Right Place, Right Time: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life

by Ryan Frederick, Paul Irving (Foreword)

Wondering where to live in your later years? This strategic and thoughtful guide is aimed at anyone looking to determine the best place to call home during the second half of life.

Place plays a significant but often unacknowledged role in health and happiness. The right place elevates personal well-being. It can help promote purpose, facilitate human connection, catalyze physical activity, support financial health, and inspire community engagement. Conversely, the wrong place can be detrimental to health, as the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted. In Right Place, Right Time, Ryan Frederick argues that where you live matters enormously—especially during the second half of your life.

Frederick, the CEO of SmartLiving 360 and a recognized thought leader on the intersection of place and healthy aging, provides you with tools to evaluate your living situation, ensuring that you weigh all the necessary factors to make a sound decision that optimizes your current and future well-being. He explores the pros and cons of different living options, from remaining in your current home to downsizing, intergenerational living, co-housing, senior living, and more. Along the way, he helps readers answer important questions, including "Are you already in the right place?" and "In what areas does your current place not align with your needs and desires?" The rest of the book helps you to unpack specific options for place, beginning with considerations for regions and neighborhoods and then looking at specific housing models. It also focuses on how housing is changing, particularly from a technology, health, and health care perspective. The book closes by challenging the reader to develop a discipline of choosing the right place at the right time.

Combining real-life stories about people selecting places to live with design thinking principles and interactive tools, Right Place, Right Time will appeal to empty nesters, retirees, solo agers, and even adult children seeking ways to support their parents and loved ones.

Genres: Nonfiction, Aging

264 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 12, 2021

Reviews

[Dave]

Right Place, Right Time is not a book about how to choose where to retire. You will have to look elsewhere fir such information. Instead, it's a look at housing communities from an urban planning perspective, comparing different types of planning choices, particularly contrasting single family homes with urban core living and age-restricted villages with other options.

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Planning to age into longevity is the focus of this book. And although no book is the "ultimate guide," Ryan Frederick hits a lot of the marks in how we should think about entering our senior years, finding the right place or making the right, place and all the micro-decisions that always accompany a move, both emotional and physical.

I think this is good book to get people started with planning for their later years. I do think the author could have a used a better editor to avoid some of the typos, incomplete sentences and sub-optimal word choices I stumbled over. However, these are minor when compared with the message. I plan on buying this book to help me plan. I recommend you do the same.

[Edwin Priest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frederick does a great job of looking at the demographics and problems with our current housing situation and exploring what is and what should be important to us when choosing a new place to live. There is a fair amount of repetition and some not so helpful sections, but in general this is pretty good in helping one focus one's priorities when contemplating a move. 4 stars.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really solid book with great stories to illustrate the different avenues for moving (or not moving). Helpful dashboard to assess your current and future place in terms of 5 variables: purpose, social connection, physical well being, financial well being and match to place. I have been thinking about "where next" for years and the book helped me articulate what is off with my current place (purpose, connection, not walkable place), what I may be able to fix (purpose, connection) and what I may be able to live with in the current time (not living in a walkable city). The book has one section devoted to exploring the right place in terms of regions, states, neighborhoods and communities. Really liked how the author delved into the importance of third places and walkable communities and even mentioned the work of my hero, Jane Jacobs. Another section delved into the pros and cons of the different kind of housing options (single family, apartments/condos, age restricted, senior living and other emerging options like cohousing and ADUs) and explored whether or not to live near family. There is no one cookie cutter answer for "where next" and that is why it is important to look at the question from a myriad of lens. I also really valued the author's suggestion of using "design thinking" to explore the next place. Instead of moving with little research, one can test out places by interviewing people, even moving somewhere for a month to explore. Stories where people have moved and it has been the wrong fit abound. It is a leap of faith to leave a known community. Sometimes people have to do so in the case of a health crisis or other emergency but one can also intentionally plan as well. I think this book would be very useful for people in the next stage post retirement thinking of what is next in terms of home and place.

[Dr. Lisa Cowley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Right Place, Right Time: The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Home for the Second Half of Life," is a worthy examination of an important subject matter. There are so many individuals who hang on to the concept that they are not leaving their home but often times as they age, they must modify their space for them to continue living there. Sometimes modifications are not enough and they will have to be open to another form of living arrangement ie. senior living facilities.

The book has many stories of how individuals in the second half of life navigate this issue and the author uses a tool called a "personal dashboard" to examine the five universal elements that shape our well-being (purpose; social connection; physical well-being; financial well-being; place.)

Even though financial well-being is touched upon, most the examples were of individuals who could make a choice in regards to their living arrangement because they had the financial means. What will happen with all the baby boomers who have not been able to save for a "rainy day?" We need additional books to address this concern as more and more are financially unequipped to afford some of the housing options the author illustrates.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Grab bars, non-slip tiles, and pickle ball. He was way too focused on these three things. But it also highlights my major issue with the book, which was that his definition of place is very different than mine. I was thinking in terms of a home. He, by contrast, is thinking much more about a community or a broader area in general. That said, it did provide some different context for thinking about place, and probably brought up some issues that I wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Unfortunately, it still was the case that for me that 80% or more of the book was just not on point. I attribute part of it to just not understanding what he intended to cover, but also that he tried to cover the waterfront - too many different uses, perspectives, issues - such that it ended up being a hodgepodge of anecdotes, generalizations, and strange fixations (hence grab bars, etc.). Readability 7. Rating 5.

[Thibault Manekin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ryan combines his unmatched passion for our beautiful elders, his incredible academic knowledge of the subject, and gripping stories that draw the reader into each moment into a powerful book. This should be required reading for anyone entering the second half of their lives and anyone with family preparing for that journey. I have great confidence that this book will change the lives of many for the better.

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very practical book to help think through all of the options we have later in life. And not just for retirees—I’d recommend this to anyone from mid-life forward who wants to be intentional about where they live. Also great if you’re helping an older person make decisions about their living situation.

[Marc S · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good read for those (Boomers?) that need to contemplate and decide on their living situation for the duration. It would get 5 starts if I was married, since the majority of examples are for couples. But it's still very good for singles, and the whole concept is probably more important for singles.

[Ada Frederick · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoughtful book that widened my understanding of the importance of place. It has changed how I view the next several decades of life. It is a very readable and well-researched book with lots of practical advice and compelling anecdotes.

[Peter Harrington · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars as just more then half of the book was useful for home purchasing decisions. Those important areas covered the options available for choosing where one wants to live and then pointing out good vs bad things about such areas, depending upon ones personal feelings and conditions.

[Elizabeth Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots of food for thought to choose the best dwelling for every life stage/situation. Maybe a little too much information though as I was experiencing decision fatigue/anxiety just thinking about all the possibilities.

[Susan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were good points to consider when debating whether or where to move.
The main issue I had with this book was that most of ideas that were discussed or suggested are beyond (financially) to the vast majority of seniors.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Still don’t know where to move. Austin sounds nice. Lots of variables. Mostly skimmed.

[Susan · Rating 3.75 out of 5]

Much of what is in this book was not new to me but good summary of various options for us older folks. I skimmed through quite a bit of it.