Learning To Become More Charitable – Episode 287

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Listeners, welcome to the Prosperity Podcast. Today, we’re talking about charity, and that can mean how much we give to charity, how much we save, how we go about our charity, or maybe even starting some charitable foundation ourselves. Now, we’re going to turn over the microphone to Kim, and we’re going to talk about charity. Are you there with us, Kim? I am, and I can’t wait to share my all-time favorite approach to this and specific charity that others may not be familiar with. I have two of them actually that I love to support. Well, we would love to hear it. I’m so curious of your specific and favorite approach. Well, let’s do the approach first. The first part I think is that each family and each

[00:56] person does have to take a look at this area for themselves probably every two or three years and make some conscious decisions. One of the things early on that I decided is the no part. Deciding what you’re not going to do I think is often sometimes easier and equally as important as deciding what you are going to do. A long, long time ago, I just decided that I was not going to be involved in charities for kids and for diseases. Now, that might seem normal or weird, who knows, but believe me, it’s not that I don’t love children and think that they should be supported. That’s just not something that I want to put my efforts towards. I think deciding no is really valuable. I absolutely didn’t. Again, honor, please to the people that choose and have family members that have

[01:50] diseases. You choose to focus on charitable organizations to support those diseases. That’s awesome. I’m super grateful that there are people that do that, but that just doesn’t work with me. Instead, I went with a direction of being very focused on church and my contributions there for quite some time. Fine, that certainly works. The whole 10% of income, is it gross? Is it net? That’s always a discussion that I think floats about in people’s minds. I will admit I am not as good at the 10% as I would like to be, but it is an area for growth. That’s always good. It is certainly an area that I do some towards and certainly some thinking about. That’s the approach I think that people need to just get clear on in their own minds is an amount that they’re comfortable

[02:44] with. Of course, that may vary year to year, but I do think giving is an important thing. I think giving first is an important thing. Charity is an easy, easy way to do that. I have a funny story of a time when I was really struggling with some cash flow issues and I just fought with it for a couple months and got irritated, frustrated, ready to break through this limitation and jumped on kiva.org’s website, which is I think a wonderful organization of microloans to many, many entrepreneurs that can benefit from it. This is quite some time ago, but I gave $25 because that’s all I had. In fact, I’m not even sure I had that at the time, but I gave $25 and I felt like it honestly helped me break through. Just that act of moving money, just that act of giving first of literally

[03:42] putting my money where my mouth and my thought was in the form of giving first seemed to really make a difference. That was a super cool thing. It sounded like even in the most challenging times, you decided to put charity first, and it changed what happened in your mind. Did you still have cash flow problems? I believe that they ended up solving themselves fairly quickly after that. It’s hard for me to remember, but as we have talked before, it’s not like cash flow problems go away. They just get bigger zeros, but I do believe that we broke through them at that time. Okay. Isn’t it funny? I’m just sitting back. I’m the armchair quarterback right now, but isn’t it kind of funny how you clearly remember putting in the $25 towards charity.

[04:32] You drew a line in the sand, but you don’t remember what that cash flow need was exactly. You put forth the right intention and all of a sudden it worked out. Isn’t the circumstance, isn’t the moment in 30 years you might not remember that business transaction or the cash flow need, but you’re always going to be clear on your principles. That’s the reason why you have the principles of prosperity. Those are principles lifelong. They’re going to last for years and years and years. Absolutely. It is fun too. I really enjoy a variety of charitable actions. I think Christmas time is always a good time and Thanksgiving time as well, just as you’re thinking about being grateful to express that in monetary form. Frankly, we should be doing that in Valentine’s and Veterans Day.

[05:31] What other holiday can I think of that might remind us since it’s gratitude and expressing gratitude and paying it forward and all those things really should be a yearly, nope, monthly, nope, daily, nope, sometimes every minute event. I do want to share another favorite charity that I have. This will get a laugh from our listeners because they’ve learned how much I like animals. The other charity is heifer.org. Heifer like a cow, a female cow that hasn’t had a baby yet. Heifer.org. I think we have done another podcast edit, but you can give as little as five or $10. Of course, a thousand or five thousand works as well. You get lots of animals and you can give alpacas and water buffalo and sheep and llamas and chickens and pigs and goats and all kinds of things.

[06:30] It’s just a fabulous organization because it then teaches the recipient to be a donor themselves and turn around and give of the production of that animal to another family member. If you give a cow to a family, they learn how to milk it. They learn how to breed it. They learn how to get a calf, a baby cow, just for those that don’t know what a calf is, and then give some of that offspring to another family in their community and continue to pay forward the whole idea. That’s part of the reason that I like heifer.org so much. That’s amazing. That really is. It’s actually really close to how you see life insurance. It has this benefit beyond what you’re putting in. It’s got this benefit that lasts generations.

[07:27] Absolutely. It is so amazing because it helps the families get food. It helps them create income. It’s the single most widely impactful gift that I know of. It’s not just for third world countries. They do it some in the U.S. as well. It’s always amazing. Us people here in the U.S., we don’t think that there’s families here that have hunger issues and income issues, and there are. This is a great way to help them. Yeah, definitely. How do you approach charity when it comes to family members? That’s an interesting one. We’ve done some things in the past where my parents, acting as grandparents to our children, gave them money. The request was that they give it away and write to everybody in the family within the next 30 days what they did with the money.

[08:27] That was kind of a fun, unique twist on charity and Christmas and gifting and that kinds of things. We’ve done other aspects. We live in a tiny little town, so it’s not super easy to go do a food bank or that kind of thing, but I absolutely have helped the kids in the past prepare toys to be given away, purchase clothing occasionally for families and that kind of thing that could be benefited. I love right now our children are in college and just out of college. They’re great savers and they’re great givers. One of the things that I think is also really special at this time is to be conscious of people’s love languages. This is a book we haven’t covered on the podcast at all if in a long time. It’s Gary

[09:15] Chapman’s Five Love Languages book. Yeah, that’s a great book. Oh my gosh, it’s an all-time favorite of mine. My daughter’s major love language is gifts. I always try to be really conscious of that at Christmas time because for me it would be very easy to just be like, hey, let’s not do gifts this year. Let’s all donate to charity or all create a trip or something like that. There are times when we do that and yet I’m always conscious of her love language and making sure that she gets an opportunity to express that because we all know that when you don’t get to express your love language, it’s very frustrating. Of course, I reverse that as well. I make darn sure I have a gift for her. Whereas my son’s, his love language is time and so I will probably get him a gift also,

[10:01] but I might treat the whole circumstance differently than I would his sister because of those love languages. Oh, that’s so smart. That’s definitely smart. Now, do you have any friends or know people that have started a charity? I do know people and we have started one ourselves as well and I know how difficult that is. I spent I think about three years getting our charity, which is a public charity for education of people’s finances. I think it took me about three years to get it approved and we did get it approved as a public charity, not just a private family charity and that was a serious effort. I also am of course aware of people that have done more private family foundation kind of work and all of those things are super cool and I

[10:51] love concepts like charitable remainder trusts and charitable unit trusts that facilitate charitable transactions and then to add to that whole family ethic, my son’s work is in raising money for a non-profit and that’s his full-time job that he gets paid to do to go raise money for that, not our non-profit, just for disclosure sake there. It is another public charity that he works for, but I’ve got what I would say is a lot of experience. I don’t know that I would pretend to have a lot of knowledge about it, but I think that’s a super cool space. Absolutely. I have a friend, his name is Davis Smith and he started a company called Cotopaxi and they make bags and outdoor gear. We talked years ago and he was thinking of starting a charity, but he realized he was

[11:46] really good at business and so he decided to start a business and what the business does is it employs a lot of people in countries where he would have set up charities. Now they have a job instead of just receiving something and it improves everyone’s life. I think we can look at this. I love that. Isn’t that great? The company is called Cotopaxi. They’re actually one of the largest. They’re taking on North Face. They’re a huge company now and it’s wonderful because you can set up a charity if you choose or you can do a business that’s going to be charitable. I know people that are real estate investors and people that they hire to do the remodel of the houses are people that have limited disabilities.

[12:37] They’re disabled, but they have limited disabilities so they can still do some work. There’s always a way to be charitable. Yes, that’s fabulous and the whole business aspect of hiring people and providing employment is incredibly charitable. To take that out and expand it even further is so fabulous. It’s interesting when we look at the Warren Buffett, Bill Gates routine. Of course, they’re in a different category, but they donate massive amounts of money and yet the real good that they’ve done is build those companies. It’s always interesting to me to watch how they sometimes turn and they almost forget the value that the building of the company and the employing of people has had in terms of its charitable aspect. I think I’m going to take your words

[13:32] and I’m going to put a wrapper on this episode. I’m going to say maybe for us as listeners, as you’ve mentioned Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, their real talent was in building those businesses. Maybe our talent is getting our family’s finances in order so that we can create better future generations, more prosperous families, and then we can do more good. Is that a good wrapper on this? I love that. Very well said, Spencer. Wonderful. Also for our listeners, there’s a plethora of knowledge and things that you can learn to become more charitable. One of the things that we would definitely love from you is to take your listener questions. If you’re looking specifically on how you can be more charitable or how you can teach your

[14:19] children to save better, or maybe what you should do with your finances, message Kim at hello at partnersforprosperity.com. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast. To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.