What It Means To Express Gratitude

And The Act of Giving Back

With Thanksgiving coming up this week, I have done a lot of reflecting on what I am thankful for this year. I have also thought a lot about what it means to be thankful, and how to express gratitude in a true meaningful way to those I am thankful for. While I do appreciate and carry on the time-honored traditions such as going around the Thanksgiving table with each person stating what they are thankful for, I also believe there are better ways to express that thankfulness than just words. One of my favorite sayings of all time is, “Actions speak louder than words”. I believe this to my core and try to act it out every day that I am able.

Words are meaningful and we should never leave things unsaid, but words expire and need constant refreshing. Like fresh flowers, they eventually die and need replaced. Whereas true acts of thankfulness are often remembered by the recipient forever. I won’t list any personal examples here for times’ sake, but spend just a few moments thinking to yourself about examples from your own life and experiences. Do you remember when someone told you they were thankful for you and/or something you did for them, or do you more easily remember when someone showed you that they were thankful with an act of gratitude.

I am thankful for so many people, events, answered prayers, and unanswered prayers in my life. I am thankful for my daughter Audrey most of all because she brought a joy and fullness to my life from the moment she was born. I don’t know where I would be in life without her. She motivates me every day to be better, and I express my thankfulness by trying to be a better father and example for her every day. I show my gratitude by being involved in her life and building a stable financial future for her. I am beyond thankful for my family, friends & clients, and I travel across the country regularly to keep a close connection with them in my life. I am thankful for my supporters, haters, former bosses, colleagues and my competition because they motivate me to do better professionally. Without this last group Mills Financial Group (MFG) would not exist, so I am forever grateful.

Before I just make this entire article about my personal list of who to give thanks to, let me bring this back to business. As a product of public school and two full time working parents, I am also very grateful to my community for helping raise me. I never liked the saying, “it takes a village”, but for many people in modern American culture, it did take a village to raise them. Our society has forced parents out of the home for much of a young child’s life. Many had help from family members, siblings, church members, teachers, counselors, neighbors, coaches, school mates, parenting groups, etc. I am probably leaving so many others off that list. I am so thankful to all those that have influenced my life and helped bring me to this point. How could I possibly find the time to thank all these people in meaningful ways? That seems like an impossible task. Thank you cards just won’t cut it. I don’t even know how to contact my school teachers at this point.

I decided early on in my adult life that the best way to thank an entire community for helping is to work in a profession that gives back to the entire community. What is one industry that every person of the community needs? What is a skill that I can learn to provide a needed service for my community? Whether they like it or not, at every point in someone’s life they will require medical attention. So, I decided that I wanted to go into the medical profession. As I pursued that path, I discovered that the idea of going to school for a decade, and going into hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt required to become a doctor didn’t seem like the best way to give back for me personally. As a finance guy, the return on investment of giving back that way was too low for me to pursue. It would take years of me taking from our community before I could ever hope to give back to it. Seeking a more immediate way to contribute to my community, I went to work at the local hospital at 18 years old as a cardiac monitor technician while I worked on my obtaining my business degree. Doing this allowed me to explore the healthcare industry in my community while focusing on my financial studies, which always came more naturally to me.

While working at the hospital, I developed a love hate relationship with the healthcare industry. Another topic for another day. Many of you already know that story from previous articles and personal conversations. I decided that I wanted to pursue finance full time. As a maturing adult, I quickly learned about politics and taxes. I began to see how corrupt it all is. Being an older “millennial”, my entire adult life has been filled with corrupt politics and division being front and center. I decided the best way to give back to my community is to use my expertise to help people keep their hard-earned money in the community to the best of my ability, and out of the hands of the corrupt politicians and taxing authorities. The best way to do that is to prepare tax returns and provide guidance on tax avoidance strategies.

To gain the needed experience, I went to work for the major tax preparers in town. You know the names, I won’t out them here. Often times the best way to beat your competition is to know your competition, so you have to go on the inside to see what makes them tick. That’s exactly what I did. These companies asked me to prepare taxes for low-income earners and charge them nearly $500 to prepare their very simple tax returns. We would charge these people more to prepare their taxes than we would charge married couples making $400,000 a year. These companies preyed on low-income earners who had no choice but to pay these outrageous fees just to claim their child tax credits and earned income credits promised to them by politicians. The government is giving these community members financial support and these companies are making sure they scrape a huge chunk off the top first, by design. Clients often paid the fees without question, even paying an additional fee to have those first set of fees taken directly out of their tax return because they don’t have the money to pay upfront. I charge only $150 or less for these same services, and provide a higher quality, personal level of service.

As I worked my way up in the corporate world, I also very quickly learned about the scam that is the current retirement advising industry. Advisors were charging an industry standard 1% on my entire retirement balance, while lumping investments together with everyone else. If you had the $1 million in a retirement account that is needed to retire according to these same experts, they would be charging you over $10,000 a year to manage that money. That is insane to me and seems like a huge conflict of interest. The industry was literally treating everyone like a number on a spreadsheet while offering no service of real value to the people they were charging. I saw another opportunity to offer a better service at a lower price. These major corporations are literally sucking the money out of our community while giving very little back to it. I saw this as my opportunity to offer something better to my community, and others, as a way of giving back. I like to share some of these experiences of the last couple decades that brought Mills Financial Group to life because my service is how I express gratitude and give back on the largest scale.

So, what does it mean to give back? I strongly believe that giving back to your community or offering an expression of gratitude means giving something of yourself to others. Not giving a little money that you have left over after you have satisfied all your own personal needs, but truly giving what matters the most, yourself. So many ways of giving back today have been stripped of their humanity and sterilized for efficiency. Just round up your purchase at the grocery store and you have done your good deed for the year, right?

But what if giving back is more than just making a donation because you don’t want to be judged by the cashier? What if giving should be more than tax write-off? Is there something more valuable that you can do? So many people are far wealthier in intelligence, skills, expertise, physical abilities, or some other ability that you have which would be much more valuable to your community than rounding up your cup of coffee to a corporate non-profit. Think of all the ways that society has made it easy for us to “give back”, have you ever personally seen that impact one individual’s life on a personal level? I like to believe my donation to Shriners is going to help young Caleb from the commericals, but do you really know for sure?

In 2023, it is always a risk to state a personal opinion, because someone of a differing opinion will inevitably be offended. So, I want to be clear and say that I am in no way demeaning any of these ways of giving back to your community, as I see them all having value. People contribute what they are able to. But I am challenging us all to truly think about how we are giving back. I am challenging those of us who are in white collar professions to think about the status quo of how we give back. Are there better ways that you can elevate your level of giving back using your God given abilities that would be more impactful than a cash donation?

The standard operating procedure of many white-collar professions is to use our expertise to offer a service of value to the community which translates to higher-than-average income. As my high school counselor once told me, go to college, get your degree, get into management, you will make lots of money and be able to retire comfortably. I was constantly reminded that my skills would be rare, and I could charge people a lot of money. Nowhere on this path did one person pull me aside to say, learn a skill, offer that skill back to your community to make it stronger. The moral of the story was, get a comfortable job, a pension, and all your worries would evaporate. I tried that path and felt like I was slowly dying on the inside. In no way did it bring me any level of comfort.

These lessons continued to permeate every aspect of the corporate professional world. The standard operating procedure for many specialized professions is to charge as much as the market will possibly pay while living a very comfortable life throughout the year isolated from any economic forces that are drowning the lower/middle class of our communities. Some professions charge the maximum allowed by law, well, because they can. For many in these professions, the act of giving back is overcharging their community all year long, then making a small cash donation at the end of the year for a tax write-off. I also see many of these organizations doing food drives, which only collect boxed corporate poisons pretending to be actual food. Do low-income families in our community not deserve fresh healthy food to eat? Do they really deserve boxed/canned garbage for Christmas that you wouldn’t feed your own family? Perhaps we could come up with ways to serve healthy food and bring different families in the community together during the holidays.

Another common method of giving back for businesses is to pay sponsorships for things like little leagues, golf tournaments, fundraisers, etc. Many donate to fundraiser dinners, which do serve their purpose, please don’t misunderstand what I am saying. But let’s be honest, if those dinners weren’t giving out a huge meal, free advertising, and free guns, would they donate? I love the social community building of these events, but are you truly giving anything of yourself by attending? These often turn into sales transactions with a small portion cash benefit at the end. You have to eat dinner anyway. The act of the dinner itself serves nobody but the donors and the businesses. I have always found these methods to be somewhat self-serving.

Is it really giving back to be charging excessive prices to all the family members of a little league for your service, only to give a small donation every year in which your business receives free advertising? Where is the net benefit ever felt there? I don’t mean to single out any professions, as this is pervasive in many industries. Is it really giving back to donate only 1% of the money that was overcharged to the community all year long in exchange for a tax deduction?

On a personal level, is donating what is left over after all your vacations are paid for, Christmas gifts are purchased, and retirement is fully funded, is that truly giving anything of yourself? Is there any true sacrifice in that? Is that truly what is meant by tithing?

What does giving back mean to me? Giving back to me means truly giving of yourself back to your community. I translate that into action by building this business, Mills Financial Group. I could have stayed in the corporate world, making a very nice living off the backs of this community. I probably would have retired in my early 50’s. I could keep donating to 501c3 organizations with what I had left over at the end of the month. But that path felt so devoid of any humanity. I felt no connection to my community. I challenged myself to come up with something better. So, my way of giving back has become front loaded, not back loaded. I give to my community on the front end, knowing that God will take care of the back end. I give of myself on the front end without worry of my own financial future. If I am performing a service that the community truly values, the financial part will work itself out. There are also things in this world that are more important than money.

My way of giving back through my profession is by offering a better level of service than the major corporate competitors but at half the price, even if that means I have to make personal sacrifices. I strive to use all the same technology for the convenience of my clients, but also offer that face-to-face humanity that many corporations have thrown out the window in search of ever-growing profits. I am ignoring all the industry norms and status quos in search of offering my community something better. My goals are all about reaching the maximum number of people that I can serve in my community. I am not trying to achieve a set income level every year, but only trying to grow my service to help the most people in my community. I hope to eventually grow my service enough to train others who can provide these financial services and continue this philosophy after I am long gone.

I have already been paid back in more meaningful ways that a paycheck could ever offer. The feeling of connecting with someone I went to high school with, who is struggling financially, who needs my help, is far more rewarding than any cash donations I have ever made. The feeling of helping retirees in my community protect their life savings from corporate vultures and inflation is immeasurable. I love the feeling of completing a simple tax return for free or low cost, and feeling the true gratitude of that person who would have been charged hundreds of dollars elsewhere. The payback of a home baked apple pie or professional animal photograph that I have received as a measure of gratitude is far more meaningful than anything financial that I could receive.

I totally understand that being trapped in a 40-hour Mon-Friday work week can limit your time, and limit how much you can give of yourself to your community. I was stuck in that place at one point also. Starting Mills Financial Group has also freed up my life to give back in other ways personally. I am no longer trapped in the rat race 8-5. My schedule and my life have much more flexibility and has allowed me to pursue ways of giving back that involve my time. I am able to meet clients where they are comfortable at a time that works for them. Asking a night shift working client to come into my office 8-5 M-F is not my idea of offering a valuable service to a community. We must find ways to meet people where they are.

I now have time to give back in other ways that I never could before. Giving of yourself is the ultimate donation and is not taxable by the IRS. I now have time to pick up garbage in my neighborhood and others, build more meaningful relationships, volunteer at church, spend time with family and help family members with projects, grow food for my family and community, connect with others doing good in the community, volunteer at youth groups, prepare free tax returns for church members, build community gardens, build/repair relationships, talk with others about what needs exist in community, and pursue other areas of skill that are desperately needed in the community.

As I wrap this up, I want to remind everyone that there is no one way to give back, and no wrong way. I asked a lot of questions in this article in order to make you question your own self and how you give back. I am challenging us all to think of what it means to give back as a means of expressing gratitude. Are your methods of expressing thanks truly felt as gratitude by the person you are thanking? Are you truly expressing gratitude or just checking a box in obligation as I was for many years?

Are you stuck in an 8-5 job that you don’t really like, working for a company or government agency that is only taking from the community and not giving back to it? Perhaps it is time to consider a change, and I can guide you on how to do that from my own experience. Nothing makes me happier than seeing my family and friends start their own business while doing things their own way. It’s how we progress. Corporations know nothing but the status quo. Some things achieved in this world are more valuable than comfort.

I am also asking those who don’t have much money to give, what does giving back mean to you? How can you express gratitude in a more meaningful way by giving more of yourself? There are so many creative ways to do this that do not involve money at all. Unfortunately, money drives so much of what people perceive as valuable today. Think hard about what you can do in your personal and professional life to give back and express gratitude to those around you. If you have any ideas, please come talk to me. Let’s share and spread the idea of truly giving back this holiday season.