EP 15 - John Hankins - How to Give More and Reinvent Yourself in Your 70s

Summary
In EP15, I travelled to the U.S. Georgia, to chat with John Hankins — a giver, a licensed social worker, certified financial therapist, and former IT professional — about his unique journey through life, work, and the evolving relationship we have with money.

John shares how his childhood and family traditions shaped his views on financial responsibility, generosity, and purpose. After retiring from a long career in IT, he reinvented himself in his 70s as a financial therapist, helping others — especially those NGO and those midlife and beyond — navigate the emotional side of money.

We also explore John’s deep desire to give back in his life - from putting giving back as a family value to becoming a kidney donor. It’s a conversation about purpose, reinvention, and the many ways we can live a meaningful life.

Highlights:

• How early life experiences shape money habits
• Reinventing your career after retirement
• Financial anxiety in retirement years
• Living with purpose and curiosity
• How the process of becoming a kidney donor actually saved his life (!)

Keywords
childhood, family legacy, storytelling, giving, money, finance, life after retirement,  grandparents, relationships, memories, creativity, personal growth

Transcript

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John, welcome to the Beyondhood Podcast.

We're delighted to have you here.

So first of all, could you share with us, what is your name, where do you live, and how old are you?

Hey, Nicole.

That's great to be here.

Thanks for having me on.

My name is John Hankins.

I'll be 74 in May, and I am in Savannah, Georgia, where I live in the winter.

I live in the Boulder, Colorado area in the summertime.

Lovely.

And ignoring your birth certificate that you're turning 74 in May, how old do you actually feel you are?

That's a tough question.

45, 50.

I think old enough that I've gained a little bit, a little bit of wisdom.

I'm not going to make so many stupid mistakes, but also that I'm young enough, you know, looking forward to the future, having some goals, having some enthusiasm, wanting to see what's next.

Yes, I think 40-ish is a good age, because you gain enough, and you feel you're at a certain point to walk through.

But if I just look at you and talk to you, I think at most, I thought you were like 60.

So you're keeping well.

So let's dive in to starting with your childhood.

Where were you born, and where did you grow up?

And what was your childhood like?

Can you share a story with us that defined who you were as a child?

Sure.

So I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which is a pretty historic city in the United States.

I was actually born at Pennsylvania Hospital, which was founded by Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence.

So I always had this very kind of historical environment that I lived in.

I grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs.

My parents were both from the Philadelphia area, actually from their families were both from New Jersey, and we had some very deep roots there as well.

So I always felt very connected to the Philadelphia area.

In terms of a story that would define me as I grew up, I would say that on the one hand, I always loved nature.

I loved being outside.

I was lucky that I grew up in an area that...

This was post-World War II.

I was born in 1951.

This was in suburbs, in new subdivisions that were being built, that had been farmland or forest.

And so I always felt like I had access to a lot of the outdoors and really enjoyed all of that.

And very early on, I really loved to ride my bicycle, and a lifelong cyclist, but that was really important to me.

Bicycle riding, and it gave me a sense of freedom that I could get around at an early age on my bike, and I would just take off and go.

And that's still...

That's to me.

That's a very interesting part that since you were like little, until now, that you're still doing the same exercise.

And how about your parents?

What do your parents do?

And how many siblings do you have?

I have an older brother and a younger sister, my parents.

So they were born just before the...

My father was born in 1916, and my mother was born in 1921.

So they grew up during the Depression.

And I think that had...

Particularly on my mother, that had a big influence on her in terms of money and material wealth that we can talk about.

For my father, I think there was just more, not a huge amount, but kind of more affluence, but a very...

It's at a certain point, and I don't really have all the dates on this, but my grandfather became a very serious alcoholic, which really influenced my father.

My father never had a drink in his life, so that was a very big piece for my father.

My father also had an injury that left him with a form of epilepsy.

He was...

During the Second World War, he had a 4F, he was a medical deferment, he couldn't serve.

And I think that that really influenced...

It influenced me in a couple different ways.

And I think it influenced my father.

I think my father always felt like he hadn't...

He was a little bit ashamed of his not being able to be in the army.

I had numerous uncles, and just his peer group, it was kind of a very much an identification of, what did you do during the war?

Where did you serve?

You know, those sort of things.

I mean, World War II was a very, still a very big thing that I didn't really appreciate as I was growing up.

It seemed like it was in the distant past for me, but I was born six years after the war ended, which is, when I look back now, that's a really short period of time.

But when I was a kid, it felt like that was just complete ancient history.

So that, I think, was very influential.

It also meant that my father couldn't drive a car because he had epilepsy.

And that was also for me a very influential thing.

When I look back on it now, I really wished that I had done more to appreciate my father when I was a kid, that I saw his deficits, and I didn't do enough to appreciate all of the great things that he taught me.

And when I look back now, he was really a very influential figure in my life.

But when we're kids, all these things are just, you know, they're just like a swirling mess in our heads, I think.

My parents both worked at the Pennsylvania Railroad.

That's where my father spent his entire career, was at the Pennsylvania Railroad.

My parents met, they worked together, and that's where they met and got married.

So that, and that was the true of my grandparents and my aunt and uncle as well.

So the Pennsylvania Railroad was kind of always this big thing.

And you have to appreciate that the, even though my father didn't have, you know, he had a, he worked in an office and had a fairly low, he was kind of a very minor department manager at one point.

But the Pennsylvania Railroad in the mid-20th century, America was kind of like the Microsoft of, you know, the end of the century.

This was a big growing, a huge growing business that was incredibly influential in the country.

And a lot of people made a lot of money investing in it.

And it was viewed as a very secure place to work.

It was kind of interesting because in 1970, it went bankrupt.

There was a lot of, by then, there was a lot of turmoil.

So your parents and your grandparents both met at the same place.

It was thought of as a great place to work.

I mean, my grandfather, he didn't even have a high school diploma.

He was also a very, had kind of a very low level office job there as well.

Speaking of your family's history, I remember you talk about your dad got into a lot into genealogy, and you discovered something very interesting about your family.

Both of my parents' families had somebody in the family when I was a kid that was into genealogy.

When my father retired, and he retired in 1975, he got further into genealogy and started pulling together all kinds of different material.

And what I discovered was that I knew that my father's family, for instance, there was an individual whose name was Zachariah Hankins, served as a private in the Revolutionary War, that my family had been in New Jersey, settled in New Jersey in the 1700s.

Even earlier than that, William Penn, who was the founder of Philadelphia, who was this important figure in early American history, he was given land by the King of England.

Not that he actually had the land to give.

There were people living there already.

But he was deeded this land, which became Pennsylvania, because he was a Quaker, and they wanted to get him out of England.

And so they gave him some land, and they sent the Quakers to America.

And so one of my relatives was part of William Penn's Quaker organization, and came over to America in, you know, like 1670s.

And both of my parents are direct descendants.

This man's name was James Shin.

They are both direct descendants of James Shin.

And they were actually seventh or eighth cousins.

They never knew that, but they had this direct line back to this important Quaker family in the New Jersey area.

What was your parent reaction when they find out they were seven cousins?

I don't...

This is an interesting thing, because I...

I figured this out.

I'm sure my father must have known this, but they...

I never heard them talking about it.

I only understood this myself when I was...

I got interested in some different pieces of genealogy.

This was probably like 10 years ago.

And I started going through these different...

This material that my father pulled together is all the stuff that was on ancestry.com.

I started looking at that.

And I realized at one point that both of these lines kind of pointed back to this same individual, James Shin.

And I started tracing it back myself.

And I thought, well, this means that they're actually cousins at some level.

And so I pieced that together.

So I don't know exactly how that played out between my mother and father.

They were both dead by then, so I have no clue on that.

I can't, I can't, it was kind of a funny thing.

So we'll talk a little bit about your parents and their history.

How about your grandparents?

Do you know much about them?

And is there anything like story you want to share with us with them?

Well, the interesting thing about my grandparents, this is on my mother's side, I knew much more about my mother's parents than my father's.

My father's mother died before I was born in, I think, 1946 or 1947.

And as I mentioned, my father was very estranged from his father because he was an alcoholic.

So that was my father's family.

That piece was really kind of off the table.

I was very close to my grandmother.

My grandmother was a middle child, and I was a middle child.

And my grandmother always thought that she got kind of a raw deal being the middle child.

And so she was, she was always my advocate, which was kind of good and bad.

But I was, I was, I was very close to her.

She, she grew up as an interesting, her father was a doctor, and he had decided at some point in his mid-20s that he was going to become a doctor.

He, he got into, into medical school, a medical school that still existed in Philadelphia, went to medical school in Philadelphia, and then became a small town doctor in New Jersey.

And so my grandmother had a fairly affluent upbringing, not fabulously wealthy or anything, but had a fairly affluent upbringing.

And then when she got married, my grandfather, they didn't have much money.

They weren't impoverished, but they, they, it was certainly a, you know, middle class, lower middle class, blue collar kind of life.

And I think my grandmother was really, she was really resentful of what other people had.

And she actually then I think passed that on to my mother as well, because my mother, when I was growing up, the money story that surrounded our household was always based on my mother's resentment of kind of what she didn't have and what other people had, and not what we did have.

We grew up in an interesting area in terms of the school district, that it was quite a range of kind of socioeconomic status, there was some really wealthy people, and there was some really poor people, all in the same school.

And I had a number of friends who were really quite wealthy, and my mother was really very resentful.

And she took it that because I had these friends, that this was an expression of my own rejection of my own family.

Which is probably not totally inaccurate, because my mother was always focusing on what we didn't have.

And so I was maybe kind of looking more at what I wanted to have.

So yeah, that was really pretty challenging, and in a sense, pretty sad, I think.

That we would have, I would have had a much happier childhood had my mother been more able to focus on what we did have, which was really a lot in many ways versus what we didn't have.

I think that will tie into a lot where we're talking about what you did in your elderhood.

But for now, we're moving to your adolescence.

I want to ask you, what was one of your favorite family traditions?

We grew up in the Philadelphia area, and a big vacation tradition for people in Philadelphia was to go to the Jersey Shore in the summertime.

And my parents actually grew up with that tradition as well.

As kids, they went to the Jersey Shore.

So we, every summer, my father would have two weeks off, we would go, and we would rent a beach cottage at the Jersey Shore, which was really quite wonderful memories.

We had, my cousins would come sometimes, or my grandparents, and my parents had an eight-millimeter movie camera, and we had, you know, bunches of movies that they took of us at the shore, that when I was older, I, and we still, my brother took some of that film and put it, got it, put on a DVD, but just different scenes of us on the beach, these kind of classic, you know, choppy movies of kids running around and jumping in the water.

Yeah, so the eight-millimeter movie, is this something you have to bring on a camera and then put it on the beach?

And everyone does that?

Or how does it work?

No, it's a camera.

It's about this big.

And the film rolls are about this big.

So you put a roll of film in, and then you wind it up, and then you shoot the film, and then you get it developed, and you put it into a projector, and it projects onto a screen.

That sounds so fun, but now I think we all just use our phone or camera.

Oh, this is like so.

It's such ancient history.

We talk about your childhood, your parents, your grandparents, and some of your favorite memory.

And let's move into your teenage year.

Do you enjoy school?

What was the most adventurous or rebellious thing that you have ever done?

Adolescence is such a challenging time, I think, for everyone.

And when I look back on it now, I have such mixed feelings about it.

I kind of started out, let's just take this from 7th grade on, at that time, you go through elementary school, and then you go into junior high school and then high school.

And I was not a successful student.

I just couldn't focus.

I was really focused on trying to fit in and being popular and all those sorts of things that were much more important.

I was somewhat successful at it.

My biggest success in all of that was that I was elected as the vice president of the student council in my senior year of high school.

But most adventurous thing that...

Well, one of the things that we did, this goes back to my love of bicycling, that when I was 15 years old, or maybe 14, so this would have been 1965, 66.

And a couple of my friends got into European racing bikes, the bikes with dropped handlebars.

This was totally...

Nobody had seen this stuff before, and we had got these bicycles.

And so one of the things that we would do, from one of my friends who kind of lived out in the country, we would go out and ride our...

We'd go out at like midnight, and there was this one girl that we were all kind of in love with.

You know, they were all like 15 years old, this one girl, who I still know, and I still know all of these people, still connected to all these people.

We would get on our bikes, and it was like about a five-mile bike ride.

We would ride on these country roads to this girl's house, you know, in the middle of the night.

And when I look back on it now, it's like...

You know, this was really...

We didn't have any lights on our bikes, nothing, you know.

We're just out on these country roads.

In fact, this particular girl, her mother, who was like...

The ultimate cool mom.

She was just like the greatest person.

She bought us these safety crossing guard strap belt things that we could wear that were reflectors, because she was worried about us riding our bicycles at night.

You have such a fond memory of this time.

I can see from your laugh.

When I look back on it now, I was really getting into cycling.

I mean, I was really fortunate that I was really getting into cycling and this whole idea of these European racing bikes.

I had the ultimate crappy version of a European racing bike.

My more affluent friends had cooler bikes than I did.

But when I look back on that, yeah, it was just we had this...

We just loved riding our bikes.

And then this really...

Now I look back, this really sad thing happens, where we turned 16, and all we can think about is, at that time, was getting our driver's license.

In Pennsylvania, you could start driving a car at 16.

So it was like, you know, I'm 15, I'm riding my bicycle, I'm gonna be 16 tomorrow.

I put my bicycle away, and I completely forget about it.

It's gone out of my life.

Two and a half years later, I remember taking my...

this other bicycle.

By then, my European racing bike was long gone, but we had another, just sort of a regular three-speed English bike that people of my generation would recognize.

And I remember taking that up to where I was going to college and riding it around, you know, riding around the campus and riding around the town.

And I was the only person there that had a bicycle.

Wow.

So we come back to bicycles, which still has a very big influence on you.

And how about beside bicycle?

What was the most important historical event that you remember as a teenager?

And what do you think about it at that time?

And why was it so impactful to you as a teenager?

Well, so I graduated from high school in 1969, and the Vietnam War was in full swing at this point.

And there was a draft.

And so there was a man, a boy, graduating from high school.

This was like a real thing, that you could be drafted and sent to Vietnam.

And so for that reason, and this is certainly true of me, if you could afford it, you went to college, and you could get a college deferment.

So I would just say that I, at the time, okay, when I was in high school, for my parents, I mean, it was very much, it was sort of an aspirational thing.

You're going to college.

And it wasn't so much like, you're going to college to escape the draft.

It was more of a, you're going to college because this is the social, this is our social status, that we want you to go to college.

This is gonna, this is the next step for you to be a successful adult, is to get a college education.

And just as an aside, my father never finished college.

He went to college for two years and never finished.

And so that was another huge piece in our family was, your father never finished college, but that's not gonna be you.

You need to go to college.

So I was on that trajectory.

Once I did that, once I was in college, I began to recognize the, and learn much more about the war.

And it was becoming much more controversial at that point.

As my opposition to the war grew, my view of the inequity of if you've got the wherewithal to go to college, you're not going to be drafted.

If you don't, you're going into the army.

And there was a whole racial issue here as well.

So there was way more black kids that were being drafted than there were.

The white kids were going to college.

Black kids were getting drafted.

And I came to view that as just extremely unjust.

And in my second year of college, I was first very...

I continued as a really crappy student.

I had no motivation at all.

I was just not interested in any subjects that I was studying.

And I was way more focused on my whole growing anti-war views.

And I decided that I didn't want to participate in this system of...

that my opposition to the war deserved more expression than just opting out of it by going to college.

So I quit college with the idea that I was going to become a conscientious objector, so that I would take a kind of an activist position against the war, which is what I did.

So before we dive into that part of your adulthood, I want to ask you one more question in your adolescence.

You have a mixed feeling about teenage years.

You have some fond memory, but also some difficult time.

And looking back, what would you say to your teenage self about navigating this complexity of adolescence?

The biggest issue in my emotional life was that I had this girlfriend, that she was my girlfriend for four years, and she came from a really incredibly toxic family.

I knew something was wrong.

I knew that there was a lot of negativity with that.

But if I was going to look at my teenage self, I would say that it was somehow I had this need to be connected to somebody.

I should have trusted myself more and been more able to navigate things on my own.

That I didn't need to feel like I had this...

I didn't need a girlfriend, I guess is the thing.

That I didn't...

That it was kind of like I couldn't make it on my own.

I couldn't...

I didn't trust my parents at that point.

I didn't have a close relationship with my siblings, and I couldn't make it on my own, and I needed a girlfriend to complete me in some way.

And that that was a really, really kind of fatal error on my part.

That really took me quite a long time in my adulthood to kind of resolve.

I carried a lot of baggage from that.

I think that's really resonate, even when you said that about you didn't need a girlfriend, or I think a lot of the time nowadays, teenagers as well, they may be not in a relationship, but more into like social media.

Looking back, teenage years could be very tough, and having someone to remind you that you can do it on your own is actually really important as well.

So now we're going to dive into your adult.

You were mentioning that in college, you were having this anti-war feelings, and then you quit.

So then what happened?

What path did you choose, and how did it evolve for you?

When I was going to go to college, I had always had this idea that I was going to go get an engineering degree, and I was actually accepted into an engineering program.

But when it came time for me to go to college, I decided I wasn't going to do that, and I went off to a small state college.

I basically trained teachers.

I didn't have any interest in being a teacher.

Again, I was just going to college, just going somewhere.

I wanted to get away.

That was part of it.

And but I also thought about that being an engineer, that whole thing didn't feel right, and I got more and more into that I wanted to do something with people.

I wanted to do something that connected with people and gave back to people.

And then when I went through this whole conscientious objector piece, that was really a requirement to be in a service job.

And so that's the path that I went down, and I got very involved then in...

So I quit college, and then I started...

I went through a series of jobs where I was working in different community mental health programs and working with people with intellectual handicaps.

And then I went back to college.

I went back to school part-time, and finally finished my degree, really focused on that kind of work.

And ultimately, I spent a number of years working with people that were being brought back into the community that had been in state mental hospitals for maybe 10, 20, 30 years.

And so they were being moved back in.

It was this whole idea of what was it then at that time called deinstitutionalization and bringing them back into the community and trying to structure services in the community to support them, which is pretty challenging.

All of that doesn't exist.

The state mental hospitals are largely much, much, much, much smaller institutions than they were at the time.

Now we see homeless people, kind of the upshot of some of that.

But so that became my focus.

And then I went and I got a graduate degree in social work.

And then I was accepted into a PhD program in social work as well.

So that was really my focus at the time, was very strongly in that direction.

We're saying that you were in social work, and then you did go back to private sector.

And that was something that for the many years, you were in IT businesses.

So how do you make that switch?

And how does it impact you in terms of your money view and finance?

I started in graduate school when I was 28 years old.

And this is 1979, 1978, 1979.

Computers are, you know, they're kind of this exotic thing.

And I started in graduate school, and the school that I was at had just gotten a new computer.

And I was interested in this.

And so I started, I went to a couple of workshops, and just got kind of pulled into this from the research end.

So now I'm in a graduate program where research is a thing.

And I pretty quickly became a research assistant to one of the professors there, and got more and more into doing computer stuff for that particular individual.

And it just kind of took off from there.

And then I finished, that was a two-year program.

And then I went on to a PhD program, and there it was at another, at a major university, which had a very big computing program for the social sciences.

It was really one of the, easily one of the leaders in the country.

And so I just got completely sucked in to doing computing stuff.

And at one point, after three years in that program, so now I've been in graduate school for five years, I had the opportunity to take a full-time job in the university doing IT stuff.

And it paid more than I was going to make of becoming an assistant professor.

And I was really interested in it at the time.

I was really, I was just completely just occupied by it.

And so I took that, but I was still within a university environment and working with academics.

And it all was kind of, I felt like a good mix.

And we sort of saw all this in the service of advancing scholarship, you know, all those different pieces.

And then ultimately, I left and did go in.

And I should say, then I became, and as part of that whole, and I was at that university either as a graduate student or as an employee for almost 15 years.

In 1990, I started working on internet service stuff.

I was introduced to the internet at a pretty fundamental level in 1990, very sort of early on in the life of what we view as the kind of public internet.

Then in 1995, I left and went to work in the private sector for an internet company, and then did that until I retired in 2018.

I had this really deep commitment to doing something that was really contributing to the good of the world, and I felt like I was just getting further and further away from that.

I'll just give you an example.

So my wife was a social worker.

At one point, she was working in a nursing home facility, and working with people.

The only way they were leaving was when they died, and she was working with the families.

And I remember one day she came home and she said, Yeah, I was sitting with a family today, and their grandmother, she's dying.

She's in her absolute last moments, and I was sitting with them and helping them process that.

And I thought, yeah, and I was sitting in an office, and we were talking about how we could improve our profit margins.

And that is what a sad contrast in where I've landed in all of this.

So, yeah, that really started to eat at me in a pretty negative way.

Can you share with us, how did you meet your wife?

And how would you describe her?

And what is one of the stories you can share with us?

And how about your children as well?

Do you have any kids?

Okay, yeah, so I met my wife.

We were both living in West Philadelphia at the time.

And for me, it was like a very special time in my life.

And I think this is everybody in there.

When you're in your 20s, you're much more in a community of people that are kind of having a good time together.

You haven't necessarily started a family.

You know, you're kind of enjoying the world in a lot of ways.

So that's how I look back on that time.

I met her.

She, in fact, had been married and had a daughter.

She had a three-year-old daughter.

And so she was also...

So I was in graduate school in a social work program, and she was in undergraduate school in a social work program, even though she was actually older than me.

She had a whole other story.

So we were both very focused on this same, what did we want to do?

We had very...

And we continue to have very similar political views, what we support.

For me, she has been a constant, a constant source of understanding my values.

She's a constant reminder of what our values are and how we need to live our values, not just talk about them, but how we need to live our values.

So we have two children now.

So we have my...

I was raised, my stepdaughter, who I've never...

I've always hated that term, my daughter.

And then we have a younger...

We had a child together, so we have two children that are now...

My youngest is 40, and the older is 47.

And we have two grandchildren as well.

And so we're very close with all of them.

And both of my daughters, one is a teacher and the other works in...

She's worked in nonprofits.

And my wife is a social worker.

She retired as a social worker.

Whenever I would talk about my own disappointment in myself, as far as the path that I took, which did have a lot of financial benefits for us, they all always tell me, well, because you were earning money, so we could do what we...

We could express the values of our family, but we were able to do that because we didn't have to be as focused on money as we might have needed to have been.

So I feel like they're all a...

Yeah, a solid expression of...

If I was going to talk about how kids could turn out, that's how I wanted my family to be, that I'm very happy with and proud of how that's, you know, all the work that they've done.

So it's kind of a family teamwork.

They have a balance with value, monetary, and both of your daughter works in the serving industry, as you mentioned.

What are your daughter's names?

For each of them, do you have a specific story that you want to share that reminds you of why they're special?

My older daughter, that's Sarah, when she graduated from college, she went off.

She actually worked in the advertising industry for a while and then decided that she wanted to be a teacher and then went back to graduate school and got a teaching certificate and a master's degree.

She's really done a lot.

But one of the things that she did was that she teaches in a very wealthy school district.

But she worked for 10 years in the elementary school in that school district that was the poorest school.

A lot of kids from families that had immigrated here from Mexico, South America, so her parents didn't necessarily speak English, and just a very challenged population to work with.

And she worked there for 10 years, and really gave a lot of herself in that role, and I'm extremely proud of what she did there.

My younger daughter, so my younger daughter is a lesbian, married to a woman, she's been married to a woman for the past five years.

Her name is Jessie, and she worked for several years in a program that was basically an advocacy program for gay and lesbian youth.

And she worked in an area that had pretty liberal values.

But she would basically be the person who would be showing up at the high school and say, Hi, I'm here to help you start a after school club for your gay and lesbian youth.

And I was joking, well, there's some places where we do that, people would want to come and shoot you.

But really, that there could be some really negative responses to that.

So she's done work in that area for quite a long time as well.

They've been really challenged at times in the work that they do, but they've kept at it.

I can see that your family and your adulthood, like failure is something very important to you in terms of serving and doing work that you mentioned before, like bringing good to people.

So that is a good point to switch into your elderhood that now that in your later stage of life.

I understand at age 63, a significant health event occurred to you.

Can you share with us what happened?

What was that story?

So this is a continuation of my story of doing, you know, I'm this IT guy, I'm making a very nice salary, but this other half of me is saying, what are you doing?

Where, you know, where are you going?

So coincidentally, I had a friend who had kidney disease, and he was on this trajectory where he was going to need a kidney transplant.

I decided, after giving it some thought, that I would be a kidney donor.

I would donate my kidney.

I really saw this as, you know, I could do this thing for my friend, and this would be a thing that would, a sacrifice kind of on my part, a thing that I was willing to do that would kind of even the score that I would be giving back.

And I wanted to do it in a very private way because I didn't want the, there to be, oh, I'm enhancing my reputation.

People are going to perceive me in a, in this different way because I'm this guy that's donating this kidney.

I didn't want anybody to know that I was doing this.

I just wanted this to be something that I did and that I was processing.

And so I got into this program to, to where he was being treated to donate a kidney.

And I started to go.

It's a big evaluation process.

Takes like a month.

And so I'm going through the process, and they're doing some tests and different things.

And then they came back and they said, Oh, his sister is also volunteered to be a donor, and she's a better match than you are.

But we have a program that's a, a, it's an altruistic donation program.

There's six hospitals in the United States that are in this program.

Basically, you sign up to donate your kidney, and we look for a match for you.

And it could be at any one of these locations.

So you could, it could be you donate your kidney, somebody takes it, they get on a plane, they fly your kidney to New York City, and somebody else gets your kidney.

It's all based on who's in the program and who you're matched with.

And you don't, you don't ever, you necessarily even ever know who that person is.

And so this to me was even better in a sense of altruistic.

So I go through this continued evaluation process.

And the last step in the process is an entire day at the hospital, where you're meeting with all sorts of different people, meeting with a surgeon, and she's telling me, this is okay, this is what the surgery is like when we take out your kidney, and how long you could expect to be in the hospital, and just all these different things.

And one of the pieces was that I was interviewed by a social worker, which was basically the question, why are you here?

This is, you know, we want to understand your own kind of mental health and the whole piece of it.

So I start telling her my story, and I completely break down.

I am just crying my eyes out about all of this, you know, like 20 years of my own disappointment in myself, and my own perceived failure of everything I hadn't done, and kind of what I become in a way.

It was really one of the most emotionally intense experiences I have ever had in my life, easily one of the most.

So I spend an hour with this person, and then I kind of patch myself together, and I go on to the next thing.

And the last thing in this day is they do a CT scan of your kidney, because they want to see, okay, do you have a healthy kidney, and is it going to work for a transplant?

Because not every kidney can be healthy, but it might not be suitable as a transplant.

So this is on a Thursday, and the nurse who is the administrator for the program says, okay, tomorrow we are going to, the team will meet, and we've got all of your data, and we'll go over you, and we'll let you know, we'll make a decision about you being in the program.

All these different aspects of this.

And we'll get in touch on Monday.

So I'm like, okay, thanks very much.

I go home.

And so now I'm like, okay, on Monday, I'm going to find out whether I'm in or out of the program.

If I'm out of the program, what's that going to feel like?

I'm going to, you know, there's going to be this void for me, because this has been going on for like a month.

And if I'm in the program, then I'm suddenly like, well, I might get a...

If they say on Monday, you're in the program, you know, it could be on Tuesday, I get a phone call, hey, please come down here, we're going to take out your kidney.

Or it could be, you know, two months from now.

I could just be sitting around, and so this very...

Waiting period.

Interesting process that I'm in.

So Monday morning rolls around, and I'm doing my thing, and it's like 830 in the morning, literally, this is like 830 in the morning.

And I look, I set my phone down somewhere, and I come back in, and there's my phone.

Oh no, I've had a phone call.

There's a voicemail message on my phone.

It's, you know, I start to listen to it, and it's the surgeon that does the...

would do the surgery that I'd met the previous week.

And the first thing is like, why is this surgeon calling me?

This is, you know, I would expect the administrator for the program.

And so she's like, oh, hi, you know, Mr.

Hankins.

We went through your CT scan, and we have some important and troubling news for you that your CT scan shows that you could have a potentially very serious form of lymphoma, and you need to start immediate evaluation for this.

You, I've already spoken to your primary care doctor this morning, and she's expecting your call.

And I'm like, what is, you know, she's already talked to my primary care.

I mean, people don't do this at 8 o'clock on a Monday morning.

And so I'm just like overwhelmed.

It doesn't even begin to describe it.

It went from being you were about to donate to you now have a, sounds like a quite significant health issue that you have to face.

I felt like I was just whipped, you know, I'm over here and suddenly I'm just like over there.

I couldn't have been more turned around.

So I call my doctor and she's immediately there.

And she's like, yeah, I've already talked to an oncologist and I can set you up with an appointment.

And I'm like, wait a minute, you're already, I'm already seeing an oncologist.

Both my wife and I, I can't even describe the level of...

You have to imagine that we're already at this, in this very unique space around the whole kidney donation.

And now this has shifted to this whole serious healthcare concern.

The first thing was that I had to go through a number of tests, one of which was quite invasive, a biopsy, to determine if I actually did have...

What was wrong with me?

Something was clearly wrong with me, but there was a couple of different possibilities.

And so they did a diagnosis and came back and said, yeah, you have lymphoma.

But the type of lymphoma that I had was actually not as serious as originally thought.

But then I started being, I was seeing an oncologist, I guess, like every three months for a little, for the first year.

And I was being, I was getting CT scans every six months, and this was spreading.

It was growing.

And then it stopped, and which is not unusual for the type of lymphoma that I have.

And now it's kind of receded.

And so I've never required any treatment for it.

I could at some point in the future, but it is actually a kind of lymphoma that you, at least at current standards, you never cure, just you control it.

And in my case, and in lots of cases, it just kind of settles down, and it's just there, and might need treatment someday.

It might not.

So it's big.

It had an enormous psychological impact on me, but in terms of my actual physical functioning and health care, it had no real impact in that sense.

Wow, that sounds such a roller coaster story, because you went from wanting to be a giver, donor, to be worrying about, actually, I could be a recipient if this doesn't go well.

And I think it was also because you were doing something good, and you might have never known about this health issue if you weren't donating your kidney.

Did you retire?

Oh, because I know you didn't believe in retirement, so you reinvented yourself into doing something else now.

So what was that story?

What do you do now?

At that point, when I discovered that I couldn't be a kidney donor, then I decided that I was going to...

I was really going to find something that I could do that had meaning for me, even though I was still working.

So I started volunteering with an organization that supported people living with HIV and AIDS.

And I became very...

And I'm still very involved with that organization.

I was on their board for six years and served as treasurer, and I'm still on their finance committee.

I do food deliveries as well when we're back in Colorado.

So that got me back into working in the whole nonprofit area.

And eventually, in 2018, I did retire.

I just...

For a bunch of different reasons.

I was, you know, almost 67, and I decided it was time for me to be doing something different.

And I actually began working in an organization where I could volunteer for different projects with different nonprofits that were all kind of business-oriented.

And I had always...

In my work, I had always had...

It's always had more of a business focus than a technology focus.

And I was always...

Always had some financial responsibilities.

At one point, I was the...

Back when I was working at a university, I was basically the budget director for the Academic Computing Center, and I managed like a $20 million budget.

So I'd always had lots to do with money stuff.

I started working with smaller nonprofits around doing financial project work for them.

Like, okay, here's the nonprofit, and they need somebody to help them...

They just got a big grant, and they need somebody to help them build a budget and set up some management systems.

And so I started doing that work, and I was really struck by how stressful it was for people in these organizations to have to dig into all of these money issues.

And at the same time now, I had gone through the whole retirement thing.

I had been working with my peers who were going through this, and can I retire, and how does social security work, and all these different things.

And I was equally impressed with the stress over there as well.

So I saw this whole issue of finances as having this very significant emotional and mental health component that I had always, even back as a social worker, I'd always had kind of been, we had sort of, you would hear people joking, oh yeah, the two biggest issues, and if you're talking about couples, you know, two biggest issues with couples is sex and money.

And it always had been like, well, yeah, so we've made a lot of progress in talking about sex, but we don't ever talk about money.

You know, we kind of live in this space where it's sort of taboo to talk about money.

And so that was now, especially when I was working with these non-profit organizations, I became very direct.

I had a couple of organizations where I worked with, where it was very much this kind of therapeutic thing, of like I was saying, this is going to be okay for you.

You can, you've got this, you know, you're responsible for this half million dollar budget, but you can do this.

And I want to get you to a spot where you're not afraid to look at your financial statements.

So I would say to my friends, yeah, I'm doing this volunteer work, and I feel like I'm their therapist sometimes.

And this is a joke I was making.

So then it's a normal day.

I sit down and I get out the New York Times, the Sunday New York Times, which I read every Sunday religiously, especially the business section.

And I'm reading, I get out Sunday New York Times, I'm looking at the business section, and on the front page of the business section is an article about financial therapy.

You could have just knocked me over with a feather.

I was like, what is this?

And I just was completely captivated.

I need to know about this.

This is where I want to live.

And so I said, here's the Financial Therapy Association.

So I looked this up.

I go to the Financial Therapy Association website.

This was, I would say, within two weeks of reading that article, I had joined the Financial Therapy Association.

I just want to learn.

I just want to see what this is all about.

I can cast myself as a student member.

I could join as a student member for $50.

And so, I said, yeah, this is cool.

I feel so fortunate.

I feel like there has been so many times in my life where the stars have just, things have just aligned.

They've just gone my way.

Not in ways that have made me massively wealthy or anything, but have just gone my way.

And this was one of them, where, okay, I've learned about this.

And then the next thing I learned about the Financial Therapy Association is, in October, they're having their annual conference.

And that meeting is 30 miles from my house.

That meeting in Denver, Colorado.

Now, this is the first post-COVID meeting.

Okay, so this is 2022.

Yeah, this is 2022.

First COVID meeting, post-COVID meetings.

And I look at it and they have a student price, because it was like $500, which is pretty expensive for somebody who just is interested in, and if I want to find out.

And they had like $150 for a student.

So I wrote to the administrator and said, here's my deal.

Can I get the student rate?

They said, yeah, fine, cool.

So I go to this financial therapy conference, and now I'm getting into this.

And that was in early October.

And I decided, I'm going to do this.

I'm going to become a financial therapist.

And I can, the fact that I had this social work degree and some different experience, I can meet their qualifications.

It's a little bit of a stretch.

I'm sure they haven't got people that are in their 70s that are knocking on the door saying, I want to be a financial therapist, but I'm going to do this.

And I remember I went to this meeting with these friends of mine, and I kind of announced this.

Oh, I'm going to do this thing, which is kind of risky.

I want to apply to become a certified financial therapist.

So, this is another more studying and another test and submitting a bunch of things.

And so, I go through all this stuff.

So, now I've got this.

I'm a licensed social worker and a certified financial therapist, and I'm ready to go.

And again, the things line up for me, that I'm on this.

So, I'm a member of the Financial Therapy Association, and I volunteer to be on a committee.

I'm ready to go, right, with this.

I'm looking for somewhere.

I want to, now, I want to go be a financial therapist.

I have no clue what's next.

And I go to this very first committee meeting, okay?

Online, just like you and I were online.

And so people are introducing, there's like five people on the call, and the people are introducing themselves.

And I think I had been looking at who are financial therapists in my area, or were there any opportunities?

Well, I get on this call.

One of the people in my area is on the call.

And so I send her...

So things aren't really aligning for you.

I send her a chat.

Hey, can I talk to you?

Can I give you a call a little later today?

You know, do you have a minute to chat?

So I call her, and we kind of talk through things, and she's running a small practice that's both just mental health professionals, and she's a financial therapist.

Actually, she's a licensed marriage and family therapist.

And so I join her practice, and I start, I set myself up, and I start to see people as a financial therapist.

And there I am.

That's what I'm doing.

Now I'm on the board of the Financial Therapy Association as well.

And it's very inspirational to hear that you reinvented yourself into something that you combine both your experience in finance and your purpose of serving people in a social way as well.

And that will lead us to the last part of the podcast, which is going beyond elderhood.

So now, looking back, reviewing Shane, your story, what would you say is your greatest success in your life and your challenge in life?

I feel incredibly fortunate to have just been able to find this path.

And I mean, if you'd have asked me five years ago to, you know, tell me about yourself five years from now, it wouldn't have been anything.

This is totally not even remotely on the radar screen.

I'm just interested in what's out in the world.

And it's kind of an equation in a sense of I've had all of these different positive things happen, and now I have this chance to give something back.

And if the giving back becomes much more meaningful when you're looking back at all the stuff you can be thankful for, you know, versus when I was 20 years old and said, I want to do something good in the world.

I wasn't thankful.

I was trying to find something that was going to help me feel like I was worthy at that point.

You know, now it's a totally different perspective.

So throughout the interview, you keep mentioning you're being thankful, and you know, now you're giving back.

And are there any regrets in your life?

What is it if you have one?

The thing that I most regret is my high school years, that I had this opportunity.

There were so many things that I could have learned that people were trying to teach me that I just rejected.

That's probably the most regret is in that space.

I went to what was really quite a good high school.

There were a lot of smart kids there.

I just didn't take advantage of any of it.

People often say about regret.

Regret kind of helped you also in a way to process your life.

You mentioned that your regret is that you didn't learn enough in high school.

But looking at you when you were 68, it's your curiosity, your ability to ask, get a better discount, like learning about financial therapies and reinventing yourself.

So in hindsight, listening to your story is that you're part of that didn't happen in your younger life.

It kind of all plays out and happened in your later, in your elderhood.

Last two question I would like to ask you is, what do you think of death?

Are you scared to die?

And do you believe in an afterlife?

How many hours do you have to talk about that?

Well, we have another like 10 more minutes, but this is a question.

You know, it is a, in the near future, we will die someday, everyone, that's a fact.

So what is your view of it?

I am, I'm an atheist.

I believe that there is a force in the universe that we are all part of, but it has nothing to do with organized religion.

I'm very curious about dying.

I'm not afraid of it.

If I had, if somebody told me, you have a terminal disease and you're going to die in six months, that's a pretty heavy existential question turned into the reality.

But I am very much back to my family values, my wife and I, and I might have mentioned, my wife worked in a nursing home, a skilled care facility for almost 10 years.

So she has a lot of direct and by extension to me, experience working with people at the end of life in our current system.

And neither one of us has any desire to be demented Alzheimer's ridden 90-year-old.

In fact, my father had Alzheimer's.

We just, last year, my daughter-in-law, her father died of Alzheimer's at 79.

And we were very involved in his care in the last couple of years of his life.

I think part of your question there has to be, I think you have to ask yourself, what do you want the end of your life to be like?

And I know what I don't want it to be like, and that is someone who has lost all of their faculties and is an economic and emotional burden to the rest of their family, that I will not not let that happen to me.

I completely believe in the individual autonomy to when you want to end your life.

When is the right time to end your life?

I really strongly believe in that autonomy, or right to die.

How you execute that, if somebody gives you, you know, you find out that you have Alzheimer's, and things are only going to get worse, exactly how you exercise that autonomy, I think is a really, really challenging moral and legal question.

But that's where I'm at.

Got you.

You mentioned it's very, very, very important.

Is everyone at some point will be afraid to die.

But it's about how you choose what you're gonna do at the end of it.

That really, that was a very powerful message that you share.

And the last question, and let's end the interview with a more positive note.

What do you most look forward to, and what is next for you?

What I most look forward to is continuing to do what I'm doing, quite honestly.

Becoming, getting better at this, becoming, getting more experience, being able to help people in the best way that I can, being my best self in this, my role as a financial therapist.

I want to do this for the next 10 years.

I want this to be a whole, I only want to do it part time.

I also look forward to being able to dial in the amount of leisure time and things that my wife and I can do together.

And really the great life we have between living in the summers in Colorado and the winters in Savannah, Georgia.

Looking forward to continuing to improve on the current setup.

That is a good end to our interview.

Thank you very much for being on the Beyondhood podcast, John.

Nicole, thank you.

I really enjoyed it.

Thank you.

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