months. Particularly if you are moving to a totally unfamiliar place, keep your agenda clear of simultaneous adjustments that will add to your stress.

Set up as much as possible of your new life beforehand. Lower the change value of the move itself by having a clear sense of how you will go about meeting new friends or spending your days. If possible, make several visits to your new community before you move permanently. If you want to buy a home or an apartment, try to rent first.

Give yourself six months to a year to settle in. Expect to feel out of sorts (or unhappy) the first few months after moving, before concluding that your decision was a mistake, understand that any major change is stressful. No matter how much People plan ahead, it takes time to settle in mentally. Finding yourself may be around the corner, even when the chance of ever being happy seems remote.

Moving to Florida was my wife’s idea. Raised in Europe, I tolerated an adulthood spent in New York City but felt out of sorts moving south fox what I thought would be a mindless retirement life. My prejudices were wrong. I found a job teaching at the local university – something I could never do in Europe or New York without a Ph.D. I am respected and known here in this smaller pond. And once I scratched the surface, those shallow-seeming Floridians proved to be interesting companions after all. But for almost the whole first year, I was planning my escape. I’m so glad I held on long enough to find out I really do like it here.

If you are unhappy with your current home and have the choice, it makes sense to lean toward moving, even if you are not sure things will work out. Taking a chance that has the potential to make life much better seems a fair risk. Even misplaced moves are not irrevocable. They are just easier or harder to undo, depending on how carefully you build in an escape hatch. So go, but with the idea that if a year has passed and you are still unhappy, you will think seriously about returning. Of the nine thousand older people who moved from Florida to New York in 1984, many were probably migrating back from their retirement homes. Granted, some may have been forced to return because of poor health; but others surely moved back voluntarily. They simply realized their original decision was wrong.

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