When Ryan Frederick was in the sixth grade, his class participated in a program that paired sixth graders with local nursing home residents. His “buddy” had no family in the area, and Ryan’s grandparents lived on the other side of the country. They continued to connect after the program ended. Ryan says that, at the time, he didn’t realize how important that relationship would be.
After he graduated from Princeton, he worked briefly in investment banking in Silicon Valley. Ryan went to Stanford for an MBA with the objective of changing his career. His memories of his “buddy” led him to switch careers to developing housing for people over 50.
While pursuing his MBA at Stanford, he reignited his passion and switched his career focus to developing housing for people over 50. Fredericks has been CEO of Here (formerly Smart Living 360) for a decade. He wrote Right Place, Right Time: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life to help people identify the best place for their remaining decades.
The Impact of Place
Fredericks says that lifestyle and environmental factors influence up to 80% of our longevity and quality of life. That means we can make choices about important things that will affect our lives as we age. The catch is that we must make the choices and act on them. Many of us don’t.
Drifting Is Common
Drifting is a poor and risky option, but it is too common.
Most Americans probably drift into staying where they spent the last quarter of their lives without any intentional or thorough consideration of other options. Fortunately, you are intelligent, care about legacy, and happen to be reading this blog. You have a higher likelihood of making a far better choice.
How Right Place, Right Time Can Help
This book will reveal immense options that many of us have never even considered before. It will help you understand what you don’t know about what you don’t know. The second time through it, we began to seriously consider options that we had not previously thought of as possibilities.
Only 3% of all US housing has two features appropriate for people over 70! Aging in place is a convenient and dangerous myth. Housing which is excellent now may be awful in 10 or 30 years.
A suburban single-family home can be appropriate when kids are in school. However, an 85-year-old widow who no longer drives might regret too many bedrooms, bathrooms, and maintenance chores.
Here’s another example: A person who develops mobility issues may be unable to climb the stairs to a second-floor bedroom or fit a wheelchair through the standard-width doorframes in their house.
Thinking about the Right Place
Fredricks offers five scales to rate our current place/ home and then encourages readers to consider what will be best for their future intentionally. The five scales are purpose, social interactions, physical well-being, financial well-being, and place. I’ll comment on the last one. You can read about the others in the book.
Frederick starts with regions and states and then gets to neighborhoods and housing types. Few people move to bankrupt or cold states. The zip code or postal carrier route can make an immense difference in safety and access to health care.
Each scale is important. As you think through them, you become aware of possibilities and tradeoffs.
You can use Right Place, Right Time as a reference book. It has a bibliography with 100+ sources: websites, rankings, studies, books, etc. Scores of unbiased rankings highlight factors you may not have seen rated before. I was surprised at how many institutions weighed in on so many factors. Your special situations may make climate, financial, health, or recreation truths extremely important or trivial. Our sorting was simpler than many households because we don’t have children.
The reference material was like a giant mental or emotional Swiss army knife. Those sources and references covered almost every item we considered important.
The point is not to drive you mad with trivia but to increase the possibility you’ll seriously consider what truly matters to you and your household. Your insights and conversations will provoke deep awareness, which boosts your odds of making a far more appropriate choice.
You have more choice and capacity than you will in ten or thirty years. Retired people who break a hip before making a deliberate choice will have fewer and worse options. Those who understand health reality can adjust their homes and health habits to reduce the chance of breaking a hip.
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Now it’s your turn. Since you’re likely to outlive your grandparents by a generation, how will you lead a life worth imitating? Please share any tool that helped you.
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Terry Moore, CCIM, is the author of Building Legacy Wealth: How to Build Wealth and Live a Life Worth Imitating. Read his “Welcome to My Blog.”