Home Staging: the Perfect Career for Baby Boomers Nearing Golden Years

With all the negative news about the economy and the shocking drop in value of investments, are you becoming concerned about your retirement? As you approach your 60s, you may feel ready to retire, but not ready to stop working all together. If you’ve already retired maybe your savings and pension aren't quite enough to live on comfortably. If this is the case, you may have toyed with the idea of starting a business that will bring in a stream of revenue while allowing you flexibility to work around vacations and visits with family.

Home staging is a great field for anyone wanting to profit from their decorating talents to earn a good living. Home staging, real estate enhancement, or house fluffing as it’s sometimes called, is the art of decorating a home to sell quickly and for top dollar. If you have an innate talent for arranging a room to make it universally appealing then you have what it takes to become a home stager, no matter how old you are!

When you’re a home stager, you have full control over your schedule, you don’t need a store front or inventory and the most complicated piece of technology you’ll need is a digital camera. Home stagers don't have to do any heavy lifting, cleaning or painting as others can be brought into the staging project to provide those services. A home stager is more like a creative director, providing the vision for how a house can be transformed without having to actually do the physical work themselves. And most importantly, whatever you invest in training can easily be recovered with your first home staging project.

Debra Gould, expert home stager and creator of The Staging Diva® Home Staging Training Program, believes that creative people at any age or stage in life can excel as home stagers with some natural talent and the proper business tools. “I receive emails and phone calls from people in their 50s, 60s and 70s wondering if home staging would be right for them or if they would be passed over for younger stagers,” says Gould. “I don’t believe this is a legitimate fear because as long as a person has the talent to decorate a house to sell, a homeowner doesn’t care how old the person is. In fact, age can sometimes be an asset because an older person usually has the first hand experience of buying, decorating and selling their own homes over the years. That experience is a real plus to clients who hire stagers to help them sell their house more quickly and at a higher price than they would have without staging. In today's competitive real estate market, home sellers need that skill and experience even more.”

Licensed real estate appraiser, Ranee D. Strawn of Chicago-based Distinctive Design credits Gould with helping her start her fourth career with the joy that comes from more fully using her creative talents. The eldest Graduate of the Staging Diva® Training Program is 76 year old Jean Smith of Staging For Sellers, who resides in a retirement community in Florida. She had two clients within weeks of completing her training.

Gould says, “Jean is such an inspiration to us all! At an age where most people are bemoaning the fact that they won’t get a chance to do all those things they wanted to in their youth, she dared to follow her dream.” It’s never too late to start living a more creatively satisfying life. With the economy being so shaky, it’s even more reason to take control of your own destiny and protect your future.