HerMoney Podcast Episode 195: Selling A Home, Moving, Renovations, Downsizing And More

Saving money on hermoney podcast episode 195 does not have to be complicated. We rounded up the essentials so you can spend less and skip the guesswork.

Key Takeaways

• It's time to stop thinking like a seller and start thinking like a buyer.
• If you’re looking to move, sell a home, buy a home, renovate, downsize or even rent, then this episode is for you.
• We’re tackling all of the above, and diving into the emotional ties we all have to the four walls that surround us, and to the possessions w...

It's time to stop thinking like a seller and start thinking like a buyer.

If you’re looking to move, sell a home, purchase a home, renovate, downsize or even rent, then this episode is for you. We’re tackling all of the above, and diving into the emotional ties we all have to the four walls that surround us, and to the possessions we have inside them. Why do we make decisions with our hearts that should be made by the financial part of our brains?

To answer that question, Jean is joined by Caroline Carter, founder and CEO of Done in a Day, a Washington, D.C. based home transition and move management company. Caroline is also the author of the book “Smart Moves: How To Save Time And Money While Transitioning Your Home And Life.”

Caroline was inspired to start her career when she recognized her own passion for “creating organization out of chaos.” Moving is one of the most stressful life events we go through, and every year approximately 40 million Americans move. Caroline dives into how we can all bring the stress levels down when embarking on a move, and dishes on some of her favorite tips she’s learned from helping more than 2,000 families over the last 14 years.

Caroline talks about how sellers should package their homes to sell so that the buyer sees the value, and offers a checklist of things for people to do before they put their homes on the market. One trick: You can never go wrong by going to your local home depot and snagging a gallon of paint. (Neutralizing your personal space is always a good move, because you have to turn your home back into a house in order to sell it, she says.)

Caroline also dives into ways we can de-clutter our space, and how best to ignore the temptation to put everything into storage when what we really need is a trip to the dump… Oftentimes it’s not worth the cost of moving and storing things just because of the emotional implications they may have.

She also offers a step-by-step guide for how to tackle the moving process in the most efficient way possible. Hint: Start with the things that only you can do, and then plan to hire help for the things that you can’t do yourself. Also, Caroline shares her thoughts on what people regret most after a move, and how to decide how much space you’ll really need if you’re downsizing.

Then, in Mailbag, Jean advises a mom who is concerned about saving for her son’s college education, and guides a woman who’s considering putting all her investments into a target date fund. She also counsels a listener who’s worried about timing the markets while recession fears are looming. Lastly, in Thrive, we dish on allowances for kids, and how much they should really be getting.

Transcript

Caroline Carter: (00:01) There’s a need to change your mindset. From the minute you make the decision to sell. You need to stop thinking like a seller or a homeowner and start thinking like a buyer.

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Jean Chatzky: (00:17) HerMoney is brought to you by Fidelity Investments. We want you to feel confident about investing so that you can make your money work just as hard as you do. Learn the ropes without the jargon at fidelity.com/demandmore. HerMoney comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody, I’m Jean Chatzky. Welcome to HerMoney and thanks so much for joining me because today we have a lot to unpack. And I mean that literally. We are talking about home buying, home ownership, moving, renovations, renting, and the emotional ties that we all have to our places and to our things. For those of you who are homeowners and those of you who are renters, you all know far too well that we can get so attached to the four walls that surround us to the possessions that we have inside of them and we start to make decisions that when should be made with the financial sides of our brains are actually made by our hearts. I was struck, you all have heard me refer to the research that fidelity did with the Stanford university center on longevity where they talked about the fact that we all as individuals go through four stressful life events each and every year and these can be good things like getting married and having a baby and getting a new job, but they can also be troublesome. Things like getting a divorce or losing a parent or losing a job and moving ranks really high on the list of these stressful situations, which is why I’m so excited that today we’ve gotten the studio, Caroline Carter, she is founder and CEO of Done in a Day which is a Washington D.C. based home transition and move management company. She’s also the author of the new book Smart Moves: How to Save Time and Money While Transitioning Your Home and Your lLife. Caroline, thanks so much for being here.

Caroline Carter: (02:44) Thanks Jean. I’m really excited to be here.

Jean Chatzky: (02:47) So I haven’t let my listeners know this yet, but my husband and I are actually planning a move ourselves.

Caroline Carter: (02:53) Well congratulations. Where are you moving to?

Jean Chatzky: (02:55) Thank you. We bought an apartment in Philadelphia and we will be first renovating, which is going to be stressful in it of itself, but we’ll be moving there in I hope less than a year.

Caroline Carter: (03:11) Wow. That is exciting.

Jean Chatzky: (03:13) But we’ll see. Yeah, so, this is a very personal conversation for me today. I’m excited to dig into it and to make it as stress less as possible, but before we get there, tell me a little bit about you. This is a very interesting business to specialize in.

Caroline Carter: (03:33) It definitely is. And I sort of fell into it. I’m a single mother with three kids and back in 2005 when I was newly divorced, I was in a position where I hadn’t worked outside the home for 12 years, at least professionally and could not afford to continue living where I was living in Bethesda, Maryland without producing income for my children. And I received a call from a very good family friend who had recently lost her husband unexpectedly to a heart attack while he was out for his morning run.

Jean Chatzky: (04:03) Oh my gosh.

Caroline Carter: (04:04) Yes. She had two small children and had decided to move back to D.C. where she bought a property, sight unseen, and asked me, would you, you know, go over and assess what needs to be done, paint, landscaping, new carpets, so on and so forth, and can I send a truck ahead and you just do this. I am literally unable to move forward. I’m doing everything I can to keep life and limb together right now and I don’t have the bandwidth. And I thought, of course I’ll do it for you just because I would do it for anybody, but this might be an interesting opportunity for me, for her, for everybody. So I spent a couple of weeks and immediately set about sourcing the trades and so forth that I would need. And a couple of weeks after we were getting the work done, she sent ahead the 53-foot moving truck full of household belongings that I had never seen before. And I settled the home. The family arrived a couple of days later and was able to move in and do nothing for the first year, but really pay attention to, you know, dealing with their grief and, and reconnecting to the D.C. community. So it was during that first project where I really kind of had my “aha” moment.

Jean Chatzky: (05:15) You realized this is a business.

Caroline Carter: (05:17) I thought, wow, this is an opportunity. I am an absolute organizational freak and love. I’m able to really see, you know, we each have our own superpower and I think that mine is to be able to create order out of chaos for people. And what I really learned from this first home transition was the emotionality surrounding it. In this particular case, the death of a spouse was, I mean, would bring any family to their knees, but as you mentioned, it is one of the five most stressful life changing events. So from this first transition came requests for other families who had heard about it.

Jean Chatzky: (06:03) And 40 million people do this every year.

Caroline Carter: (06:05) Every single year.

Jean Chatzky: (06:07) It runs the gamut, right? We’re not just talking about people who purchase homes or sell them or tying about renters who are moving to a bigger apartment, or smaller apartments. How do you, when you’re thinking about a move, start from square one so that you can, let’s just focus this conversation on doing it right, to bring the stress levels down.

Caroline Carter: (06:32) Okay. That’s a excellent place to start. And the place that you start is by understanding that there’s a need to change your mindset from the minute you make the decision to sell. And Americans move 11.7 times throughout their lifetime. That’s a lot of moving. So from the moment you decide to sell is the moment you need to change your mindset.

Jean Chatzky: (06:54) What do you mean?

Caroline Carter: (06:54) Okay, you need to stop thinking like a seller or a homeowner and start thinking like a buyer. For numerous of us, our home is our largest asset or one of the largest we own. Yet consistently over the 2000 families I’ve helped over the last 14 years, I see people making very poor financial decisions about this asset.

Jean Chatzky: (07:17) Like what?

Caroline Carter: (07:18) Am I going to stage it? For instance, staging is just one portion of the total home transition process. Meaning am I going to hire someone who is going to help me to visually and cosmetically update the house, place furniture, tablescape that is aspect of the process. Am I going to invest in painting? Am I going to make fast, simple and inexpensive updates?

Jean Chatzky: (07:46) I just painted the outside of my house. Are you going to tell me I made a mistake?

Caroline Carter: (07:49) No, not at all. Not at all. But the issue is the, the problem is today there’s so numerous experts telling people so numerous different things what to do, how to do it. People really don’t know where to start. I am a truth teller in this industry and obviously have been working in it, which is really a niche topic for the last numerous years. And what I would tell you is the ability to think like a buyer is the most critical aspect of the process. Meaning what, as a seller, okay, you want to do the least amount of work possible. As a buyer you want to do the least amount of work possible. So what does it mean for both sides? Well, for the seller, you need to emotionally disconnect from this asset. You need to be able to look at your asset and rate it based on what a buyer, a current buyer currently expects and is and is determined to find, right? So it’s really not about you as a seller, it’s about the buyer. And it’s about packaging your house to sell so that the buyer sees the value. Right? It’s a very strange concept. A.

Jean Chatzky: (08:56) re there things that sellers should do every time that we can direct them toward? Is it about clearing the clutter? Is it about painting the walls white? Is it about embracing the fact that everybody seems to like gray these days? I mean, are there, is there a checklist of things that we can tell people to do?

Caroline Carter: (09:19) Yes, that’s really a excellent place to start. And one of the reasons why I wrote the book Smart Moves. There are some basic things that you need to pay attention to. The first of which is you can never go wrong by going to your local Home Depot and getting a gallon of paint neutralizing the personal space. Meaning, what sellers need to understand is there’s a difference between house and home. You purchase a house but you make it a home. In order to sell it quickly and at top dollar, you need to turn it back into a house, which is marketable asset. That has nothing to do with the emotional investment we make in our homes. So, so to be able t

Final Thoughts

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Originally published at savingswitch.com.