‘Money can make you happy’: My wife and I have no heirs, but we’re making the world a better place by giving it away
People love to insist that money can’t buy happiness. My wife and I have discovered a more complicated truth: money can make you happy when you use it to improve someone else’s life. We don’t have children, and for a long time we assumed that meant our savings would eventually trickle to distant relatives, or languish in carefully labeled accounts. Then, a few years ago, we sat at our dining table with a stack of estate documents and realized we were hoarding a future we didn’t actually want. We had enough. The question was what to do with the rest.
The answer—give it away, thoughtfully and while we’re still around to see the results—has changed everything.
When you don’t have heirs, your relationship to money shifts subtly but profoundly. It stops being a baton to pass down and starts becoming a tool to build the world you want to inhabit. For years, we saved the way you’re supposed to: retirement accounts, an emergency fund, a filtered sense of scarcity that insisted anything fun was probably irresponsible. We came from middle-class families who stretched every dollar; frugality was its own kind of achievement. Then the pandemic forced everyone to look more closely at need. We found ourselves asking, in middle age: why are we waiting?
There’s research to back what we felt instinctively. Studies have shown that spending on others—“prosocial spending”—boosts well-being more reliably than spending on ourselves. But we didn’t need a journal article to tell us what we felt the first time we funded a laptop drive at a neighborhood school. The principal sent a photo of kids grinning behind their screens, and I felt an electric combination of joy and relief: this is what the money is for.
Once we decided to give while living, we approached it the way we once approached saving: with a simple plan and the humility to adjust. We created a giving portfolio, not because generosity needs spreadsheets, but because clarity protects intention. Ours has three buckets.
The first bucket is neighbors. It’s our food pantry, the immigrant legal aid group down the street, the community health clinic where volunteers know patients by name. This bucket is about proximity and trust: we ask what they actually need and give unrestricted funds so they can focus on the mission, not on appeasing us.
The second bucket is upstream. It includes organizations that work on policy and prevention—clean air initiatives, criminal justice reform, maternal health. These aren’t always as instantly gratifying as a new roof for the shelter, but they change the conditions that create emergencies in the first place.
The third bucket is forever. This includes endowments and land trusts, places we hope will outlast us. We’ve made bequests to our public library and local arts organizations in our will, and set up a donor-advised fund to keep things going if there’s money left when we’re gone. If there isn’t—good. That means we put it to work.
We’ve learned a few practical lessons that also happen to make giving more joyful.
First, give before you’re asked, and give without strings. There is a strong temptation to fund projects with our name on a plaque. We’ve sponsored those, and they’re fine. But the happiest checks we write are the quiet ones that pay for rent, salaries, and tires for the van that picks up donations. That’s how work gets done.
Second, give consistently. We set a percentage of our income and commit to multi-year support where we can. It gives organizations stability and turns generosity into a practice rather than a performance.
Third, give some power away. We started by deciding everything ourselves. Then we tried something different: we asked a few groups we trust to recommend other nonprofits doing great work. We made grants we never would have found on our own. It felt less like directing and more like participating.
Fourth, don’t confuse scrutiny with impact. We used to demand detailed logic models before opening our wallets. Now we ask simpler questions: Are you trusted by the people you serve? Do you treat staff well? If we disappeared tomorrow, would your work keep going? Impact matters; so does humility about how complex change actually happens.
Along the way, we’ve made mistakes. We funded a program that sounded brilliant but fell apart under the weight of reporting requirements we partly imposed. We gave too little to an organization we loved because we were overly cautious about “sustainability,” as if hunger respects balanced budgets. Most of our missteps share a theme: we centered our anxieties rather than the work. The fix wasn’t to stop giving; it was to give differently.
We also confronted the uncomfortable politics of wealth. Big-ticket philanthropy can distort priorities and replace public systems with the whims of the well-off. We’re not tycoons, but that critique still applies. Our response is threefold. We pay our taxes without looking for exotic shelters. We support groups that organize and advocate, not just those that fill gaps. And we prioritize organizations led by the people most affected by the issues they address. Money should be a lever, not a spotlight.
What does happiness look like in practice? It looks like a scholarship recipient’s handwritten note and the photo, two years later, of her in a lab coat. It looks like the food pantry moving to a bigger space because someone finally funded a forklift instead of a ribbon-cutting. It looks like sitting quietly in the back of a poetry reading at the library you helped keep open on weekends. It’s not adrenaline. It’s alignment—the feeling that your values and your calendar and your bank account are telling the same story.
We’ve also found that giving eases fears about aging. It’s counterintuitive: shouldn’t we be stockpiling for medical unknowns? We’ve run the numbers conservatively. We keep a sensible cushion. But beyond that, giving now has made us less afraid of later. It embeds us in a web of relationships—not transactional, but real. Volunteers become friends. Executive directors call just to say hello. Gratitude runs both ways. The future feels less lonely when you help build it.
People ask how to start, especially other couples without heirs. A few simple steps helped us:
– Decide your “enough” number. Once you know what you truly need and want, you can name the surplus and dedicate it with intention.
– Automate a portion. Recurring donations reduce decision fatigue and help organizations plan. Save some discretionary giving for surprises and emergencies.
– Give appreciated assets when possible. Donating stock or using retirement distributions directly to charities can be tax-efficient and can increase what you’re able to give.
– Keep the burden low. Favor unrestricted gifts and light reporting. Trust your grantees until you have a reason not to.
– Balance near and far. Mix local relationships with systemic work that tackles root causes.
– Involve each other. We rotate a “veto-free” gift each year: one cause each, no questions asked. It keeps the joy personal.
We still buy nice things. We travel. We eat well. But the marginal delight of a new gadget fades fast; the lift from a good grant seems to compound. The day we funded a mobile dental clinic, my wife cried in the car and then laughed at herself. “I didn’t know money could make me feel like this,” she said. Neither did I. It turns out money can buy happiness—not when it buys you more, but when it buys someone else a fair shot.
We’re not trying to be saints. We’re trying to be useful. We got lucky in ways we didn’t earn: stable jobs, timing, health. Giving away what we don’t need is a way of acknowledging that luck without pretending it was solely skill. It’s also, frankly, more fun than any pile of statements could ever be.
We can’t take it with us. That’s become less a memento mori than a design principle. The point isn’t to die with zero; it’s to live with purpose. For us, purpose looks like a checkbook, a calendar, a willingness to listen, and the stubborn belief that neighborhoods and lives can change. If you’ve ever wondered whether money can make you happy, try turning it into someone else’s tomorrow—and watch what it does to your own.
