Free tool
Senior move job margin calculator
Enter the room count, your crew hours per room, your loaded crew cost, and the disposition spend, and see what a downsizing package actually leaves you.
Free tool, no sign up
Downsizing lead time planner
Find out how many weeks a downsize needs by starting from the decision hours the client can sustain rather than from the date the community wants.
Almost every downsizing overrun starts with a schedule built backward from a move in date. The community offers a unit, the family picks a date, and the manager works out packing days from crew capacity. What that arithmetic leaves out is the constraint that actually governs the job: how many hours a week an older adult can sit with her own belongings and decide.
Two hours twice a week is a normal ceiling for many clients, and less after a hospital stay or with cognitive decline in the picture. This planner starts there, converts decision hours into sorting weeks, adds the crew days needed to pack and load once decisions are made, and includes a week of slack for elevator reservations and donation pickups that never happen when you want them.
Your result
Total client decision hours
21.0
Hours the client herself must spend deciding, spread across sessions.
Weeks of sorting sessions
4.2
Calendar weeks needed to get through the keep and release calls.
Crew days to pack and load
1.1
Eight hour crew days once the decisions are already settled.
Lead time before move day
5.4
Sorting plus packing plus one week of slack for pickups and elevators.
Quote the lead time from this number, then tell the community your first available move in date rather than accepting theirs.
The client sets the pace, not the crew
Crew capacity is elastic. You can add a packer, run a longer day, or bring a second team for the kitchen. Client decision capacity is not elastic at all. An eighty year old who can give you two useful hours on a Tuesday morning cannot give you six because the move date moved up, and pushing produces decisions she reverses on Thursday.
That is why this planner divides total decision hours by weekly session capacity first, then adds packing. If the answer is longer than the community window, the honest response is to negotiate the date, stage the move in two phases, or reduce the number of rooms requiring her sign off by agreeing which rooms the family can decide on her behalf.
What the slack week is actually for
The extra week is not padding for slow packing. It covers the things you do not control: a donation partner that only picks up on certain days, a consignment shop that will not take the dining set until next month, a building that reserves the service elevator in blocks, and a bulk pickup with a two week municipal queue.
If your disposition partners are booked early and your elevator reservation is confirmed in writing, you can spend that week. If any of it is still unbooked three weeks out, it is not slack, it is the thing that will push your move date.
Questions about this calculator
What if the client cannot make decisions at all?
Then the decision hours belong to whoever holds authority, and the arithmetic changes shape. A family member or agent under power of attorney can usually work longer sessions, but you need the consent path documented before anything is sold or donated.
Can I compress the sorting weeks with more sessions?
Sometimes, up to a point. Three shorter sessions a week often works better than two long ones because fatigue is the real limit. Adding a fourth rarely helps and frequently produces reversals that cost more time than they save.
How do I use this on a first call with an adult child?
Run it live with rough room counts while you are on the phone. It converts a vague question about timing into a specific week count and sets expectations before a community deposit locks in a date you cannot meet.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The new unit fit sheet
A one page working template you fill in on the community tour so the keeper list is decided by measurements instead of by argument.
The calculator gives you the number. DownsizeRoute keeps it current.
Fit a fifty year household into a two bedroom floor plan before the moving truck is booked. Ask for a walkthrough and we will run it against a real week of your own.