Place Planning: Where to Live?

Deciding where to live after retirement, for most older adults, should probably involve more planning than throwing darts at a map. You could start by scanning all of the year’s “best of” lists to get a snapshot of locations to consider.

But Ryan Frederick, author of Right Place Right Time: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life says place is much more than an address. “It’s a tapestry layered with relationships, experiences, and possibilities.”

Frederick is a consultant and expert on health and aging and the founder of Here, an organization that guides people through place planning. For the past 20 years he has worked to understand how place and longevity intersect. Senior Planet spoke with Frederick to learn about his work and some of the strategies he uses to help people learn about their needs and how it impacts their decisions around where to live.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

KEVIN: What is “place” and why is it important?

RYAN: You’re starting to see longevity getting more and more energy, and with questions about the implications of a longer life place is being woven into that conversation. Stanford created something called the New Map of Life. And it basically says we’re living longer, we’ve got more chapters. And so  this idea of learn, earn, retire –  that three chapter narrative – is antiquated relative to the world that we’re part of now. 


So we have more chapters in our lives, and with each transition (some of which we initiate, some which just happen to us), it raises questions about place. 

We might have a vision of this life where we have a lot of great friends and we can be active and have as much square footage as we need, but that doesn’t happen accidentally.  We have to be intentional about it, and place either enables that vision or it holds it back…and when we look at the research around longevity, at most 20% is a function of our genes. It’s much more about lifestyle and environment.


KEVIN: You identify four quadrants of place: health, community, environment, finances. How can older adults use these to inform their decision around the best place to move?

RYAN: The four quadrants of place get across the point that it’s multidimensional:  there are these physical dimensions of environment, health dimensions you are impacted by, community dimensions you get shaped by, and of course, the finances. 

KEVIN: And I imagine that there is some overlap with each of these? 

RYAN: Yes, there is a Venn Diagram way to look at it. But I would say we have the tendency to just focus on the physical piece, that we are only moving into the four walls: you know, the man cave, the gourmet kitchen, the workshop –  you name it.  That matters because quality of life can be dictated by the square footage and the amenities we have within our four walls, especially as we age.

But it’s not just about your four walls. It’s also your block. Do you have access to the things in your neighborhood that you care about? It’s also your metropolitan area, your county and state, and country and even reaching out to the world.

KEVIN: So it sounds like we’re starting to talk about community. And in your book you mention that you feel community might be the most important quadrant. 

How community was formed in one place and time starts to look really different in the retirement stage. So if you move somewhere just because of low taxes or good weather, there’s no guarantee that you will find community there.

There’s research that found, on average, it takes about 200 hours to develop a close friend. So if you’re moving to a place where you don’t have community, you need to have some level of informed confidence that your people are there, and that you will have the time to develop relationships.

The Harvard Longitudinal study, I think it’s 86 years old now, and ongoing, has found that the most important things are the quality of relationships. In particular, it talked about how the quality of your relationships at age 50 are the best predictor of your overall health at 80.


There’s this overwhelming evidence that this matters a lot – but at the same time, it’s actually becoming harder for us to develop and maintain close friendships. And it’s important that we not only have close friendships, but also that they’re proximate. What that ultimately means is that it’s important to consider how certain places make it easier for you to know your neighbor, develop reciprocal relationships and provide mutual purpose.

KEVIN: How does health fit into the conversation of place?

RYAN: In the health dimension, culture is part of a place.  We focus sometimes on how our place is our four walls. But health is an area where that’s particularly misleading. Because if there’s an ethos where you are, where people have walking clubs and running clubs and biking and skiing, you’re in a spot where just to become part of the norm, you’re going to be adopting healthy habits. And you can also have the opposite be true if the culture where you live isn’t healthy.

So when I say health, there’s these normative things, how people behave, but there’s also quite legitimately, can you go outside your door and walk?
Can you do errands by biking or walking? So you’re working in movement just by living your life. Certain places make that more possible.

And then there’s healthcare when something happens to you, either episodic or chronic. Our healthcare systems are changing. There’s access to your primary care we need to consider, but there’s also access to specialists. And then, particularly as we get older, there’s access to things like home care as you need it. 

I also think, with health, it’s important for people to ask “where is home for me emotionally?” You can go through a logical process of choosing a place. You say “I can afford it and it has good healthcare, and I can make friends there. And then you move and realize it’s not for you. You may have had this identity with where you came from and didn’t honor that. 


KEVIN: What about finances? 


RYAN: Financing, it’s a really big one. People live close to twice as long now as they did at the start of the century. And that’s good news for the most part so long as we have good health span, but also I would say we need a good wealth span. 

If someone has confidence they’ll live to 85 or 90 or maybe 100, how does the math work on this? 
How long will we have financial security for this longer life? And in the midst of concerns around the federal deficit and debt and the restructuring of social security, fewer people having pensions: where we live drives our broader living expenses. 

So, it raises questions that given the environment you’d like to be in, given the health needs you may have, given the community or social aspects, how do  finances fit into this? What are the constraints? 

There’s another subtle part in this, too, that people can overlook. As a homeowner, the equity you have in your home is not diversified. More than people realize, they make a much bigger bet with the value of their home. Typically, equity tends to get a lower investment return than if you put it in the stock market. 

If you took that money and moved into a less expensive home or maybe a rental, you could take the proceeds from the sale of a house and invest them in other things. That changes the risk profile and probably the investment return, which may not make that big of a difference in a couple years, but over the span of 10-15 years, those things can be significant. I’m not saying that you should do one or the other but you should evaluate it.

KEVIN: Longevity factors into the way you help people think about their decisions of place. And someone planning a move after they retire in their early 60’s is still relatively young. If you consider they may live to see 100, is it conceivable that they may need to move again? 

RYAN: Yes, 100%. This is why the narrative of learn, earn, retire can let you down because it implies that retirement is one stage and potentially in one place. 
And that’s just unrealistic with people living longer, and the new chapters that they’ll have, some of which they may initiate, some of which life initiates. 

Let’s say for a moment you move when you’re 60, and let’s say you die at 100. That’s four decades of potentially massive change. Who knows how technology and all these other things are going to reshape our society? 

There has to be some built in recognition that this idea of a forever house is a fallacy. It
doesn’t mean that you can’t make decisions and de-risk yourself in different ways, like searching for a single story home. But being convinced that your next home will be your last is naive…and one of the things about place is the cost of being wrong is significant. 

One thing that people can do is to test their hypotheses. For example, say you want to move to Miami from New Jersey. Before you sell your home, pack up your life and move, test it out.  

Get an Airbnb for a couple weeks. Or rent your house and find an apartment down there for a year. Find out if it really what you think it is.

You’re never going to know everything. But one thing we do in the place planning process is ask concrete questions. You ask yourself, as you get into those four quadrants of place; “Is this worth taking a leap? And the answer may be yes, and it may change your life.

KEVIN: What mistakes do people make?


RYAN: One, people don’t give the place where they live the respect it deserves. “Here” is a place, but it’s also a mindset. 
Are you present? Are you here? You could be in the right place, but without the right mindset, it’s not going to work. On the flipside of that, you could have the right mindset, but the place is too out of whack.

People will often say, “oh, I can live anywhere.” Well, you actually can’t live the best scenario of your life anywhere. Acknowledging that is important. You don’t shape place, place shapes you.

KEVIN: Do you think people overlook just simply searching for a new neighborhood within their current location? 

RYAN: Yes. I think one of the opportunities that people have, that can be energizing, is asking how they can replant themselves in the same metropolitan area where they have their friends, their healthcare networks, where they can root for the same teams and have a sense of comfort.

There is an energy that happens when you’re forced to clear the page and jump into something new, create something new, either individually or as a couple. And you don’t have to move to Florida to do that. You can get change by replanting yourself in a neighborhood that may better align with the person you are today.

KEVIN: Are there other mistakes?

RYAN: The second mistake people make is being overly confident about a decision and not recognizing that this is multidimensional. That’s an invitation for regret because once you get there, you may have the perfect house but you realize, oh my gosh, I’m not with my people, I’m lonely.

It can be frustrating to see someone make a decision based on what Zillow shows them because they’re missing all these key pieces of their life.

And the third mistake is people saying, “I’m just going to age in place.” The main problem with aging in place is that a lot of people actually don’t make any plans. They don’t put any thought into what that means. 


It can give people a sense that change isn’t happening when change is happening. But it’s happening every day, in different ways, and they’re holding on, and in a state of denial. And so they are effectively making a mistake by not doing something. 


 

KEVIN: Can you recommend any tools people can use as they begin their search? 

RYAN: So a few things come to mind. The work that AARP does may be the best because they’ve created this livability tool where you can make it dynamic. So they have a general index, but then you can customize it for yourself. You can go in and say I care more about this, or I care about that.

The Milkin Institute had one for a bit, which I thought was thoughtful. I don’t think they’re regularly updating it but they did a good job because they picked the best of for aging in  larger metropolitan areas and smaller metropolitan areas. 


Another tool to think about is called WEAVE that the Aspen Institute has pulled together. They have an interactive map that talks about the level of social trust in U.S. neighborhoods. 

I do have an assessment people can take on the Here website that has five questions for each of the four quadrants. And the results give you an idea of where you’re thriving or not in those four areas. It’s an easy tool because it takes three minutes and you get a snapshot of where you are. 


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KEVIN: So people could take the assessment and use the results to help them evaluate their search?


RYAN: Exactly. I mean, there’s a more involved process, but it can help flag the areas they’re deficient in and what they should be thinking about. 


Now, one dimension that’s missing in the tools we’re talking about is really encouraging people, through structured questions, to think about what the next five or ten years might look like? What do they want it to look like?

So questions like: “How am I going to be different?” ”How is the place going to be different? And based on the answers determining if that place will enable that life to happen?

What I found is that, just like financial planning, you could do some reading on what to invest in or ways to think about it. But it really doesn’t manifest until you sit down and you create a plan.

 

Kevin Ryan is a freelance writer and editor. He is a digital editor for the Mountain West News Bureau and also works as a tech support agent at Senior Planet. Mr. Ryan has worked as a reporter in Colorado and Massachusetts where his reporting has appeared on NPR and in community newspapers. Mr. Ryan has also written senior-focused articles at A Place for Mom and Palliative Care News. He is a contributing editor to the Dead Foot Collective. In a previous career Mr. Ryan worked as a high school special education teacher.

Photo credit (Kevin Ryan): Briahn Martin.