Finding Your Purpose – A Retiree’s Guide to Meaningful Giving

Retirement is less about slowing down and more about redirecting energy. As you venture into retirement, take a moment to reflect on your career's various chapters, recognizing how those past successes and struggles provided the insights that define you now. Without a daily job or business to head to, what to do with your time, energy, and mind? What makes you happy, fills your soul, and gives you a sense of purpose? How do you take the wisdom built during decades of work and direct it toward a worthy cause?

Although practical financial matters like how to afford charitable giving during your retirement years clearly matters, this article will focus on bigger thoughts. Is devoting your energy toward charity important to you … Or not? How to decide if charity is your next chapter is what this article will focus on.

Many charities to choose from.

The Personal Benefits of Giving

For a retired person, charitable involvement can:

-Replace Career Identity: A lifetime of work/career structure can lead to a “purpose void”. Charitable involvement can help you build a new identity and relevance based on meaning rather than just actions.

-Validate Life Wisdom: You can showcase that the intellectual capital built over a career has value in helping a nonprofit manage its communication, operational, and financial needs.

-Avoid Isolation: Leaving the working world can reduce the social circles we once had. Being involved with a charity can provide a built-in social network of like-minded persons.

Time, Talent and Treasure

Turning past career success into charitable significance requires a personal inventory of the following:

• Time: How do you want to spend your time? Is providing it to helping a nonprofit in any capacity a worthwhile use of the minutes and hours in your day?

• Talent: Your career has provided you with a toolbox of skills, traits, and experiences that helped you accomplish what your employer or business needed to grow revenue and serve customers. How can that same toolbox be put to good use in serving a nonprofit and their mission?

• Treasure: Nonprofits need money. From paying rent, employee wages, utilities, items needed to serve their cause & constituents, etc. … Charities are like businesses. The actions they undertake create expenses, and those bills need to be paid. What can you afford? What role do you want your dollars to play: ongoing gifts or specific campaigns that benefit from lump-sum gifts?

What is Your Passion & Purpose?

What has been in your own life story? Reflection on that can lead to thoughts about:

-Your Career: What profession or industry did you work in? What problems did you see? Are there charities that exist that attempt to solve the issues you saw in the workplace?

-Your Past Pain: Have you or loved ones ever been affected by misfortune? What disease, disaster, social harm or injustice caused that harm? How can you help a charity that fights that adversity?

-Your Childhood: What were your parents involved with when you were a child?  What did they do … Donate time, donate money or both? Is what was important to them still important to you?

Understanding your scope and depth of interest play a role as well. If you focus your charitable efforts on local causes, you may enjoy seeing your tangible efforts take hold. Or do you rather focus on big, global concerns that require a long-term vision because you regard them as more deserving and important than smaller, local issues?

Putting Purpose into Practice

There are a variety of ways to see how your involvement in a cause can use the gifts that you have and determine if that charity is something that you enjoy being involved with. They include:

• Pro-Bono Work: Provide your professional experience at no cost to charities that may not be able to afford to bring an employee on staff.

• Board Service: Join the board of a nonprofit to provide high-level strategic guidance.

• Mentorship: Guide younger persons within your past profession or cause to help them gain from your experience and insight.

• Hands-on Volunteering: Provide your physical labor and donated time to better understand the charity, the needs they solve, the work that needs done, and the people they serve.

• Advocacy: Encourage and persuade others of the value of the cause you represent. This allows you to reach out across your social circle and the broader community to explain why you value this nonprofit and why they deserve support.

Next Steps

The article is filled with questions that only you as a retiree can answer. Understanding what charitable causes( if any) deserve your support and how you want to be involved is an undertaking that requires thoughtfulness. Other thoughts on how to provide financial gifts and complex strategies involving donor advised funds, QCDs, trusts and so much more requires an expert to provide the guidance you need.

At Generosity Nexus, we have the insights to help you answer the big questions regarding what role do you want to play in charitable good and the practical matters on how to afford the giving you may want to make.

Don’t hesitate to schedule an appointment to learn more about how we can help you.