It's looking like my parents are going to be moving next spring. Tentative plan:
1. Sell house
2. Dad retire
3. Mom & dad pack up their stuff, it all comes to my town and is loaded into a storage unit.
3a. Me and sis sell/donate/whatever is left at the house that didn't get moved.
4. Mom & dad move in with me while they find more permanent housing. Mom wants to buy, we're pretty sure that's not going to be possible, but she's going to have to find that out the hard way.
5. Move into wherever, in the process attempting to convince mom that she doesn't need to keep 10+ chairs that are currently not usable just because of FAMILLLYYY.
6. Get rid of the rest of the stuff in the storage unit.
Throw in 2 cats, dementia, and some very stubborn personalities. Not going to be fun.
I feel your pain. I'm currently in the phase of life where you become the adult to both sets of parents. My in-laws moved out here about 2.5 years ago. Getting my MIL to part w/her crap was difficult, but we purposely did not rent a truck. She still managed to blow $1,500 in postage to ship boxes of stuff. Then moved into the new place and spent more money cluttering it.
They had about $200K in their nest egg, due to an inheritance. SSA was nearly $3K/mo. Plenty of room to enjoy retirement and live off SSA in a LCOL area. Lots of coaching from us about the need to not touch the nest egg. Well, MIL gets diagnosed w/stage 4 lung cancer, and dies of complications less than a month after diagnosis.
No storage units, but in both houses, there were spare rooms devoted to crap. Our first task was to clear the back bedroom, so my FIL could finally use it as a proper office. SO MUCH STUFF. All of it new in box, and just GARBAGE from HSN and QVC. I took a bunch of it home, and have been slowly selling on Facebook. I've made nearly $300 so far, and I'm sure my MIL spent 10X that. This money is going to my FIL, but it's not going to stretch very far.
Last week I decided it was time to attack the elephant in the room. Could FIL live on one SSA check? Dunno. We wrote down the income and expenses he could recall, and it was ugly. He seems to understand that the housekeeper, lawncare, and bottled water deliveries must go. Then we discovered that on top of their SSA, they managed to spend 20% of their nest egg! So now he's spending time at the airport near their home, trying to get a part time job to make ends meet. He wasn't that great at keeping jobs before retirement, so I'm concerned about that too. Oh, and he was an accountant. Just painful.
My side of the family deserves it's own thread, but let's just say I'm currently suing my sister for elder abuse, as she's been living exclusively on my Mom's resources for the past 8 years. She just ran out of money, and my mom's about to be kicked out of the dementia facility. Good times... :(