Growing with Gratitude
We talk about gratitude every year around this time, and there’s good reason for it. As the temperatures cool and the days grow shorter, something in us naturally begins taking stock. We look back at the year behind us — our place in our families and communities, our successes and failures, what we’ve gained and what we’ve lost — and when the “report card” is good, gratitude tends to rise to the surface.
Gratitude isn’t just a feeling; it’s something we do. We might say a word of thanks to someone who helped us, or express appreciation in a note or a phone call. And this time of year, many people express gratitude financially, which is why charitable giving spikes so dramatically in December; for some, this is the time of year they give.
Neuroscientists and contemplative traditions — including the Buddhist practice that I participate in — tell us that gratitude improves our well-being and even our physical health. So the real question becomes: how do we take something we feel at the end of the year and make it part of daily life? How do we avoid being one person for 364 days and a grateful person for only one?
Gratitude has not always come naturally to me, and I have long admired those who seem to walk through the world with steadiness and appreciation that I have never quite managed myself. I’ve had to learn gratitude, and I’m still learning it. Like anything meaningful, it requires practice — and a willingness to return to it again and again.
One practice that’s helped me is the use of a donor-advised fund to automate charitable giving. Instead of giving once a year, I might schedule monthly or quarterly contributions; if I would have given $600 at year-end, I spread it into $50 a month, and over time I have come to support more than 50 organizations this way. Even on days when I’m not consciously thinking grateful thoughts, my intentions are already moving out into the world through these small, scheduled acts of generosity, which happen regularly and quietly without waiting for my repeated inspiration.
This structure also makes me more open when organizations reach out. I read their letters more seriously and consider their needs with more attention, even if I can’t contribute to all of them. I’m not always sure whether gratitude created the giving or the giving created the gratitude, but the practice has changed me, and it has taught me that gratitude isn’t static — it evolves, and it matures alongside us, and it grows as we grow.
I see a similar evolution in the work we do at New Capital. Many clients come to us thinking our job is mainly to grow their wealth — and that is certainly a major part of what we do — but another part of our work, one that often goes unnoticed, is helping people understand what their wealth makes possible. Financial planning can reveal that giving isn’t a sacrifice; it is often deeply aligned with a client’s values, and it can be done without impairing their own goals.
When clients see this clearly — when they understand, based on real planning, that they have room — often plenty of it — to give — something shifts. They move from fear to confidence, from constraint to freedom, from “I can’t” to “I can,” and watching that shift happen is one of the greatest privileges of this profession.
Even the Reminders system we’ve built into NCM360, our groundbreaking proprietary client portal — years in the making — is part of this work. It helps clients follow through on their intentions, whether that’s supporting charities, helping family, or honoring annual giving traditions. It isn’t about pressure; it’s about support. Gratitude is easier to practice when there is a structure in place to hold it.
Gratitude can be private, but very often it emerges in community. Giving as a family too, can be deeply meaningful, though rarely simple, because different generations carry different values and priorities. Successful family giving requires openness, listening, humility, and sometimes a long runway, and when families find their way through those conversations, the shared act of giving can strengthen bonds that already exist and form new ones.
As we look toward 2026, it’s impossible not to acknowledge the tone of the world we’re currently living in, where hatred and division have become more visible than any of us would hope. Differences in race, religion, nationality, orientation, or belief — things that should enrich a society — are too often used as weapons, here and around the world, and it is painful to witness.
In a climate like this, gratitude becomes more than a personal virtue; it becomes a quiet form of resistance, a refusal to allow fear, anger, or dehumanization to define how we move through the world. Gratitude pulls us back toward compassion, shared humanity, generosity, and the responsibility we have to one another, reminding us that even small expressions of care can counteract the coarsening of public life.
If I had to capture financial gratitude in one word, it would be freedom: freedom from the illusion that we are solely responsible for our financial well-being; freedom to recognize the enormous role of luck and circumstance; freedom to give without fear; and freedom to live with more intention, more clarity, and more alignment between values and actions.
If you’re looking for a way to reconnect with your own financial values at the end of this year, I offer the three timeless questions from the Jewish sage Hillel — questions I return to often:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
If not now, when?
These questions hold the essence of gratitude: self-respect, responsibility to others, and the urgency of acting on what matters.
I am personally most grateful this year for my colleagues — the people who make this work possible, purposeful, and deeply human — and for the families we serve, who trust us with their plans, their worries, and their aspirations.
As you take stock of your own year, my hope is that you’ll find places where gratitude can take deeper root — not necessarily through dramatic leaps, but through small, steady steps. Gratitude doesn’t need to go from zero to sixty; it can begin by simply going from zero to one, one to two, six to ten, and so forth.
And if something in this reflection resonates, I invite you to reach out. Let’s talk about how your financial life can support a more intentional, joyful, and grateful year ahead.
Wishing all our clients, business partners, friends, family, and all beings everywhere a joyous holiday season and a most happy new year.
Leonard M. Golub, CFA
President