Ryan Frederick: Why Your Home May Matter More Than Your Portfolio Later in Life

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**SPEAKER_2** (0:27)
Please stay tuned for important disclosure information at the conclusion of this episode.

**Amy Arnott** (0:33)
Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I'm Amy Arnott, Portfolio Strategist with Morningstar.

**Christine Benz** (0:38)
I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

**Amy Arnott** (0:43)
Our guest on the podcast today is Ryan Frederick, an author, speaker, and entrepreneur focused on the intersection of place and healthy longevity. As founder and CEO of Here, he provides content courses and coaching in place planning, a holistic research-based approach to help people find the right place for every stage of life. He's also the author of Right Place, Right Time, a book that helps individuals think through housing decisions for the second half of life.
In addition, Ryan provides strategy consulting to organizations looking to create better places, including Fortune 500 companies, institutional investors, health systems, and housing developers and operators. He's also a member of the Advisory Council for the Stanford Center on Longevity. He previously served on the National Advisory Board of Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing and was a member of the Bipartisan Policy Center Task Force on Health and Housing. He's a graduate of Princeton University and Stanford Business School.
Ryan, welcome to The Long View.

**Ryan Frederick** (1:52)
Thank you for having me.

**Amy Arnott** (1:53)
We're happy to have you here. So we wanted to start out by talking a bit about your background. And you actually lived in a senior living community in a suburb of Atlanta, when you were in your late 20s. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how that came about and how that sort of sparked your interest in housing solutions for the second half of life.

**Ryan Frederick** (2:20)
Well, for any guys out there in your late 20s and you're looking for an eco boost, move into a senior living community and you'll get more attention than you may be looking for.
Actually, it's a really funny story. But the reason why I did it, the kind of the narrative in this is I was really, at the time, actually didn't care much about place, ironically. It's about 20 years ago now, the summer in between years at business school at Stanford, and I was really curious about longevity and people living longer, and how do we not just live longer but live better. I wanted to see what it was like to be in your 70s, 80s. I was close to my grandparents growing up. Actually, one winter break, I'd stayed with them in Florida for a couple of weeks, and that's a whole other story. But I was really curious, and so that summer I worked for a senior living company, and part of the condition was, I wanted to live in a community for a month.
We've never heard that request before, but they're like, well, actually, that's interesting because it will give you a perspective of how things really operate and develop like a human-centered perspective on this. My wife and I had been married for a couple of years. She was not willing to go with me to the retirement community, so I was left to unsupervised, only male, only person under 75 in my particular wing.
When I think word got out that they were going to have a new temporary residence, we're traveling pretty fast. So I had a lot of unsolicited brunch requests, cookies. It was hilarious. It was great. In fact, the whole reason I did it turned out was true to form. I had just many conversations with people in their life journey, some couples, some solo agers, and I got a perspective of their life stage. I also got a perspective of the role of place and how it has shaped their life in that moment but also prior. But yeah, I've never perhaps had more attention given to me than that particular month stretch in Atlanta.

**Christine Benz** (4:48)
Is that experience what made you want to focus on aging and place planning for your career?

**Ryan Frederick** (4:53)
You know, I would say that I'm a strategy guy. Like I plan a bit, but my curiosity can get the better of me.
And there was no master plan that had led to that summer necessarily. And then writing a book and doing the work that I do today around place. I mean, I was a electrical engineer, undergrad. So this was, you know, the idea of even writing a book was not... I mean, I did engineering to avoid reading and writing. I think what's happened is I've been able to just kind of follow my curiosity and have kind of stumbled in to what I believe is very significant lever in people's lives across a number of different dimensions. And that is place, you know, it's kind of hidden in plain sight. So I would say it was certainly instrumental in stoking some of that curiosity and then gave me, I think, a unique perspective that I've built upon in this journey.