On this episode of The Long View, our guest was Ryan Frederick, an author, speaker, and entrepreneur focused on the intersection of place and healthy longevity. We talked about the role our homes play in our retirement, and he told us how he came to live in a senior community in his 20s.
Here are a few excerpts from our conversation with Ryan, the author of Right Place, Right Time.
How Your Home Can Affect Your Health, Finances, and Quality of Life
Amy Arnott: I’m wondering if you could maybe give us an example or two of how place might actually improve your health or detract from it. You mentioned things like air quality and noise pollution, but are there other factors people might want to take into account?
Ryan Frederick: Yeah, absolutely. In my book … I’ve given this a name … “place planning.” And the way I see it is there’s four quadrants of place planning.
- There’s environment. Your four walls, your neighborhoods, physical attributes, how many square footage your house might have or home may have.
- You have health, meaning how active, quality of food, sleep, air quality, etc., access to healthcare, high-quality healthcare is in that quadrant.
- The third quadrant is community. Social connections, close friends, secondary friends, etc., just that ethos.
- And the fourth one. The fourth one’s financial. Finances. So to what extent does your place enhance your financial well-being or detract from it?
… Traditionally we tend to think of, the most experience when I’ve been working with people, they tend to focus on the environmental piece, you go to Zillow, “Wow, look at that stainless steel kitchen” or “the man cave—doesn’t that look amazing?” And then also the finances. “Well, how expensive is this?” And property taxes, etc.
I think there tends to be a lot of focus on those two quadrants. But when we think about our broader health and then community … There was a study done at Harvard over 80 years, this longevity study, and they found that—it was actually JFK’s class. They had his class at Harvard and then as well as indexed it with some other males in the larger Boston area. Net-net, they found that the strongest correlation to being high-quality health in your 80s was not your education, your income, your vocation. It was the quality of your relationships in your 50s and 60s. So that’s to say that, again, going back to those four quadrants, if you’re off on any one of those, that can be enough to suggest, are you in the right place? Is there a better place?
So, I’ll give you a couple examples. So having done place-planning work with dozens of people, there’s some real anecdotes. So one example, a common one, actually, you might have someone, say, in their 70s, who has been living in their home for a long time, and there’s an emotional attachment, understandably, to their house that they’ve been living in decades. It may be more home than they need at that point. This is pretty common right now for various reasons. You have more square footage, maybe there’s multiple floors, etc. And so you may be a spot where actually the physical environmental attributes of your house is not a good fit for you. It’s taking time away from things you’d rather do. Maybe it’s also more expensive in some ways, but then maybe the biggest piece is it may be that your community has changed. You don’t know your neighbors the way you once did. Those social connections aren’t as strong.
It’s harder to be the person you may want to be based on the way that home is. So you may love your home, but your home may not love you back. It’s one example.
Another example … perhaps someone’s living in an environment where a healthy lifestyle is just part of the ethos. I’ll pick on Boulder, Colorado, for example, which by the way, I have not spent much time in. … And you’re in a spot where there’s a lot of hiking trails, it’s walkable in certain areas. It’s an expensive area. So maybe you have a smaller, maybe you’re living in a condo as opposed to a single-family home. And I know it’s a pretty social area as well. So in an environment like that, you might be in a spot where, again, thinking about those four quadrants, your spot maybe fits your physical or environmental needs. It’s nudging you to a healthier lifestyle, you’re making friends, and it fits within your financial parameters. So there’s a lot of variables at work.
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One thing I’d also say is that I think it’s increasingly a complex thing when we think about the second half of life. There’s just more considerations to think about. There’s also, in some cases, more degrees of freedom than there might’ve been when you have younger kids and you’re thinking about school districts, etc.
But the idea of place and how it shapes you, this concept of place planning, it’s true across the full adult age spectrum. … It’s not like, “Oh, I turned 70. Now I need to think about place.” No. It’s true your entire adult spectrum. And I think when we look back, if we’re honest with ourselves, where we’ve chosen to be has shaped who we become.
Should You Stay in Your Home or Move in Retirement?
Christine Benz: I wanted to talk about housing flexibility and the relationship between income and wealth. Moving carries costs. So can you talk about whether people of the lower income and wealth levels really do have that flexibility to make significant changes in where they live as they age? It seems like it would be much harder.
Frederick: It’s not. It’s not. But it’s been interesting having written the book and then working with people like real life examples. I would say there’s a piece of this that is really around mindset. And so the name of my company is called Here, H-E-R-E, and it has a dual meaning. It says here, oh, look at the map. This is the spot: here. But it also is a shoutout to this idea of being present where you are. Are you here? You with me? And what I’ve found is that mindset is so significant because people, invariably, especially in the second half of life, for various reasons, there’s a tendency to not see the full breadth of possibility. In some cases, we can become ageist to ourselves. “Oh my gosh, I’m turning 75” in my mind. I might think 75 of a certain image that may not be me or my peer group, but it says, in a way, you can stop dreaming.
And this is kind of a broader psychological conversation. But the point being that what’s so important in this is to highlight for people that we have agency in pretty much every scenario in every stage of our lives. There are some outliers, but for the most part, we have more agency to shape the life that we’re looking to have than fate alone would suggest. And so what do you mean by that is that, yeah, there are people that have unlimited means, very few constraints. As they solve for place, that’s like a different problem. Where do they begin? Where do you stop?
For people that have constraints, in this case, financially, going back to your question, it’s real. And it’s real, especially in this context that we talked about earlier of 100 years. It’s one thing if you’re planning for like 65 in a day, how do you manage that, versus what might a 100 years look like? Yeah, the financial lens is going to be important. But that doesn’t mean, I’ve seen this in many occasions, that there’s situations where people can say, “Well, wait a second. Where I am, what can I do to enhance my place?” It could be that just a reorientation to your place can help your life. For example, some modest redecoration or being more proactive to reach out to friends or finding ways for greater purpose through volunteering. Just some examples.
In fact, I’ll give you one specific one. There’s a woman in her early 50s, a recent widow, who went through place planning and worked with her, and she was convinced she was going to go move. House was too big, thought it was too expensive in some ways. And then she realized, actually thinking more about it in a more rigorous, processed way, that the best place for her actually was to stay where she was but reorient how she thought about it. So she did exactly like I’m describing. With her memories of her late husband, she’s like, “Well, what if I could do some redecorations?” She started hosting a Sunday brunch every Sunday, broadened her social network, got involved in a not-for-profit in that area around trail maintenance. A few months later, she started dating someone. I think the trap we can fall into is like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t really afford to do anything, so I’m not going to try.” And that’s a formula for a suboptimal place outcome. Doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be realistic around what your parameters are.
But last thing I’ll say on this is I think people do tend to underestimate—this is actually a pretty important point—they tend to underestimate the financial opportunity cost of owning a home. I’ve seen this a few times now where people own a home, say it’s an older suburban home, they aren’t really grasping the fully loaded cost of what their home is. True maintenance and various costs, separate than property tax, etc. And the big variable that people can miss is the opportunity cost of the equity in your home. And in that scenario, what ends up happening is, if you’re really trying to optimize for financial outcome and then think about range of possibilities, if you take the equity in your house, if you were to sell it, put that in the broader market, and then start to think differently, maybe you rent a different sort of home for various reasons. And so if you go down a certain path where, “Oh, I don’t have any options,” you’re then not even being creative about what life could look like and maybe even some financial resources you can tap into that you’re not aware of. Because over time, the equity return on an unleveraged home tends to be a lot less than the market at large.
Valentina Djeljosevic contributed to this article.
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