A ‘Senior Move Manager’ Helps Boomers, Retirees Sell Stuff, Downsize

Paul and Diane Baxter didn’t know what to do with their 1,200 books, or the spare furniture and clothes they’d collected over 40 years of marriage.

The retired couple was getting ready to downsize from a 1,800-square-foot three-bedroom house to a 1,200-square-foot single-floor townhome in a 55+ community just south of Portland, Oregon.

“For the two or three years we’d been thinking about it, it was like, how are we going to get rid of all this stuff? What are we going to do?” said Paul, 70.

Once they’d bought their new home earlier this year, those questions were suddenly urgent.

The answer became clear after Diane happened to meet Sarah Gomm at a gathering of friends. Gomm is a “senior move manager” — a professional organizer who specializes in helping older people get rid of their stuff and downsize. Days later, the Baxters hired her to aid their transition.

Gomm tackled a slew of tasks, from organizing to packing and finding movers. She arranged for more than 1,000 of the Baxters’ books to be sold to a book collector and at someone else’s estate sale.

“I would have torn my hair out, and Paul would have torn his out also, if we hadn’t had her,” said Diane, 82.

Gomm is part of a growing industry of specialists who help older people declutter, downsize, and move to more suitable homes. They’re professional organizers and de facto therapists — and their services are increasingly in demand as the oldest baby boomers turn 80 and find themselves crushed under a lifetime’s worth of things their kids and grandkids don’t want.

Parting with possessions, not memories

Gomm, 59, had never heard of senior move management when she came across a description of the job in a book about careers for people over 50. After decades of working in unfulfilling corporate roles, Gomm said she was immediately drawn to the idea of helping older people learn the joy of organizing while running her own business.

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“I was like, this is it, eureka! This is everything I love to do and I’m excellent at,” said Gomm, who says she, like many others in her line of work, has some light obsessive-compulsive disorder.

After taking classes in senior moving and professional organizing, Gomm started her own one-woman shop, New Chapter Transitions, in May 2020. She’s seen her business grow steadily since then and is able to support herself on the revenue. Last year, the profit from the business topped her peak income from previous jobs. These days, she mainly helps older people cull their possessions, design their space, pack their things, and unpack in their new place.

The “hallmark” of senior move management is helping older people “part with possessions without parting with memories,” said Jennifer Pickett, who leads the National Association of Senior & Specialty Move Managers, which has more than 1,100 member companies.

This can mean taking photos of things someone’s giving away and creating a photobook or a collage of pictures. “If Mrs. Jones has 25 teapots, is it the 25 teapots she’s attached to? No, it’s the memories from where she got the teapots,” Pickett said.

Have you downsized or are you planning to move into a smaller or more accessible home? Share your story with this reporter at [email protected].

Senior moving specialists tend to charge between $40 and $80 per hour for their services, Pickett said. Clients typically spend anywhere from $1,000 to $3,200 on their move manager. Gomm said she works with clients for an average of about 36 hours in total, but it ranges from just an afternoon to months of work.

She compared her work to that of the queen of tidying, Marie Kondo, and the Netflix-famous Home Edit team, though she said their color-coded, Instagram-friendly systems are unsustainable for most of her clients, who often struggle with health issues or just can’t maintain a hyper-organized space.

Gomm said she’s had many clients who’ve lost an adult child or suffered some other traumatic event that’s made their life transition even harder.

“There’s a lot of psychology that goes into this,” Gomm says. “Once you meet these people and you understand their pain and what they’re going through, you just want to do everything you can to get them in a better place.”

Occasionally, she gets cases she doesn’t feel equipped to handle, including people with severe hoarding tendencies. While she’ll work with serious clutter, she won’t work in homes without navigable pathways through the clutter, or with structural damage or broken appliances. In those cases, she’ll refer the person to a specialist in hoarding.

Downsizing in place

Anyone who’s ever moved understands the herculean nature of packing and decluttering. Clearing out closets, parting with collectibles, and moving houses is even more challenging when you’re getting older. And baby boomers often have multiple generations worth of stuff, like filing cabinets full of their kids’ report cards and their own parents’ furniture and knickknacks.

Meanwhile, younger generations have grown up in a Target, IKEA, and Amazon world, where furniture — and everything else — is cheap and disposable. They’re not waiting around for their parents to downsize in order to get their own dining room set or cutlery.

“In the past, there was a lot of generational passing down of items, and we just don’t see that so much anymore,” Pickett said.

A growing share of older Americans aren’t moving as they age. Instead, they’re “aging in place” in their homes until they die or need a nursing home. Some simply don’t want to move, and many can’t afford to.

Increasingly, move managers are helping people downsize in place. They improve the functionality and safety of a home by moving a bedroom to the first floor, installing better lighting, or removing rugs that could be a tripping hazard.

But if moving is in the cards, Diane said she tells all her friends to do it as soon as they can.

“Even with all the help we had, moving at this time of life is a horrendous proposition,” she said. “If you even remotely think you’ll have to move, don’t wait, because the longer you wait, the more difficult it’s going to be.”