Picture this: Your parent calls to tell you they’re selling the house.
Maybe they’re moving across the country. Maybe they’re cashing out and buying a condo in a state you’ve never associated with them. Maybe they’re downsizing into something that feels, to you, like a mistake. Bottom line is, they’re selling the home you grew up in—perhaps the home that you pictured inheriting someday.
You have thoughts. But before you try to talk them out of it, it’s worth asking yourself an honest question: Is your concern actually about them, their finances, their future—or is it about something else entirely?
Baby boomers are the most active generation in the housing market right now, accounting for more than half of all home sellers, according to the National Association of Realtors®. Many are downsizing, relocating to lower-cost areas, or moving closer to family as they settle into retirement.
For their adult children, the reaction isn’t always positive—the move feels too fast, too risky, not well thought out. But according to the professionals who work with these families every day, the parent is usually making a more rational decision than the kid gives them credit for. Here’s how to parse a good move, or an understandable move, from a truly bad one.
When the concern is real
Sometimes your parent is making a bad decision, and the numbers bear it out. The challenge is knowing what to look for.
“I always start by asking whether the parent is requesting assistance, or whether the child is attempting to intervene,” says Evan Farr, an estate planning attorney and financial planner. “An adult has the right to make decisions that others don’t agree with, even if those decisions ultimately prove to be poor ones.”
But there are legitimate red flags. Farr says the most common mistakes aren’t emotional, they’re mathematical. People underestimate transaction costs, relocate to no-income-tax states without assessing the full cost of living, or buy homes that aren’t aging-friendly and end up needing to move again. One of the biggest errors: a parent sells a mortgage-free home, buys another in cash, and leaves themselves with little reserve for future care needs.
From the agent side, Danielle Nazinitsky, founder of Decode Real Estate, sees parents “over-downsizing” into a one bedroom and regretting it within a year. She also warns about cost optimism. “Downsizers often assume everything will be cheaper. In reality, desirable downsizing markets are usually expensive in their own way,” she says.
So if you’re worried, think about the fundamentals even if you don’t have full visibility into your parent’s finances. Do they seem to have a cushion beyond the new home, or are they sinking everything into the purchase? Have they considered how their retirement income will be taxed in the new state? Can they age in place, or does the layout suggest another move is likely? Are they near quality health care? You may not have exact numbers, and you may not be entitled to them.
But if your parent has good answers, they may simply be making a different choice than the one you’d make.
When it’s more than a disagreement
There’s an important distinction between a parent making a choice you disagree with and a parent who may not be equipped to make the choice at all. If you’re noticing signs of cognitive decline—confusion about finances, impulsive decisions that seem out of character, vulnerability to pressure from others—that’s a fundamentally different conversation, and one worth having with their doctor before it becomes a real estate problem.
But outside of that, the legal reality is clear.
“Adult children have no authority unless they have a valid power of attorney or are appointed guardians by the courts,” Farr says. If your parent has capacity and the funds to support themselves, you don’t get a vote.
Which means that if your parent is sharp, solvent, and still making a move you hate, it’s worth asking yourself what’s really going on.
When it’s not really about the money
A lot of the time, the objection isn’t actually financial. It’s personal.
“Older buyers underestimate how much their identity is tied to where they’ve been living,” Nazinitsky says. “But so do their kids.” When a parent sells the family home, the adult child isn’t just losing a property. They’re losing the place where holidays happened, where their childhood lives. Those feelings can show up disguised as concern about square footage or property taxes.
And sometimes it’s not about the past, but the future. Farr sees adult children whose real worry isn’t that the move is a bad deal, but that it’s going to make their own lives harder. “Oftentimes the child is concerned about future caregiving responsibilities due to anxiety as opposed to an actual financial error,” he says. “Family conflict generally arises when children misinterpret disagreement as lack of competence.”
Nazinitsky says there’s another dynamic she sees regularly—one that’s harder to admit to. She’s worked with older clients whose adult kids were clearly unhappy about the move, and the pattern is almost always the same.
“The parents are trying to reduce their carrying costs on a fixed income. If the adult children are living in or utilizing the property, they suddenly realize that their free housing arrangement has an expiration date,” she says. “That’s when the move starts to feel ‘too fast’ or ‘not well thought out.’”
None of this means your feelings aren’t valid. But it’s worth being honest about where they’re coming from before you frame them as financial advice.
How to have the conversation, and when to let it go
If you’ve done the honest self-assessment and still have real concerns, the way you raise them matters. Farr recommends bringing in a neutral third party—a financial planner or elder law attorney—so the conversation can shift from emotional reaction to data-driven analysis. “More often than not, that’s the best course of action,” he says. “The discussion moves from ‘I think you’re making a mistake’ to ‘let’s look at the numbers together.'”
Framing matters too. Ask questions rather than make declarations. “Have you looked at what health care access is like there?” lands differently from “You clearly haven’t thought this through.” And timing counts: raising concerns before the decision is final is a conversation; raising them after the closing is more like criticism.
But sometimes, even after you’ve brought up your concerns thoughtfully, your parent is going to go ahead with the move. That’s their right. And when that happens, the best thing you can do is let go—not disengage, but stop trying to steer. Stay close enough to help if things don’t go as planned, and trust that they’re weighing more than you can see from the outside.
One day, you’ll be the one trying to balance aging gracefully, stretching a fixed income, planning for emergencies, and staying out of your own kids’ way. When that time comes, you’ll probably want the same thing your parent wants now: the room to make your own call.