Lifestyle

After She Sold Her House and Moved Into an Apartment, People Asked About Throwing Money Away on Rent. Her Answer: “Someone Else’s Responsibility Suits Me Just Fine”

By Mike Harper · November 8, 2026

For more than 20 years, the family home was where her life happened. Then the math, the repairs and the worry added up, and she made a move a lot of people questioned.

“In my late 50s I went from being a homeowner to an apartment dweller,” says the creator of Positively 60 (@positively60) at the start of a January 2025 video on her YouTube channel. In her mid 50s, she adds, she also became single for the second time.

She walks through how she got there, and how she feels about it now, in her video on YouTube.

She does not tell it as a sad story. She says she prefers to call herself independent rather than single, and that she is happily independent. She describes the end of her marriage without blaming anyone, and says she and her former husband have since become friends again.

When her husband moved out, their daughter was in high school, and she was not willing to move and cause her more pain. So she stayed in the mortgaged house with the same bills and one income. She says she has always worked and has a career, and her grown son moved back home and paid rent, which helped. For about four years she worked two jobs so she could stay.

The house itself was the hard part. It was 70 years old, she explains, with the breakdowns, repairs and mechanical problems that come with an older home. She describes waking up every morning wondering what was going to break that day.

She says that waiting period also gave her time to get comfortable on her own again, emotionally and financially. She did not rush. She sold the house in February 2022, which she says turned out to be the peak of the market where she lives, and moved into a small one-bedroom apartment.

“So I moved into an apartment I had had enough of the endless worry,” she says, about maintaining a property of her own. Having that be “someone else’s responsibility suits me just fine.”

More than a few people, she says, asked whether she cared about throwing her money away on rent. She does not look at it that way. She values the safety and security of an access-controlled building and not having to worry when things go wrong. To her, it is a fair price. She also says she may change her mind someday, but for now it makes the most sense for her.

Her choice runs against what many people want. The National Institute on Aging notes on its page about aging in place that many people hope to stay in their own homes as they get older. NIA also says living at home as you age takes careful consideration and planning, and it suggests being realistic and revisiting the decision as your needs change. Its list of help some people need at home includes housecleaning and yard work.

If you are weighing your own house, some neutral questions may help:

What does the house cost you besides money? For her, it was the daily worry about what would break next.

What would you be paying for if you rented? She lists security and not handling repairs herself.

Is the timing yours? She waited until she felt ready and the market made sense to her.

There is no single right answer about owning or renting, and her choice may not fit everyone’s budget or plans. For her, though, handing off the repairs was worth it.

This article is for general information and is not financial or legal advice. This article was produced with the assistance of AI and fact-checked against the sources cited by LightWave Reports.