What do you and I stand for? What are our core values and deepest characteristics?
If we were to honestly jot down traits to describe our values, would we be embarrassed to read negative words like greed, selfishness, hypocrisy, racism, entitlement and arrogance?
Or would we be pleased that our list contains positive attributes like love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, inclusiveness, perseverance, fitness, fairness and kindness?
Or might we simply acknowledge our commitment to neutral values like wealth, ambition and focus? In truth, most of us exhibit most of those negative, positive and neutral traits some time or other. None of us is a complete sinner or a total saint.
We aren’t as bad as we fear nor are we as good as we aspire to be, which incidentally is what fuels the entire self-help industry, the financial planning profession, and the D-I-Y personal finance movement.
You might like to know that every three to five years I revisit my list of the five or six top core values I care about and wish to embed within my maturing character. Each time I do so proves to be a private journey.
Nonetheless, it makes sense for me to share one, two or three of my topmost values in this interesting age of ours where ubiquitous hashtags (consider #kindness) on social media might take on meme status and then virally sweep the globe.
CHECK LIST
In various iterations of my own list of the top values I wish to inculcate, these three always appear: kindness, generosity and wealth. Today I want to focus on kindness, specifically on how each of us might exhibit true kindness NOT for some hoped for reward later in life or even in the afterlife but because it’s a beneficial way to live and an effective means of leaving our world in better shape than we found it.
How might we exhibit true kindness? Actually, you already know how to do so.
You know how to smile at a stranger having a bad day, you know how to pick up a crying toddler who’s fallen down and scraped her knee, and you know how to marshal your resources to contribute to charities that make our world a better place.
I can’t teach you to smile more genuinely so the love in your soul shines through. Probably, though, as in most things in life, practice makes perfect. I can teach you how to channel your material resources more effectively so you grow more effective at exhibiting tangible kindness even as you grow in wealth.
I believe personal involvement in social works, plus targeted donations to well-chosen charities are wonderful ways of extending kindness to others. Jewish rabbis wrote in their ancient Talmud more than 1500 years ago that: “Deeds of kindness are equal in weight to all the commandments.”
KINDNESS BEGETS KINDNESS
Giving to charities that channel all or most of their resources to the target groups that they have been set up to help is a potent way for us to extend tangible kindness.
However, most of us aren’t magnificently wealthy. So we need to manage our money well — meaning strategically — to extend our reach and achieve our goals, including, perhaps, being kind and growing kinder each day.
Eric Hoffer was an American philosopher who died on May 21, 1983, a day before my 19th birthday. He wrote: “Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.”
Hoffer’s description parallels an old Swedish saying: “Kindness begets kindness.” Both Hoffer and hordes of old time Swedes recognised that kindness is like a muscle. If we keep flexing our metaphoric kindness ‘muscle’, even if at the start we fail more often than we succeed — especially when we’re enraged, frustrated, stressed, ill, impatient or hungry — we will grow kinder. If enough of us do so, then our family, community, country and world will get better.
Even through the narrow lens of financial planning, the way to grow kinder through greater generosity is to prioritise the allocation of every RM that flows into our lives into four tiers (you may tweak these if they don’t mirror your priorities but I suggest you try out my way first):
TIER 1: Give to God — fulfil your religious obligations;
TIER 2: Save and invest — we can’t give money away tomorrow if we spend all of it today;
TIER 3: Exercise kindness through charitable giving;
TIER 4: Live on the money that is left.
You should tweak your percentage ratios in TIERs 1, 2 and 3 so that you are able live on the percentage of your income left to flow into TIER 4.
What I believe you will discover over time is that kindness is its own reward. A key principle I have learnt through observing my own life and the lives of my best clients who follow my 4-tiered cash flow allocation model is that ‘money saved acts as a magnet for money earned’.
When that principle works, more money flows into our lives, sometimes from unexpected sources, and that surging river of passive income will make it far easier for us exhibit tangible kindness to others.
© 2019 Rajen Devadason
Rajen Devadason, CFP, is a Licensed Financial Planner, professional speaker and author. Read his free articles at www.FreeCoolArticles.com; he may be connected with on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/rajendevadason, or via rajen@RajenDevadason.com You may follow him on Twitter @RajenDevadason.