How three questions turned $300K into $6.6M...

How many of you have ever felt like giving was for ‘someone else’—for people with more time, more money, or more experience? Working with clients who don't fit into the traditional "philanthropist" model (read: not literal billionaires), this mindset comes up a LOT.

But here's the funny thing... for many of us it's completely in our heads. Implicitly, we know this too, because we feel there's more we could be doing, but life in 2024 is one of seemingly-infinite things to juggle in our busy lives.

Traditional wealth management preaches "growth for growth's sake"... and all the metrics of what "success" means are tied to one single number: your net worth. Anything that makes that number go down - even in the short term - has such a negative connotation that it can actually cause physiological responses of fight-or-flight.

Think of it this way: have you ever lost sleep over what the market was doing? (or perceived to be doing... or perhaps may do one day?)

We call that a scarcity mindset. While I've waxed poetic about that in the past, let's put a face to that story - specifically a client of mine, Matt, who was able to conquer that scarcity and not only become more generous to himself, but to the people he loves, AND to his community in a major way.

Meet Matt: Young Executive, "big" dreams.

When Matt and I first met his goal was singular and focused: buy a condo in Toronto.

A fantastic goal for a young executive - and one that we managed to create a plan and put in motion with some automated savings in about a week. For the next couple of years we doubled his net worth, but things still felt very much stuck in this reactionary cycle. The line just went up but all of our conversations were around the line going up further... there had to be something bigger for Matt, right?

I had started to realize that I was part of the problem. Re-enforcing that same model of "greed is good" mindset without even realizing it. My own scarcity mindset was keeping me from "pushing" - leave the bigger dreams to the Ultra-High-Net-Worth, we need to wait until Matt has "made it" it told me.

Frankly, that scarcity voice in my head was full of shit... and once I realized that in my own life I knew I had a duty to help clients like Matt break theirs.

Great challenge for me, don't you think?

The Three Questions that broke Matt's Scarcity Mindset

The cracks started to form in Matt's scarcity mindset when we walked him through our Strategic Generosity Blueprint and focused on the 3-Key Questions: How can you be more generous to yourself? To the people you love? To your community?

That conversation was one of the deepest and longest we'd ever had in our relationship and I learned a ton of things about Matt. First, I learned that the condo goal he had really wasn't his dream... his dream was a house and he had assumed that a condo was the best he could hope for.

(Isn't it funny how scarcity tries to keep us down?)

How can you be more generous to yourself? To the people you love? To your community?

I also learned that to be generous to his family he wanted to give them the one resource he could never find enough of: time. With everyone scattered across the country and Matt in Toronto with his busy life, it was hard to make it back home where his heart was.

Lastly, while I knew he gave back and was a fairly prolific fundraiser, I learned that his community wasn't just a special cause for him, but it was a shared cause for his whole family - all in memory of his late father who had passed away some years ago.

There we go, we had our compass pointing us in the right direction of generosity and values... but what was the map?

The Donor-Advised Fund solves both problems.

The strategy that ended up changing the game completely for Matt was when I introduced the idea of setting up a Donor-Advised Fund in the name of his family. What is this? Think of it kind of like an investment account smashed together with a giving fund: money goes in (from Matt, his family, or anyone really who wants to help), grows with an investment fund, and is granted out to his family's favourite causes along the way.

What we'd help him do was not just set it up and administer it, but also help him and his family run an annual "DAF Day" (thanks to Mitch Stein for that movement, which we're now weaving into client's lives) to see the impact of the previous year's grants, and decide where next year's grants will go.

...but the thing is, this is really only a half-truth. Because on the surface this was a financial review for the DAF... but really? This was a family reunion in disguise.

What a wonderful way to come together and spend more time, the family that DAFs together... laughs together? (Still workshopping that, but you get the point)

The Strategic Generosity snowballed from there and impact started to pop-up left, right, and centre. If we fund the DAF through some securities we can actually make it more tax-efficient. If we put through a legacy gift in this insurance policy we can leave a massive gift for the next generation. And if we replace your giving from your personal pocket to the DAF's gifting budget? That's more money back to go on vacation.

When the dust cleared in our workshop of generosity this is what the plan looked like:

1. The condo goal was modified into a house goal, budget increased and everything set to be purchased before Matt's 30th birthday.
2. Time set aside to spend quality and shared time with family, more often, and over a shared purpose in memory of his father.
3. His lifetime impact to the community - which was estimated at $300K before our planning - increased to $2M during his life... and $6.6M with an estate gift.

Matt's now a powerhouse of personal, family, and community generosity - and on the path to do everything he's ever dreamed of and more.

Scarcity didn't stand a chance.

The Strategic Generosity Blueprint.

The traditional models of wealth management make it very hard, if not impossible, to create positive outcomes that don't result in hoarding of wealth. But ultimately, wealth should be an active tool, because it's entirely useless to us, the people we love, and our communities if it stays nothing but a "net worth" metric.

That's why I developed the Strategic Generosity Blueprint, as a way of helping people use their values as a compass, strategic planning as our map, and generosity as the wind in our sails.

...but this isn't just for Matt, and today I'm announcing that I will be opening up 4 spaces for new clients to go through the Strategic Generosity Blueprint starting in Q1 of 2025. If you're intrigued about getting answers to the same three questions I asked Matt and how to turn your wealth into your own active tool to destroy scarcity and move into abundance, you can book a consultation here.

In community,

Adam Malcolm - MFA-P, CFP, RIS