In this episode, as part of a series on aging, retiring, and dying single (which airs on the first Thursday of every month), Peter McGraw talks with Shelby Radcliffe. She shares insights on generosity and legacy for Solos, discussing how they – with thoughtful planning and reflection — can make significant contributions and create meaningful legacies while living fulfilling lives.
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Listen to Episode #223 here
Aging Single #6: Generosity And Legacy
Welcome back to the series on aging, retiring, and dying single. The series will be appearing on the first Thursday of the month for the foreseeable future. In the next couple of episodes, we are going to be addressing end-of-life issues. In this episode, I discuss generosity and legacy with Shelby Radcliffe. Shelby is the Vice President of Advancement, which means alumni relations and fundraising, at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She is a proud solo. She loves living her solo life with a dog named Opal in one of the most beautiful places in the world. Welcome, Shelby.
How are you, Peter?
I’m great. We met by way of mutual friends. They told you about the show. You became a listener and then you reached out to me to pitch this very episode. Why?
They both said to me that they thought I was a solo. I had never heard that phrase before. Lisa Landerman is a colleague at Willamette, and we’ve become close friends. Eric’s wife, Jen, and I went to grad school together. They are Salem people. I spend a lot of time with them. They watch me living my solo life. They are both married. They raved about your work, what you were doing, and your project from the early days. I’ve been tuning in and identifying very closely with the project this whole time. It has been enlightening and liberating for me to have a way to describe my life to other people. It has been great.
That’s great. Why do you want to talk to me about this topic specifically?
Early on, you did an episode with Bella DePaulo who has written in Psychology Today and other places. She has a book.
She has a dozen books.
She talked a lot about singles and how much more generous they are with their time, energy, and money. This was interesting to me personally because I observed the bias towards coupledom and the undervaluing of solo people in my personal life. It was also interesting to me professionally because I work as a fundraiser for a university.
I’ve been in higher education fundraising for 27 years and a lot of the work I do is with couples. We pay a lot of attention to couples. It was enlightening to say, “I got to go back and look at those people who aren’t married. They may not be as engaged with the institution, but they may be more likely to give either of their time or their resources.” I started investigating what we know about our folks in our alumni database.
Did you find some evidence that singles are being overlooked and that they have a different perspective?
Yes. I haven’t done any actual studies. The majority of our alumni who are over a certain age, let’s say 30, are married by far. Many of them are married to other alums, but it’s more like 10% or 15%. It’s not 60% or 70%. We are engaging much more with people who are partnered and or widowed after long marriages than we are with unmarried people.
We do pay attention to childless couples, which is interesting. We pay attention to them because childless people usually give a lot more of their money to charity than people with children or grandchildren. We already built into our predictive models that we use the fact that someone is childless, but we haven’t historically built in the fact that someone is single.
What we hope to do in the next year or so is to look particularly at our youngest alums, those who are graduating to maybe fifteen years out because my suspicion is that they’re all single. We have an opportunity to be a home base for them intellectually and service-wise. They’re looking for a connection. They’re eager to make connections.
My field figured out that young alumni were important about 25 or 30 years ago. If you didn’t engage them when they were young, you didn’t have them when they were midlife and older when they had more resources to give. How we engage with them as single people should be different than how we engage with our midlife and later-in-life alumni who are more likely to be married than not. It’s an interesting question.
I’ve been pulled slightly into this at my institution at CU Boulder, giving talks to alumni, for example. The demographic shifts are impossible to ignore. The one that I’d like to mention is that 25% of Millennials are projected to never marry. Who knows what’s happening with Gen Z at the moment? It’s too early to tell. I don’t see a regression happening where they’re going to suddenly start embracing traditional relationships. If anything, that group is going to be even more non-traditional.
The population I work with is mostly college graduates. They’re going to have more economic freedom than their non-college graduate peers, generally speaking. It means they’re going to be able to choose a solo life more easily in some cases than other people. I bet those numbers for college graduates will be even higher.
I suspect so. In many ways, single living is still luxury living. The world is built for two. You need to have some extra income to live alone, for example. There are some very smart reasons to couple up economically. There’s a hedge. You get to share expenses. The economic abilities and even the freedom with regard to time and energy in some ways is a little bit of a tale of two singles. Some people are struggling to make ends meet. They’re working a lot. They don’t have as much leisure because they have a lot of financial insecurity.
There is the other group that you alluded to that has what might be a breadwinning job but is keeping all the bread to themselves. I have friends in academia. Academia seems to have a slightly higher rate of singles. I have some single friends of my generation. We joke that we have spent our child’s tuition dollars over several times traveling the world, having fun, and so on. I get it.
It’s true. Interestingly enough, we don’t get tuition benefits like our child-rearing friends and colleagues. At my institution, it’s a $48,000-a-year benefit that I will never have access to.
I know. I have a paper I’m working on about this very thing. You may receive a competitive salary but you’re going to fall behind on benefits because benefits are built for two or more.
It’s true.
A few notes before we jump into this. I want to say that this conversation is not meant to be prescriptive. We’re not here to tell you what you should do with your time or your money. You can do anything you want within the bounds of harmlessness and consent. I want this to be a generative conversation. I want it to inspire. I want people to consider a different script because there isn’t very much conversation about giving and about legacy for the singles specifically.
The thing that sticks with me after tuning in to your show is this notion that we shouldn’t should ourselves to death. We want to liberate ourselves from that kind of language in all kinds of ways, not just around the identity of being a solo person or having a traditional relationship if you’re dating, all the things you talk about in your book and on the show.
The same exists for kindness and generosity. Our culture has all these shoulds about what we should do. It values certain kinds of generous acts more than others. I want to liberate people from that too because watching your friend’s children so that they can have a date night is a tremendous act of generosity that solos do all the time. You don’t get a tax credit for that, but it’s still incredibly powerful in the way that it serves your community and the way that it serves you.
I do want to break open some concepts about what I mean. I very carefully don’t use the word charity because I think of charity as something that is tax deductible. You give a service that you would normally charge for for free or you give assets to some nonprofit entity. That’s a tax-deductible charity. Generosity is a bigger umbrella. You like to have a wide tent for the solo community. I like to have a wide tent for generosity as well because there are so many different forms of it and they’re all fabulous. I would be surprised to find a single person in the solo community who isn’t being more generous than they realize.
Amen. I also like this because it does break the stereotype of the single as selfish. We’ve talked about that before on the show, so I don’t have to reiterate my perspective on that. With that in mind, I’d like to say that singles have optionality. They have the ability but not the obligation to make a decision. Riding the relationship escalator demands a lot of time, attention, and energy. In that, the traditional form can crowd out a lot of other opportunities.
As I see it too, solos especially have optionality. The reason for that is different. It’s because solos question convention. They question the rules. They question the scripts. The moment you start questioning those rules, it gives you the opportunity to bend or break them. You suddenly have lots more choices to make and lots more options to pursue by doing things differently.
When people think about legacy, they think about doing something purposeful, something bigger than themselves, and something that has a lasting impression often beyond their time on earth. The purpose could be achievement-oriented, doing something bigger than yourself for yourself. Chamberlain’s 100-point game lives on and they live on forever. It happened. Purpose can also be meaningful. Doing something bigger than yourself for others is challenging for you.
For many people, their children are their biggest legacy. That’s highly valued for good reason. It’s a challenging endeavor. I don’t envy them. The world supports that. They want to support their children. Should they be lucky enough to have wealth at the end of their life or wealth during their life, they give that to their children and help their children get a leg up, so to speak. Solos are less likely to have children, although many people in the community do. I don’t want to ignore them. This opens up opportunities. What are you going to do?
Generosity And Philanthropy
These meaningful endeavors involve generosity. I looked up the definition of generosity. We all know what it is, but I was curious what it is. The Oxford English Dictionary says generous as an adjective is showing a readiness to give more of something, especially money, than is strictly necessary or expected. Cambridge Dictionary, also as an adjective, says willingness to give money, help, kindness, etc., especially more than usual or expected.
Here we are talking about solos’ optionality and generosity generally and specifically for what we might do with our leftover wealth should we be lucky enough to have it to engage in philanthropy, charity, or whatever the terms that people use. Shelby, where do we start?
In the 27 years with all the donors that I worked with, I got to see the very best of humanity in my job. I get to be part of the most generous act of someone’s life for the most part. It’s pretty remarkable. Many of the donors I work with are giving to their children, but they’re also giving to charity. They’re not passing everything on to their children very conscientiously.
What I do find about most of the donors that I’ve worked with is that they’re less intentional than you would imagine. They’re less used to the discipline of saying, “What do I believe? What do I value? How will my actions live out those beliefs and values?” Oftentimes, by the time I get to them, they’ve been giving to the institution for 20, 30, or 40 years. I ask them, “What would you like to do with your money that would bring you the most joy as a philanthropist?” They can’t answer that question.
They sit back and often say, “No one has ever asked me that.” I say, “If you’ll allow me into this conversation, I’d like to be your guide as you figure that out. I’d like to engage in a conversation that might last several years about what would bring you the most joy.” There is a wide range of things that would bring joy to someone philanthropically or service-wise and they’re not all the same. There are a ton of options, especially for solos. I know you like rubrics.
I love a good framework.
I didn’t get too far, but what I did do was make the typical X-axis and Y-axis. Along the X-axis, how are the recipients? Are they known to you, which is on the left, or are they unknown to you, which is on the right? You can imagine a known-to-you recipient is a neighbor who’s elderly and you’re going to mow their lawn every week. It could be a charity in Sri Lanka or somewhere far away that you have no chance of knowing the people who will benefit from your service. It’s that range of options.
On the Y-axis, how close is the benefit to you? There are a lot of benefits to giving. One of my fundraising colleagues says that when you put your alma mater in your estate, you automatically add fifteen years to your lifespan, which is not true. We haven’t proven it to be true. On the high end, how much does it benefit me? A tax-deductible gift benefits me.
Maybe as a solo, I’m building community by making this gift or act of service that helps me to build that community that I’m seeking since I don’t have a built-in community in my home. On the low end, it’s not going to benefit me much at all because I’m giving anonymously or it’s not local, so it’s not building the health of my own community. Although we do live in a global society where one could argue giving to a water organization in the Middle East is certainly going to help us globally. You get my point.
There’s no wrong quadrant to be in. You can be, “It’s highly known to me and highly local. It serves me very well,” or it can be, “It’s highly unknown to me and it’s very removed.” There’s no right area of those four quadrants to be in. The question is what’s going to feel best to you? One thing we know about giving is that people do it again because it feels good. They believed in the impact. They trust the organization. They received notification from the organization about how their gift was used. It made them feel joy. It made them feel happy.
Most people start out not thinking about these things. They think, “My friend is running a marathon for leukemia, so I’m going to give $250 to the marathon for leukemia,” or “This is the shelter where I got my cat, so I’m going to give to this shelter.” They don’t sit down and figure out what the framework for their personal giving is, whether it’s their time or money. When you’re talking about legacy, you’re usually talking about something pretty big, either a lot of time or a lot of money, whatever that number is. You want to think about what feels best and where you feel you want to be in those two measurements, how close it is to you, and how much you’ll get back.
That’s a useful rubric. I love a good X-Y four quadrant.
It’s a work in progress.
It makes sense. One of the things that I like about that message is there’s no value judgment. I started fussing with a will. One of the things that I have noticed fortunately is should I have wealth left over, I’m eager to give it to people I love and care about. What I have noticed is most of those people don’t need my money anymore. There was a time when we all needed the money. We were 24.
You bought your first house.
Whatever it is. That’s right. That creates an interesting puzzle because I want to honor them. My current solution is that I want to give the money with a string attached. You can’t do this, but you could say, “I want you to use this money for X,” something that they might have trouble spending money on or something like that. It also does open up possibilities that you could then give in this person’s name. I like the idea that there is no one way to do this. It is up to you. No one else gets to tell you how you should do this. This is your money. This is your time. These are your desires. You should do what makes you happy in that sense.
Once you figure out what kind of legacy you want to leave when you’re gone, that enables you to decide how you want to connect with that legacy purpose while you’re living, which can be very fulfilling. Habitat for Humanity is an organization that I’ve volunteered for over the years. I served on a local board of Habitat in Pennsylvania. I was the chair of the Family Selection Committee. I sanded, painted, and installed installations, so I care about it a lot. I trust it as an organization.
I want to give a legacy, but what if I hadn’t volunteered for them? Would I want to start volunteering for them? Maybe I want to give non-charitably, so not in a way that’s tax deductible. Let’s take your example. I want to support a set of friends. I want them to go on a great trip. How might I start enacting that while I’m alive?
If that’s what I decide is the thing that would bring me the most joy, how do I help them do that while I’m alive? Is it by planning vacations with them? Is it by giving them little treats to take when they go on vacation? “I’m going to give you $300 to go to a Michelin-star restaurant when you go to Paris because I know you won’t do that yourself,” or whatever it is. There’s no right answer. That way, you get to activate your legacy gift during your lifetime. It gives you the chance to appreciate the experience and test out your decision to make sure it’s the decision that it’s meant to be. It’s meant to bring you joy. It’s an interesting question.
A lot of people during their lifetime are giving $50 here, $10 there, or $100 here. Somebody is running a marathon, doing a walk, or they’re selling cookies for their basketball team at the local high school. Any number of ways that you’re giving unintentionally in a way based on the opportunities that are placed in front of you and your sense that you should do something.
Most people don’t sit down and say, “I’m going to give X dollars away per year and I’m going to do it to these three organizations.” I went through that process myself when I got divorced. I got divorced in 2008. Suddenly, I was a happy solo, delighted to have complete financial freedom. I was the primary breadwinner in my marriage, so it was wonderful to have all of my resources going to my life.
We had been giving to whatever like many people do. I sat down and said, “How much can I afford to give away? Who am I going to give it to?” I’m in the business of philanthropy so it makes sense that I would be thinking about this. As I talk about it with my friends, the ones who have gone through this process, as difficult as it is because it does force you to say what you value, and by saying what you value, you’re also saying what you don’t value, it’s so liberating.
Every time someone asks me for $100, I can say, “No. I’m giving to Heifer International. I’m giving to Willamette University where I work. I’m giving to the local Marion Polk Food Share where I serve on the board. It’s a food scarcity organization in my region. Those are my top three. Thank you for the opportunity, but that’s what I support.” It makes that whole feeling of obligation evaporate because I’ve thought carefully about it and I’ve made a decision.
That’s wonderful. I was about to ask you for some examples of this. To go back to the haves and have-nots, the tale of two people, I spent my whole life to a certain point not having enough money. The idea of giving anything away seemed crazy to me because I’m trying to make ends meet and I’m trying to save for my future. Suddenly, you’re like, “I have some money left over at the end of the month. I have some money left over at the end of the year,” or “I have a little more time and flexibility than I did when I didn’t have tenure to be able to dedicate to volunteering.” What should be pretty clear to our regular audience is that the Solo project is my philanthropy.
It’s your service to the world.
It’s my biggest legacy moving forward. It will live on after I’m gone in some way, shape, or form. My obituary will say that I was a champion for singles. The book will live on and the show will live on. The money and time that I put into it is well-spent for that reason.
I couldn’t agree more with that because the little vignettes that you have throughout the book and the little personal stories were such powerful examples of the way having identification with this community has lifted people up. That has certainly been true for me. You’re correct. I do want to say that sometimes in the world of giving, people begin to feel, because it’s what we talk about in the news, that you have to be able to give away $1 million to have that be meaningful.
That’s what makes the news.
I am far more impressed by a $25 monthly gift from a recent college graduate because I know they’re giving something up. They don’t have it all yet. They don’t own a home. They might not even own a car. They might be living with their parents but they know the institution supported them. They got financial aid and they want to pass that on, or whatever their reason is.
There are a lot of donors who give large amounts of money but it is part of the excess that they live with. I do want to celebrate the way people at every level of American society have value in giving to others. Sometimes, it’s not money, but it’s soup that you make for the next-door neighbor when they’re sick or watching someone’s child while they’re at work because they have to go to work and they can’t call in sick. It’s all the acts of service that people do. It doesn’t always have to be money, and it certainly doesn’t have to be big for it to be meaningful to you or meaningful to the world.
Beyond Charity
Can you give a few examples that might stand out to you that are outside the world of charity per se? The obvious one is the Gates Foundation because they have this particular metric. They think about bang for their buck. They’re like, “How do we save the most lives?” As a result, they do a lot of that one quadrant. It could be buying mosquito netting in Africa or somewhere like that knowing that you can reduce malaria rates. You then suddenly save lots of people and so on. It’s no surprise that the nerds at the Gates Foundation have this metric or whatnot. Does anything stand out to you as someone who has given this some thought and has a plan? You have a plan, which I’m impressed by.
There are people in my life who have chosen to be involved with various organizations that support young children in their development like the Big Brothers Big Sisters, the Boys & Girls Club, and other organizations like this. These are primarily people who have chosen not to have children or have been unable to have children. I could say safely they believe that healthy developing children are the key to a healthy society, and that’s where they want to invest. They give their time, their energy, and the resources that they’re able to when they’re able to.
My niece is certainly one of them. She does not yet have children. She may never have children. She’s not sure, at least the last she said. She is doing social work at a school. She raises money for the programs that she runs that are outside of the regular school district programs. She works for the Boys & Girls Club in her hometown. She is connected to a lot of people who do have money. She hunts for one of them who can help support these kids.
Since she’s young and getting started, she uses her social capital to raise thousands of dollars for the clothing that they provide for young people when they come to school, for the food that they provide, and for the holiday gifts at the end of the year that they provide. She raises tons of money from her social network. That’s one way that you can enact that generosity even if you don’t have the resources to do it but it’s aligned with a set of values around young people. That’s one example I can think of.
I’m going to use Eric. I don’t know if he has done this, but our friend, Eric, is an avid cyclist. He is of all types. There is a bike shop in Salem that takes donated bikes, rehabilitates them, and sells them for very little or donates them. They take volunteers who will come in and work at the bike shop and do the maintenance work on the bikes. I have no idea what it involves because I do not ride bikes. It’s a business but it’s a service-oriented business to the community. It’s helping kids and adults who can’t get their own bikes to get bikes and get out there. I would imagine that that’s something that Eric is spending time doing.
One of the things about having this as a generative conversation is the many ways that you can create these ripple effects in the world, whether it be people close to you, people in your community, or even strangers around the world. Reading that definition of generosity or being generous, I was struck by the use of kindness. Even being kind to people full stop has this ripple effect. I often say this. If someone helps me out, I’m stuck.
I remember I had a time when I had gone out and ran an errand and I didn’t bring my phone. It was a weird thing. I made a conscious choice of I’m not going to bring my phone. I’m in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt. People who know me know I don’t dress like this in public. I was using a rental car. I get back to the car and the car won’t start. I’m like, “Oh my goodness.” I’m contemplating the walk home in flip-flops.
You don’t have your phone.
I don’t have my phone. This guy moseys on by and he sees me with my head under the hood. He’s like, “What’s up?” I was like, “The car won’t start. It’s weird.” He looks at it and he’s one of these very handy guys. He tightens this one thing which was on the battery and the car starts up. I was like, “You’re a lifesaver.”
I went to give him some money because that’s all I had to give him. He was magnanimous. He was so lovely. He said, “It’s my pleasure.” I said to him, “I promise to pay it forward. I will do something nice for someone for you in that sense.” These acts of kindness have this rippling effect. It was very easy to lose faith in humanity. You spend too much time on social media and you think, “People are awful. They’re so awful,” and then you run across the person who is the opposite. It’s uplifting.
I did social work for about a decade before I started working in higher education in fundraising and alumni relations work. In social work, we talked a lot about the scarcity mindset or the abundance mindset. There was a distinct difference between clients who had one versus the other. As a very young person out of school who was doing this work, it was so interesting to learn that that wasn’t connected to how many resources those people had. It wasn’t connected to their socioeconomic level. It wasn’t connected to their educational level.
A scarcity mindset is that there is not enough. It’s like, “I don’t have enough time. I don’t have enough energy. There’s not enough goodness in the world.” You can understand how someone might grow up and develop a scarcity mindset. An abundance mindset is there is enough. It’s like, “I can stop and look under the hood with this guy, Peter, who I’ve never met and who pretty clearly doesn’t know anything about cars. I have time to do that. I have an abundance of time, so I’m going to take the time. It might take me 5 minutes or 45 minutes but I’m going to help.”
I do believe that the abundance mindset or generosity mindset is a virtuous cycle. If you put something into that cycle, you might not get it back but someone else is going to get it back because you put it in. Leaving a legacy through your service or your generosity, your philanthropy, or whatever words you want to use, is about not just the final act you make in your estate plan but it’s about the little things you do every day, every week, every month, and every year that pay into that virtuous cycle that makes the world a better place to live in.
I love the idea of being opportunistic. That gentleman had an opportunity to help you. He didn’t intend at the beginning of his day. You weren’t in his quadrant. He saw that you needed something and he helped you. I don’t want to suggest that intentionality is the only way, but you can set an intention that you want to be generous as much as you can.
It means you lift up your eyes, look at the world around you, and notice that someone needs help carrying bags to their car because they’re elderly or whatever it is. It could be that someone needs time and attention from you at work. It’s all of those things. When you put a framework around it for your charitable giving or your service-oriented work, then to me, you get back so much more because you know the cumulative effect will be around an issue that you care about deeply or a set of issues. It could be a wide range of issues.
What I’m hearing so far is beyond the obvious. With the charitable giving that you give while you’re alive or in your will and passing it on, or your volunteer activities, you’re highlighting there are a host of other ways to be generous and these may create a legacy that is observable in the world or non-observable. You may never get any credit for any of these things that you do, but you’ve made the world a better place. The second thing that I’ve heard from you is the value of having a plan and understanding what your values are. These are choices that you get to make. You could be haphazard about it and could let the world tell you how you should behave, but there is a great benefit to having a plan, so to speak.
That plan could be something you modify every five years or every decade. You don’t have to make a plan and stick to it for the rest of your life. Check-in at those important moments, whether you use birthdays, the New Year, or whatever cycle of your life that you use to reflect on whether the values that you’ve articulated and the plans that you’ve made still fit you as your life changes and evolves.
Creating A Plan
Let’s talk a little bit about how someone might approach this. What is very exciting about this is how liberating it can be for someone who may not have a lot of resources or someone who may be accepting a lot of generosity in their life because they’re in a difficult situation. They don’t have all the privileges in the world and create a little bit of balance.
I have a friend. I was writing about this friend. I’ll never be equal. He has always given way more to me than I’ve ever been able to give to him. We’re never going to be equal. I’m never going to be able to make it all up to him because he doesn’t need me in the same way that I need him, in a sense. What I can do is help these other people. I can pay it forward. I can take his generosity and leverage it into generosity to others who are even more in need of it than I am in that sense.
It’s true. When I ask them the question, “What would bring you the most joy?” I’m usually asking around money because of my job. I’m like, “What acts of generosity would bring you the most joy?” When people say, “No,” I say, “Let’s talk about the past for a second. Let’s talk about the times you have been generous with your time, your energy, your knowledge, your money, or any of those things. Brainstorm as fast as you can examples of those things.” What would you say to that question? Are you willing to answer that question? I don’t want to put you on the spot.
You should put me on the spot. I like this as a starting point. If you want to think about moving forward, let’s look backward.
It’s like, “What have you done?” The next question is going to be, “How did you feel about it?” I would not overthink it at this stage because you’re not setting your intention. All you’re doing is saying, “I paid for somebody’s lunch. I offered a friend an hour of my time on podcast technology because I know how to use this technology,” or whatever those things might be.
I’ll give you a concrete example of this. I was fortunate enough to go on a Semester at Sea, which you’re likely to be familiar with. It’s a poo-poo platter of global experiences for 4 or 5 days in a place. I got to go twice. In 1996, I went to Vietnam and got connected to a cyclo driver. A cyclo is a pedaled rickshaw of sorts that was very popular in Vietnam at the time. There were few cars, lots of motorbikes, and lots of cyclos. His name is Kung. He’s a bit older than me. He was a lovely person and incredibly generous. He showed me around and everything. We stayed in touch via letter right after that.
He sent me a letter that he had been injured in a fight. He had been attacked and had been injured. He had been in the hospital. Their family had a small apartment that they had to sell. They lost their apartment. They were now living in another apartment with twelve people. It was pretty heartbreaking to learn about this. I was going on the voyage again. I was a grad student, so I was living on $14,000 a year at the time. It was not like I could write a check. I could now, but back then, no. I put a call out to everyone I knew to donate to buy Kung a house. When I say house, I mean a dwelling. It’s not a house like we think about in America.
It’s different than American standards, for sure.
It was going to be a small amount of money to completely change the trajectory of this family’s life. People were so generous. I had no trouble collecting this money. I don’t remember exactly how much I brought. It was maybe $3,000 or $3,500 at most. It was somewhere around there in cash. I got off the ship and I had $3,000 stuck in my underwear.
I didn’t tell Kung about this because I didn’t know who was reading his mail. We got off the ship and met him at the ship. I was like, “Let’s go to your house,” because he’s got his 2 or 3 kids and his wife. I said, “Do you have a private spot for us?” He said, “Yeah.” There was one bedroom in this place. It was crazy. I was like, “I collected money from my friends and family so you can get your own place to live,” and I handed him this money.
That was pretty powerful.
It’s still powerful.
You changed that man’s life.
He calls his wife. She comes into the room and he hands her the money, and she disappears. That was our little secret. I did it because it was the right thing to do. I paid him for his time, but he was so wonderful to me and my friends. Grad students are elite at complaining. They’re some of the world’s best complainers.
I agree.
I say that with love to all the grad students who are tuning in. I was one for many years. I was an elite complainer. The trials and tribulations of that family put into perspective what a wonderful life I had and the opportunities that I had. Things were scarce but not really in that way.
By my observation of how you told that story, you’ve identified one powerful moment in your life. You gave something and it has stayed with you many years later. You could brainstorm 10 or 12 examples from big to small, but why did it feel so good? It sounds to me that some of the reasons are because the impact you could have for a relatively low price in American dollars was enormous.
You could give $3,000 to Habitat for Humanity and they wouldn’t come close to building a home for one family in the United States. Even though they do an amazing job of getting donated materials and donated land, it still would cost way more than that. For one thing, you changed an entire family’s life. You trusted this person. You had a personal relationship with this individual. That was powerful.
Figuring out what about that meant something to you will help you then extrapolate those values into what you want to do in the future potentially. Was it that country in particular? Did that country strike you on your travels? Are you like, “Do I want to go back and think about the organizations that are working on the ground in that country?” Was it the idea that there wasn’t a nonprofit involved that you knew someone? You were the someone, but do you know other people who do research in that country?
You’re an academic. You would probably have connections to people if you decided you wanted to do this again. Maybe you wouldn’t know the person but some friend of yours in Boulder does their research in that country. It’s the picking apart of the experience and connecting with that deep emotional feeling that you had of joy and gratitude for your abundance and your ability to spread some of that abundance to another person who needed it. Figuring out what about it was so meaningful helps you to then say, “As I look forward to what I want to do next, what do I think about that?”
That’s wonderful. There’s another side to this too as you ask this question, and it has to do with the Solo project and the Solo movement. My father was largely absent. I didn’t have many good role models. I had some good academic role models but I never had a great overall mentor. I’ve had to piece together my knowledge through books, through observation, and through piecemeal to figure out how to live a remarkable life.
The Solo project is my attempt to share this knowledge to help people avoid some of the same mistakes I made to help them feel more comfortable with the decisions they’re already making to try to build a community around this project and to bring people together. I’m not going to be around forever to have this not be reliant on any small handful of people but rather it’s a global movement.
Starting Conversations
We have a solo community. I’ll plug it. You can sign up for it at PeterMcGraw.org/Solo. These are people all over the world who connect. They don’t need me anymore, which is exactly what I want. I throw these Solo Salons which bring people from the community together to experience art, entertainment, and culture. It’s always a ton of work. Leading up to it, I always wonder why I am doing it, and then once I do it, I remember exactly why I do it because it is such a wonderful experience. This is very useful. I want to move on from me. What you’re demonstrating through your line of questioning is that a lot of people might not feel like they’re generous.
I bet they are.
If they’re a solo, I bet you they are.
It takes starting a conversation with a friend. There are introverts whose brains work better thinking about something. I am a person who processes verbally with humans, so I often recommend starting a conversation with a friend, but it could be using a journal or meditating on something. Think about the things that you’ve given in the past.
I can’t emphasize enough how small it can seem that you got groceries for an elderly neighbor during COVID for three months when they were sick or something, or a year or eighteen months when COVID went on forever. That was simple for you because you were already going to the store. They were paying you back. This is an example from my own life. I did this for some friends. It was super easy for me. I got so much joy out of that.
Have a conversation with yourself or with a friend about what you’ve done in the past, and then isolate each experience and try to think about each experience. What about it brought you joy? Was it the fact that you were connecting with humans that brought you joy? Was it the fact that you got to see the outcome that brought you joy? Was it the fact that you care about animals and it was animals that you were helping? It doesn’t matter what brought you joy about it, but that’s the piece that then you can use to inform what you look for in future acts of generosity. Whether they are financial generosity or service-related generosity, it doesn’t matter.
In my fantasy, when I retire from my work at Willamette, I will get to be a generosity advisor to individuals who want to explore this. I can marry my social work life and my life in philanthropy and help people make these decisions and guide them through a set of conversations that might help them figure this out. Most people can do it on their own or with friends.
I want to make a distinction here. I’d make the distinction between fantasies and dreams. Dreams can come true. I want you to make this a dream, not a fantasy.
That’s very good advice.
I want to move on to legacy in a moment, but I want to ask what you think of this other way to engage in this intentionality and this planning. I’ve alluded to it already, which is if you look back at ways that people have been generous to you and then look forward to paying it forward, so to speak, is another way. You mentioned the student who received financial aid is giving so another future student can get financial aid, for example. As humans, for a category of relationships, we care about reciprocity. I have this friend that I’ll never be able to reciprocally give to him. He doesn’t need me in the ways that I have needed him. What I can do is pay it forward to someone else. There might be something to that.
You’re right. I do want to reframe that for you a little bit if you’ll allow me.
Please.
Giving someone the opportunity to help you is a wonderful gift. I mean that seriously. We’re a very independent nation. We should be able to do everything on our own. Letting someone help you gives them the opportunity to feel needed, feel valued, and feel valuable to share their abundance. I remember at some point in my life, I finally asked someone for help and the person said to me, “I’m so glad you asked for help. You never let anyone help you. I’ve always wanted to do something for you.”
You’re right. It’s not just valuable to look at the ways you’ve given in the past, but it is valuable to look at the ways you’ve received and think about the things you’ve received. That can be advice, mentorship, presence, constancy, love, or attentiveness. It can be all kinds of things. That’s a good example, your friend who always shows up for you.
I had friends who were my divorce guides. They had been divorced before me. I got sick of myself during that period and they were always willing to listen to me and always willing to help me think about my future and how I was going to survive it. I am happy to do that for anyone in my life. My married friends and single friends were loving, kind, and generous with their time, but they didn’t understand it the way my divorced friends did. I’m happy to be that person. It doesn’t hurt me to do that at all. That’s the kind of generosity I receive that I try to pay forward when anyone ever needs it. That’s a good different perspective on using the past to inform your future plans, for sure.
I want to ask another question here that’s relevant to singles. You as a single spend a lot of time supporting non-singles. It happens at work. It’s like, “Susie has to leave early because of her kid’s baseball game. Can you step up and cover Susie’s shift?” You’re being asked to babysit. The non-trivial amounts of time and money that we give celebrating married people’s endeavors never come back. It’s never reciprocated or rarely ever reciprocated. It’s easy to resent that once it gets pointed out to you.
It’s like the famous Sex in the City episode where Carrie calculates the amount she has spent. It’s shocking when your eyes open up to that for the first time.
Those are acts of generosity. Once you frame it in that way, you have a choice. You don’t have to do these things, right?
That’s right, and you get to do them on your own terms. The baby shower is a great example for me because I did not choose to have children. I always felt obligated to go to baby showers and give big, nice, fancy gifts because I didn’t want people to think I didn’t like children. I do like children, but I like other people’s children.
It’s fine. It’s okay.
Once I had this realization, I was like, “I’m never going to get a baby shower. I’m never going to need this.” I decided I was going to send a nice gift with a lovely card and I was never going to attend another baby shower.
They’re also so boring.
They’re not for people who have recently had or are about to have babies. They talk about all the baby stuff. It’s fantastic.
They’re boring to me.
They’re building a community that they need. The folks who have been through it are excited to share the knowledge they’ve learned. It’s terrific.
That’s a good point.
It goes back to your point that you get to be intentional about it and you get to decide how much generosity. I was willing to give the Diaper Genie because I thought that was the most important thing a new parent could have, but I was not willing to give my time in that particular case. The joy and the burden of having lots of options is you do have to think about what you want.
Gratitude Tools
Well said. I want to see if you would add to this list. We’ve talked about philanthropy, especially philanthropy beyond family and even beyond community. We’ve talked about community building and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways that people build community. For example, offering to pick something up at the supermarket for an elderly neighbor, a Solo Salon, or whatever that might be. It’s these acts of kindness. It could even be simply being nice to someone or stepping in and helping someone, like returning their cart for them or something like that that’s very small. Is there anything that you would add to that list of philanthropy, community building, and acts of kindness? I know they are interconnected.
That’s a good list. The one other thing I wanted to make sure if it fits in the conversation that we talked about, and this may be a digression from where we’ve been, is there are actual tools that people can use to give more away than they realize.
This is useful. Like what?
If you’re ready to shift to the idea of legacy, and we don’t need to get into too many details, what a lot of solo people or a lot of people, in general, don’t realize is if you haven’t amassed millions, you think, “I don’t have much to give away. I need it all during my lifetime,” but there are some vehicles that you can use to do pretty impressive things.
The most obvious and available to most humans in their later lives or their mature years is the annuity. You can create a charitable annuity, which means you give money to a charity, and that charity pays you income from that investment for the rest of your life. You can create what’s called a charitable annuity. It is where you give money to a charity. They invest it on your behalf and give you a fixed income for the rest of your life.
When you die, the balance of that annuity goes to the charity. You get great tax benefits from doing it when you set it up, and you get fairly competitive rates on the income from that annuity. You can do this with as little as, for some organizations, $5,000 or $10,000. That’s a lot of money for a young person. When you’re in your 50s, 60s, or 70s, and you’re still looking at, “I might live for 20 years, 25 years, 35 years, or 40 years, I can’t give my money away yet. I have to give it away when I die. I can set this up.” You can do this with property if you inherit a property from a family member that you don’t want because it’s in another state.
The property you don’t want, not the family member.
That’s an excellent clarification. When a family member dies and they live in West Virginia and you’re in Colorado, and you don’t want that property and you don’t even want to sell it, you can gift, in many cases, the property to charity. The charity will sell it and they can create an annuity with it.
I like that idea. I’ve never heard of that.
We don’t need to go into all the technical details. There are also trusts that people do this with. Trusts are usually with larger amounts of money. You can set up trusts that are not charitable. If you wanted to give your money to your friends for a particular purpose, you could set up a trust with a financial institution and they would distribute the money to the friends for a particular purpose. It could be for the education of their children or the best vacations ever.
There are ways to leave instructions with your money if you want to, and there are ways to create income for you while you’re living. This is particularly favored by older single people because they don’t have anyone else they can count on. If they lose their income, they have to be able to rely on themselves. It’s hard to give those assets away while you’re living even though you may feel like you have more than you need. Those tools are there. You don’t have to figure out how to do it by yourself. Every established large nonprofit has someone who can help you with this.
Even better for most people, most communities have community foundations. Oregon has the Oregon Community Foundation. It’s the entire state. They will set up the annuity or the trust with you with no bias towards any particular nonprofit. You can instruct how you want them to distribute that when you’re gone to whatever nonprofit organizations you want. You could be giving to the teeniest tiniest little women’s shelter in your small community somewhere. They would never have the ability to do this on their own, but a community foundation can set that up for you. Most states and large cities or medium-sized cities have community foundations.
Those folks are worth talking to. Some people think, “I could never be a big donor,” but when you realize you’ve worked your whole life, you’ve saved retirement funds, and maybe you own a home or a condominium, you have quite a bit of assets. You need them while you’re living, but at death, you will have quite a bit to give away. You should get advice from someone who can help you to think about how to do that in the way that’s best for you.
That’s wonderful. I was completely unaware of this stuff in part because I have not thought enough about this topic. It’s haphazard. I have so much to do on my to-do list to get ready to die. It’s like death and taxes.
The thing about this is if you don’t have a plan, it’s going to go to the government.
That’s right. That’s the thing. This is similar to prenups. If you get married, you do have a prenup. It’s what the government decides to do. Do you want to take a little bit of extra effort to make sure that this gets done the way that you and your partner want it to get done? You’re right. Everything goes to my sister. That’s the default. Everything of mine goes to my sister. I love my sister dearly but my sister doesn’t need it. She has done a nice job with her life. She’s frugal. She wouldn’t spend the money. I need to do the work. You’re right. It sneaks up on you because you spend your whole life not having anything to give away, and then if you’re lucky, you do.
The ideal scenario is that you can both give to your sister and give to a nonprofit. You might get as much money to your sister because if you give it all to your sister, she’s paying taxes on that because she is not your descendant.
She’s not my wife. I have to pay taxes on it.
She’s not your partner and she is not your descendant. She has to pay taxes. The estate will pay taxes and she will get 60% to 50% of what you meant to give her. By giving some of it to charity, you shrink the estate, which pays fewer tax dollars from the estate. If you work with an estate planner, you can work it out so she still gets almost as much as you planned for her to get to begin with and you get to give to charity, which is cool.
The biggest problem is I cannot live with my sister. We were sibling rivals all the way to the end.
The hardest part about estate planning is the first version of your will. Changing the charities you support over time is easy to do. If you’re worried that in ten years you’re going to have a different set of charities, don’t let that stop you. Do the work, figure it out, make a plan, and then you can easily amend your will with a new list of charities for practically no billable hours. The hard part is figuring out whether you want to set up a trust, annuity, or foundation. That’s the hard part at the beginning.
Legacy Beyond Money
Let’s talk about legacy beyond money because that’s important. That’s often overlooked. It’s something that everyone can do regardless of their resources and regardless of their circumstance. I mentioned one already. There’s something that helps with the existential crisis of, “What does this all mean? What is all this for? Is all the pain and suffering worth it?” It’s the absurdity of life. People a lot smarter than me have tackled this topic. One way that people cope with that is the meaning that they find in doing things for others and doing something bigger than themselves.
I say that singles often have a greater ability to make things and engage in the arts because they’re not doing all the things that you need to do when you’re on the escalator. Think about you. Think about all the baby showers you skip. There are all those hours you could then put into something else should you want to, whether that be making music, creating other types of art, or creating organizations that carry on beyond your time on this planet. What do you think about legacy beyond monetary philanthropy?
I’m an atheist. My version of eternal life is that when you build a close bond with another human, part of you becomes part of them. The things they admire in you are things they emulate. When they grieve you if you go first, the process of grieving makes that even more powerful. I think about my grandmother who listened to every word I said and remembered every word I said. Especially at the end of her life, I visited her with a girlfriend two weeks before and the first thing she would say was, “Did Allison get the jeans that she wanted?” We had casually mentioned it to her. She was such a good listener and so attentive.
When I grieved her, I thought about that being something I wanted to deepen in my own personality. The listening skills that I have intentionally developed, which I’m sometimes better at than others, are Grandma Radcliffe in me. That’s my version of eternal life. I think about legacy in the same way. It can be an inanimate object that affects people like a piece of art. It doesn’t have to be a relationship. Whatever you create that’s going to exist after you is going to pass on those things. It’s like that piece of art that inspired a young artist to go to art school and then they became an artist. It’s this incredible intergenerational handoff.
I’ve never worked, not since graduating college, for a for-profit organization. I’ve worked for nonprofit organizations my whole career. For 27 years, I’ve worked in higher education and entirely at smaller universities where I’m primarily raising money for financial aid, although we raise money for other things. My work is part of my legacy, but another part of my legacy for me is that I love mentoring young professionals in my field. Nobody plans to become a fundraiser. There is no degree program for it. People stumble into it. When they find they have some talent for it, if someone guides them and supports them, it’s an amazingly rewarding profession that can pay your mortgage as well, which is a nice bonus.
That’s another part. I feel like I’m helping the one organization I’m working at by mentoring other professionals, which takes time out of my non-working hours because I do that primarily as an extra thing. They’re all raising money for all these other organizations, so it amplifies the effect of spreading that around. For me, it’s that intergenerational service. This can be in a for-profit company too. If you are a good manager and you mentor young managers, we need those people everywhere. That impacts the quality of someone’s life. It doesn’t have to be in a non-profit setting to have the same kind of power.
What you suggested earlier is that this act of reflection can be very enlightening. My mind is racing. This is a topic that matters to me because I’ve been the recipient of so much generosity across my lifespan. I do gratitude journaling most days. That pops up a lot, the guy who helped me not have to walk home in my flip-flops for an hour and a half or whatever kind of thing. My psychedelic journeys are well-documented on this show. This is a common experience with people who do psilocybin. It certainly is the case for me. You remember how wonderful trees are.
I only have to go into the woods to have that experience, but I’m sure that the psilocybin would enhance that greatly.
I have a tree friend in Joshua Tree who I visit, whether I’m tripping or not tripping every time I go.
I love that.
It’s a pretty great tree. Honestly, I go and put my hand on it, talk to it, clean up the area around it, and that kind of thing. I’m getting emotional. What was going through my mind was that the act of planting a tree is an act of legacy. In all likelihood, that tree will be around way longer than you and it will nurture the world in a way that is not trivial.
It’s a great analogy because what we know about trees and forests is that they’re not individual plants. They are parts of massive ecosystems. The trees communicate with each other. I’m using that phrase loosely, but they do things to the soil around them that do things so that other trees know that there is fire coming.
That one tree is going to outlive you, and that one tree is going to do wonderful things for whoever finds shade or beauty in its presence. It’s also going to be part of a larger thing that you can’t even fully comprehend unless you’re an environmental scientist perhaps. You can’t even fully comprehend that that one act of generosity is going to be so much bigger than you realize. It’s incredibly powerful.
It’s so easy for us to get stuck in the negativity of the world. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t also fight the battles and that we need to be fighting for justice, kindness, and all the things that need to be fixed, but there is so much good. Putting generosity into that has a huge amplifying effect. I love the notion that you have a powerful connection that you can access your spiritual self, your inner self, and your future self better and faster when you’re in the presence of that tree.
When they’re with me in the desert, we go visit the tree and I introduce them. This is as woo-woo as I get. We’re going to answer some questions and observations here. The world doesn’t get to tell you what to do with your time, money, and your energy. You get to decide. If you want to support your animal shelter, then you should support your animal shelter. If you want to help people on the other side of the world and dig wells, then you should do that.
There is no right or wrong here. No one gets to tell you what to do. This conversation is meant to be generative in that sense. Everybody wants to tell you how to behave. What they are really doing is telling you how they think they should behave. If you behave like they do, then they can feel good about the way that they’re behaving. I’ll have none of that.
The way you have been through your show coaching solos to have the tools they need to respond to those criticisms and those instructions that we get constantly is the same concept. I have a language when I go to a work gathering and I meet someone and they ask me right away whether I am married or I have children. I have language for that.
Deciding how you want to leave a legacy is exactly the same toolkit for a different scenario. You don’t feel as judged because you know you figured out what’s best for you. Who cares what your neighbor, someone at your church or synagogue, your parents, or anybody else thinks? You figured out what kind of generosity and what kind of legacy is meaningful to you. That’s all that matters.
Listener Comments
I 100% agree. That’s better said than I said it. What I often say is you flip it and imagine telling this person what they should be doing with their time and money and how horrified they would be if you were to do that to them. I get that. I told the audience that I was going to be talking about this topic. Some of them are comments and some of them are questions. I invite you to respond if there’s something that comes to mind.
If someone in the solo community wants to see a picture of my tree friend, remind me on the solo community. Send me a note and I’ll post a picture of my tree friend so people can get a sense of my magnificent friend. Let’s read a few of these. Someone said, “Great topic. I look forward to hearing this episode as this very much matters to me. For now, I plan to donate my assets mostly to my close friends and some family members. One difficulty with this is that some financial institutions like AmEx Savings require you to have the beneficiary’s Social Security number to designate them. As a backup, I plan to donate to charities I care about.” That was one reaction that I had.
It’s an interesting thing to mention. You could work with an attorney to develop an actual will if you provide identifying information that is not a Social Security number but something that could be helpful in supporting you’ve got the right person. They want to make sure they have the right Peter McGraw. That would probably be sufficient for most cases.
Here’s another one. Someone said, “This year, I had a will created with legal assistance. I’ve listed family, friends, and a couple of ministries as beneficiaries. My clothing, shoes, and accessories will be donated to the ministry that helps women experiencing various difficulties get back on track.” That’s lovely and very thoughtful. Here is another one. They said, “I drive a stick shift. My two grandkids and my daughter don’t. I will be leaving my adorable little car to NPR/WLRN radio. They sell the cars at auction and proceeds go to public radio stations of your choice. Let’s keep public radio alive.”
Both of those last two examples are good reminders that your physical assets have to be distributed. Someone has to get rid of your books and your art. Nobody wants your books, Professor McGraw. I’m sorry to tell you. No library wants them.
Trust me. I know.
It is helpful to have a plan. I talked to my nieces about two of the major assets I have. One is the piano and the other is my grandmother’s engagement ring. I wanted them to know that they were each getting one thing and that they could have it sooner if they needed it sooner. It’s helpful to decide what you want to do with those physical things and who is going to do that for you because you won’t be around to donate your books or your clothing. Those are good things to remember.
If there’s anybody in the community who’s 6’5” and about 200 pounds, I’ve got a lot of clothes that might fit you. Otherwise, I don’t know who’s going to fit in those clothes.
There are a lot of organizations that help people do job interviews. They give people clothes. You are a dapper dresser, I understand. There’s an organization probably in Boulder that would help people get set up for job interviews.
That’s a great idea. This is a good segue. This person writes, “I haven’t thought much about it, but I would donate some part to charity. I don’t have any nephews or nieces, so nothing to be going there.” This happens a lot. I have nephews and nieces. I have some decisions to make about what they get when they get it, and so on.
This person says, “One thing I would be making sure of is sharing all the details of assets with someone trustworthy, writing a will, and also sharing email, passwords, and where the documents are stored. In case of my sudden death, my legal heir shouldn’t be running around places. They should know what I own.”
I’m going to tee this up. I have a very good friend. He’s an ally. He tunes in to the show. He has this life document that we’re going to do an episode on. It’s a document that takes you through all these things so the person who’s responsible for your stuff, your executor, your team, or whatever knows that you have money in this account. They know that you want this stuff to go to these places, and so on. That’s coming later in this series.
It’s a good reminder because people think that it’s only the wealthy who have complicated estates. My godmother, who was a middle school English teacher, had seventeen different retirement accounts, bank accounts, and savings accounts. She had seventeen different things we had to deal with. When she died, my brother and I were her godchildren and she had no children of her own. It’s easy to accumulate over a lifetime a lot of different little things. It’s very helpful for your friends who are going to be taking care of this for you as a solo to have all that down in one place. That’s so true.
You need the right person to clear your browser history and wipe some hard drives perhaps.
That’s true.
I want to end with some alternative perspectives if we can. I get a lot of private messages. This is a member of the community, and I’m paraphrasing her thoughts, has been rethinking legacy in financial planning. She read the book Die With Zero, which is a book that I’ve read. It’s a book that’s designed to combat that scarcity mindset.
Oftentimes, the person who does a good job of saving does a terrible job of spending. They keep living frugally late into their lives and then they die with all this money in their bank account, so to speak. That is fine if you haven’t felt like you needed it, but there are those people who can’t bring themselves to spend an extra dollar. They can’t bring themselves to upgrade themselves on a flight or to get a nicer hotel room because the skill that got them there is a skill they can’t undo.
She suggested this idea with the goal perhaps of dying with zero, which is the day you die is the day your bank account goes to zero, to focus on creating meaningful experiences and memories while alive. It’s balancing preparing for a future while also being able to live in the present. Her mother has this wonderful philosophy of giving with a warm hand, not a cold one, which is so wonderful, and to seek how you create an impact now versus some impact later that people can enjoy with you. You’ve already alluded to this. Maybe you should take your friends on that vacation now rather than them doing it while you’re dead.
For me, as a solo, the fear of having my nieces be the ones to take care of me is so strong that I want to have enough. If I live long enough that I need a high level and very expensive level of care, that burden will not be on anyone in my life. You can’t count on your children to do that anyway, but people do count on their children.
How much better to spend that money on sending them on great vacations or going with them on great vacations while we’re all young enough and healthy enough to travel? You have to make plans. I’m looking forward to your other episodes because I have some work to do along those lines to figure out that part. I do like the idea of spreading it while you’re living so you get to see the joy that you’re giving to other people. It is quite wonderful.
Episode Wrap-Up
It’s a nice shift. What we’ve been talking about all along is these two time periods, while you’re alive and while you’re not alive. We’ve been talking about how you maximize the joy, the warmth, and the ability to make things right while you’re alive but then also to consider how this may play forward in a time that you’re not regardless of what your religious or spiritual perspectives are. Do you have any closing thoughts? For the person who feels a little bit overwhelmed by this because there’s a lot to do, I have a two-part question. Do you have any closing thoughts? What would you say should be the first step for someone who has tuned in to this and wants to proceed?
You talk a lot about having team members. You have a team member who helps you with money. You have a team member who helps you with other parts of your life. The first step is to figure out who your team members might be. This goes with my closing thought, which is this is hard stuff. It’s mortality. If you haven’t figured out what your belief is, it is scary stuff. The final thought is if you touch it and you don’t feel ready, that’s okay too. Sometimes, you have to sit with it for a while because it is your mortality. These are big concepts and they can be hard to wrestle with. That’s okay. It’s fine for it to take a while.
I have worked with donors over the years and years while they have figured this stuff out. They’re telling me more than they’re telling anyone in their life. They’re trying to figure out what legacies to leave to their children. They’re like, “Do we give the child who became a teacher more money than the child who became a stockbroker?” They’re wrestling with huge issues and they’re the only people who can make those decisions. Be gentle with yourself. Be kind to yourself. We’ve talked a lot like it’s a set of to-do items on a list that you have to do, and it is, but it is also deeply personal work. Take your time, be gentle, and be kind to yourself.
That’s wonderful. It’s almost like you have to develop a philosophy before you can get into the tactics. It’s your own personal philosophy. This is the burden of being solo. It’s quite liberating, but suddenly, you have lots of choices.
Ultimate freedom comes with a tremendous responsibility. It’s so true.
Shelby, I appreciate you pitching this idea to me. It was a blind spot as I was approaching the series. I’m enjoying the series. I’m learning a lot. It’s valuable to get a conversation going about these concepts in general. Our culture tends to be pretty bad at talking about aging, money, and these kinds of things. Singles have some unique needs. As imperfect as the series is and we’re stumbling along here a little bit, it is a good starting point. I appreciate you reaching out. It’s always so wonderful to hear about people who come to the movement by way of the people who love them. It warms my heart to be able to do this.
I thank you for everything that you’re doing. I have talked incessantly about your show to anyone who will listen, including all of my coupled people who have the chance to become allies. It has been a great touchstone for me. I am incredibly thankful that you are putting your energy and leaving this legacy for all of us and all of the others who will follow us. I don’t have to explain it. I can say, “You have to tune in to this show.” It’s fantastic.
I may call you again.
I would be delighted to participate.
That’s wonderful. Thank you for your time.
It’s great to see you. Thank you, Peter.
Cheers.
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About Shelby Radcliffe
Shelby Radcliffe is the Vice President of Advancement (which means alumni relations and fundraising) at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. During her tenure, engagement of alumni, parents, and friends has reached an all time high, from event participation to volunteering.
In addition, the Willamette Annual Fund has more than doubled and major and planned gifts growth has led to two record years of giving and the conclusion of the largest fundraising campaign in the University’s history ($160M against a $150M goal).
In addition to her work, Shelby serves on the board of the Marion-Polk Foodshare (food pantries and meals-on-wheels programs in the Willamette Valley) and loves living her “solo life with dog” (Opal) in one of the most beautiful places in the world.