#191 The Benefits of Living a Generous Life

Hey, everyone. Hope you've had another great week. At the time I'm recording this, it is the season. It's a season of giving and season of generosity. And so I thought this week we would talk about this topic. It's not a topic that's always been easy for me. And so I'm going to talk about my struggles and my challenges with generosity, how I now see it as a tool, a powerful tool for anybody, not just myself, and then how I've integrated it into my life and my business so that it really benefits myself and everybody around me. So we talk about those things today. So stick around. Enjoy. Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe. Now, let's get on with the show. Now, when it comes to giving as a lifestyle, we've all heard about it, we hear examples of it. Many of us try to integrate it into our own lives. We try to teach it to our children, and we want to be seen as generous as possible. And I know during this season we. We all get hit up for so many different groups and opportunities to give. Now, it's always a challenge because we always want to be seen as giving and good, generous people. I mean, of course, when you go up to buy any sort of thing these days at any sort of store, restaurant, you get hit up with that little automatic charge or tip. You know, none of us want to be seen as cheap, so we probably click a button sometimes out of guilt. Right? I don't know if you feel like that, but I do sometimes, especially if somebody's watching me and it's awkward when you're doing it right in front of somebody, so you don't be seen as cheap. And I've always personally struggled with that because I feel like I'm a generous person and I want to be giving and generous, but at the same time, I want to make sure that I'm secure, my family secure, especially when it comes to money. So how do you marry those things and make sure it all works out? I remember that I would always have that attitude where I would say, if, when I have more money, when I have more things, I'll give more and I'll be more generous. And I use it as an excuse not to give or to give very, very little, only that which was left over maybe at the end of the day, whatever's the change in my pocket, whatever it might, and I have to believe that a lot of that is normal. That's a normal survival mechanism. It's this mindset, honestly, of scarcity, meaning that there's only limited amount of resources out there for myself, limited number, amount of money that I can make. And so I want to make sure when I have all these plans for myself and providing security for my family, I want to make sure I have enough first, then I can contribute and feel more free and generous to give to others. But then I started surrounding myself, and this wasn't super intentional, but surrounding myself with a community of people that were a lot more giving, they were a lot more generous and it didn't matter how much money they had. And it's not like the people that would have the most money would give the most. It just seemed like a lifestyle for a lot of people. And so I started reading more about it, trying to understand this concept of contribution and generosity and how it might impact my life. So I remember reading somewhere and I dug this up for, for this podcast that there are five research backed benefits of giving and being generous. Number one, it makes us healthy. Literally. This study found that generosity actually reduced blood pressure as much as some of the medications we take as exercise. It also reduced the risk of dementia, reduced anxiety, depression, chronic pain, all of these things. By being a lot more generous in our lives, it also makes us more happy. It gives us some sort of emotional boost. Like, why is that? Because all of us have been there. When we get a gift, how long are we happy for with that gift? Meaning it might be just a few hours, maybe something bigger. It might last a few days. Rarely does it last a few weeks or years, that same level of happiness. But when we tend to give to someone, whether it's a gift to our loved ones, give to someone, anonymously, give to somebody, that feeling of feeling good about yourself, it lasts for quite a while. It gets locked into our neurochemistry. It triggers tons of amazing endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin, all of these things. It doesn't matter what your background is, where you're from. Giving and serving and doing others apparently does these things that triggers long lasting effects. Not that huge boost and then that drop whenever we get something. But when we give something, it completely changes our emotional well being. Number three, it lowers our stress. When we give less than we feel like we should be giving. There's this weird feeling of like stress. This feeling, why am I not more generous? I don't know if you felt like that. I have. And we start to question ourselves and there's like this internal battle and conflict that does cause stress. Where on the other side, if we're being generous, meaning that we give freely and we give more than we want, then it just releases us of all that. I mean, in fact, in some ways it heals us more than heals the other person. Next, it improves our relationships. I'm probably not the first one to tell you when you're generous to your loved one or partner, it creates better feelings and a better relationship with your loved ones. And when everybody's doing that for each other, I mean, that's when magic happens, when everyone's trying to do more for the other person than they're going to get for themselves. We all know that improves our relationships, whether it's with our loved one, our partner, our family, our kids, or anybody else in the world, even those people in our workplace. And the last thing, this is really important. Generosity extends our lives. I mean, it does add to our life expectancy. There were studies shown for people that donate their time and their money. They've done these studies that show that it can ultimately impact your life expectancy. I think it has a lot to do with the stress, that feeling of abundance, all of these things and the actions that we tend to take. It all adds up. There's not just one thing, but it shows that it can be a factor, at least one big factor, in extending our lives and actually making for happier, healthier lives overall. So I remember I began to see generosity as a tool. And then when I teamed up with my CPA and with people in the community, I found out there are actually monetary benefits to giving. And that actually helped smooth things over and made it easier for me. For many of us, we know that a lot of times the giving that we do, when we do it very intentionally, there's a tax deduction that is part of it, meaning that you can either give that money as taxes to the government, where you don't know how it's going to be spent. Many of us probably feel like we're paying too much in taxes. Then we can direct where that money goes, what. What it's used for. Not only we can use that money to try to create better outcomes in this world for whatever that's important, you know, whatever's important to you in terms of your passion. But the government also, in terms of the tax code, gives us a deduction to be able to do that. So it felt like a trade off for me. Either I pay the government in a lot of ways, or I pay towards a cause that I'M really passionate about. So that became an easy choice. And then I found out about something called a donor advised fund. I don't know if you've heard of this before, but you can go ahead and Google and search this. I'm not going to talk all about it. It's a way to take some of your appreciated assets like stocks or bonds. Again, at the time recording this, the Dow is at an all time high. If you've had a nice run with some of your stocks and bonds that are in these taxable accounts, you can donate that to what's called a donor advised fund and then take the full tax deduction. You don't even have to make all of the donations right at that moment. You can decide when you want to do that. But if you feel like your stocks have appreciated a ton during that time, you can take that max deduction. And I'll give you an example of this. Let's say you bought $100 of a certain stock and it appreciated to $1,000. Maybe it act 10x. Let's just say, for example, if you sold that stock at $1,000, you'd have to pay taxes on the capital gains or the profit that you got from the original amount that you put in, even though you have to pay taxes on it. That's a big win for many of us. If you know you want to give a certain amount, especially every year, whatever amount it could be, when that Stock appreciates to $1,000, you could move that into a donor advised fund, which means that you're basically earmarking that for some sort of charitable donation. The year you make that contribution, you take that entire thousand dollars as a tax deduction. So even though you only invested 100, you're able to take a thousand dollar tax deduction that year. You earmark it for a charity of your choice, but you get to decide once it's in the donor advised fund how you want to distribute those funds. You can decide when to do it, you can decide how much, and it can be a powerful tool for budgeting your charitable donation. If you feel like your portfolio has appreciated and you're worried that the price or the the amount will go down, you might want to move some over to this donor advised fund. Even if the value of that amount goes down over time, it matters what the value was at the time you donated. So you essentially lock that amount in. So after surrounding myself with people who are generous, that motivated me once I found the research behind how powerful it can be from a very specific standpoint in terms of improving my life. That only helped knowing that there's a financial benefit that also stacked up to help me as well. And so it became a matter of how was I going to do that and build that as a habit in my life. So it's kind of like investing. Many of us feel like as we make more money, we'll invest more. But what happens naturally is that our lifestyle increases with the amount that we make. And so we still don't have a lot of money left over to invest. So what many financial experts will suggest is that you put that money aside first, that you know that you want to invest that way. It's a non negotiable. It can help build your financial future so you don't have a chance to have your lifestyle eat that amount. You pay yourself first. So to put systems in my life to make it easier from a practical standpoint, I do the same with my giving, meaning that I have a certain amount that I will invest, I have a certain amount that I will give and then I live off the rest of that income. So there's no question whether I'll have enough money at the end of the day to be able to pay for the other things. That scarcity mindset, am I able to get past that? And then once I've set my investing and my giving, it feels like I have enough to live on. In fact, I can continue to grow that part of the pie as well. So to also ingrain that into what I do, many of the businesses that I have, I've decided that that is part of the business plan as well. Many of you probably know Tom's Shoes and I was fascinated by their business plan where they would give a shoe or give a pair of shoes for every shoe that was bought. And I remember reading Blake Mycosky's book about building giving into your business, how it can be a financial benefit to your business, but also create that generosity at the same time. It's like a win win. And so that's what I've done with a lot of my businesses as well. Many of you know I have a real estate business called Curbside Real Estate where we help physicians buy their primary homes. We connect them to great agents and lenders all over the country. No matter where they want to find a house, we have a great resource for them and we do that all for free and provide advice and counseling and whatever it might be. When I started that business again, I was so inspired by this. I said that for every house that was bought, we Were going to contribute a large portion of the profits to helping others who need a home. So I'm really proud to say over the last five, six years we've been running this business. We've built several orphanages overseas. We've also built a bunch of 3D printed rented homes in in Central America. It's just something that's baked into our business plan and something that makes me feel good about running the business and keeps me motivated to do more. Also with Passive Income MD this podcast that you're listening to this business, we also contribute a large portion of our funds to Feeding America. When we have our events and people show up based on the head count, we donate based on that. And at this point, we've donated hundreds of thousands of meals. And again, that's not to toot our own horn. It's just to say that this is something that we've had as a challenge and to ourselves is something that I've struggled with personally, but we built it into our business system. So that's not even a question. And I've thought about it. How do I teach my kids this concept of generosity when they basically live so comfortably, they have basically everything they want in life? I don't want them to grow up completely entitled, like everything is provided for them. I want them to have that heart of generosity. And so we built in systems like that save, spend and give type system you might have heard about with the three jars. Whenever they get money, they could put part of it aside to save part of it that they can spend. And they usually spend on some sort of video games these days. And then they also allocate some of that to give to other people. I mean, I've learned that this whole generosity thing has to become a practice in my own life, otherwise I get in that habit of spending and then what's left over if there's any. Then we give and be generous. So especially during this time of the holidays and when we focus on gratitude and generosity, this has been what's on my mind in terms of my journey with all of this. I've been inspired by so many of you who've shared stories of how you've been built generosity into your own lives. So thank you for that. Our community is amazing. I hope you've gotten some value from this and if you have and if you can share this podcast with one person, mean a lot to us. Any case, take care, have a great holidays and let's talk again soon. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us at. And if you haven't already, be sure to hit subscribe. Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. Learn more at our website, passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.