The Kitchen Table Test

Here is the test, and it is not complicated.

Take whatever you are considering — sell, stay, remodel, move closer to your daughter, rent it out for a year — and imagine explaining it at your own kitchen table, out loud, to someone who loves you and is not in a hurry. Then notice whether it still sounds like a good idea at conversational speed.

Most bad decisions cannot survive that. They need momentum. They need a deadline, a countdown, a sense that hesitating will cost you.

Why the table, specifically

The kitchen table is where families actually make decisions, as opposed to where they announce them. It is unglamorous, it is usually covered in mail, and it has the enormous advantage of being yours. Nobody has to perform there.

Urgency is a sales technique. Clarity is a slower and much more durable thing.

Offices produce a different kind of conversation. There is a subtle obligation to arrive at an outcome, because someone has set aside time and everyone can feel the meeting wanting to conclude. Tables don't do that. A conversation at a table can end with "we're not sure yet" and nothing bad happens.

Three questions worth asking there

What are we actually optimizing for? Money, proximity, ease, dignity, time, the ability to have people over. These trade against each other and most conflict comes from two people optimizing for different ones without saying so.

What happens if we do nothing for six months? Sometimes the honest answer is: not much, and the pressure evaporates. Sometimes it is: the stairs are already a problem, and that answer is important too.

Who is uncomfortable, and about what? Discomfort is data. If one person keeps circling back to the same objection, the objection is not resolved just because the group moved past it.

What this asks of the professional

I will say the obvious thing about my own field: the incentives do not naturally favor patience. A transaction that happens is worth something and a transaction that doesn't isn't, and that arithmetic produces a lot of urgency in the industry.

So the test cuts both ways. If anyone advising you — including me — cannot sit at your table and say "I don't think you should do this yet," you have the wrong person at the table.

The work I find worth doing is mostly listening, sorting, laying out real options with real numbers, and then getting out of the way while a family decides at their own speed. Sometimes that takes two weeks. Sometimes it takes two years. The decision that emerges is almost always better, and — not incidentally — people can live with it afterward.

That is the whole test. If it doesn't hold up over a cooling cup of coffee, it isn't ready.

General discussion only; not legal, tax or financial advice.