Give All You Can

“I believe it was John Wesley who said, ‘Earn all you can, save all you can, give all you can.’ ” Tanya (Hildebrandt ’73) Shire is reflective as she shares this little bit of wisdom. She’s right; Wesley used this statement to outline a 1789 sermon called “The Use of Money.”

This is how Tanya and her husband Aaron live today. It was modeled for Tanya throughout her childhood by her mother, Maxine Hildebrandt. Maxine, however, was not a wealthy philanthropist—far from it. She was a single mother without a college degree who tithed from her gross income, stressed the value of education and hard work, and lived frugally for years to make a way for all three of her daughters to attend Houghton.

When Tanya and Aaron decided to create an endowed scholarship fund as their legacy gift through Houghton, there was one obvious person they wanted to honor: Tanya’s mother. The Maxine Hildebrandt Scholarship provides financial aid to Houghton students from out-of-state, single-parent families who maintain a strong GPA and who engage in at least one co-curricular activity. Essentially, a student who was very similar to Tanya herself—someone who maximizes his or her educational opportunities and whose family needs a helping hand.

As a retired Edward Jones financial advisor, Tanya knows there are three things that can happen to her personal assets after her passing: she can leave it to her family, she can leave it to charity, or she can leave it to Uncle Sam. Tanya is determined to eliminate Uncle Sam from this equation. She is using qualified charitable distributions (QCDs) from her IRA to make annual gifts to grow the Maxine Hildebrandt Scholarship, and she named Houghton University as the beneficiary of her IRA—which is a highly taxable asset. She is passing tax-free assets to her family, saving them the headache of estate or income taxes.

While at Houghton, Tanya had the opportunity to develop her natural leadership skills, equipping her for career and service throughout her life. She also had the chance to explore her highly competitive side—which she still finds joy in expressing today. Now that the Maxine Hildebrandt Scholarship is firmly established, Tanya is striving to make it the largest endowed scholarship fund at Houghton. “Step in, and head for the top,” she says. “Endowments are the gifts that keep on giving—make those dollars stretch!”