MARK: I'm Mark Riepe, and this is Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about financial decisions and the cognitive and emotional biases that can cloud our judgment.
We often talk on this show about how your financial life is a means to an end and not an end unto itself.
And so, today, we’re going to bringing that to life with a different sort of episode.
Instead of going through one financial decision with one of our Schwab experts, we're going to focus on one true-life story.
This is Mary Anne.
MARY ANNE: My name is Mary Anne Donaldson, and I live in Hingham, Massachusetts. I grew up as a twin. My parents were told they couldn’t have children, and after 15 years of marriage, surprise, I was born, and 15 minutes later, my sister was born.
MARK: Mary Anne grew up in northern New Jersey with her two wonderful parents.
MARY ANNE: My mother collected antiques long before we were born, and certainly through our entire life. She used to do appraisals for insurance companies, for law firms. She did auctions. She had a little antique shop up in the Catskill Mountains. My father, who was a salesman for bakers and confectioner supplies, and he fashioned himself as an ambassador of commerce, so he would teasingly say he was an ambassador of commerce. And they were two of the most loving, dedicated parents. I mean, I have nothing to compare it to, except what friends say, but it was a very easy way to grow up.
MARK: Not surprisingly, Mary Anne and her twin sister Virginia were very close and weren’t shy about showcasing their similarities.
MARY ANNE: And we did everything together. We each probably had a friend that we were closer to, but it was always the two of us together. We dressed the same every single day until we went to college. And even the first year in college, preparatory to going to college, we bought outfits to wear. We bought the same outfits for the most part.
MARK: But even though on the outside they looked exactly the same, on the inside there were differences. Each was their own person.
MARY ANNE: She had a fear of nothing. I had a fear of everything that I thought was dangerous or fretful. She didn’t fret a day in her life. I did it all for her. Early on I knew, and I was very … you can see in pictures where I was sort of the stoic one. I was the serious one. My hat was on correctly, you know, I was all there. She … her little bonnet was askew. She was very adventuresome. My mother put us in the carriage as little children. She decided to undress me in the carriage, and … you know, she was just very spunky.
MARK: Mary Anne and her sister were inseparable—until it was time to move off to college.
MARY ANNE: My parents thought it best that we would go to different colleges, but that was kind of built in. Virginia wanted to be a nurse. I did not want to be a nurse. I wanted nothing to do with the medical field. I wanted to be a librarian. So we picked our colleges based upon what our aspirations at the time were. She went to school in Pittsburgh. I went to school in Washington, D.C.
MARK: For many kids, going away to college and living away from home can be an adjustment, but for Mary Anne it was tough.
MARY ANNE: It was very difficult. I remember to this day. My parents dropped us off. Me … I went to Trinity College in Washington, D.C. They dropped us off. Virginia was there, and then they were taking her to Pittsburgh, and so they were leaving. Well, I just wailed. Tears were all over the place, and my mother said, "It’s time to go to Pittsburgh," and off they went. And I was devastated. I hadn’t lived without Virginia. I hadn’t done anything without Virginia.
MARK: Though the twins were now separated, they kept in touch through letters. After Virginia graduated, she moved to Washington D.C. to be closer to Mary Anne. But each had their own academic pursuits now.
MARY ANNE: I got a master’s in library science after I got an undergraduate degree in history. That lasted until I left to go to California … I left to get married and go to California, and she stayed in Washington, D.C., for another year. And then she went to New Haven to get a master’s degree.
MARK: Virginia pursued a career in psychology, earned her PhD, and became an advocate in the field.
MARY ANNE: She moved to the Boston area and enrolled in a PhD program in psychology at Boston College, but as she was going through school, she taught at Mass General Hospital. She also established a private practice as a clinical nurse practitioner with an office in Cambridge. And she also worked at a managed-care practice. She taught at Northeastern in their Graduate School of Nursing. She was very active in the professional association. The legislature just adopted legislation that she fought for 14 years where nurse practitioners could prescribe without the auspices of a physician. So she was very, very engaged in her profession.
MARK: On the other side of the country, Mary Anne found that living in California can require some getting used to.
MARY ANNE: I wasn't cut out of the same cloth. My shyness, my stoicism, wasn’t totally adaptable to the way Los Angeles operated. But I just made do, and I immersed myself in my profession, which at that time was to be a law librarian, a librarian for a law firm.
MARK: What exactly does a law librarian do? Well, it’s not quite what you think.
MARY ANNE: For one, I have a predilection that I think librarians can be too librarian-like. And so my whole career I spent trying to … not de-professionalize the librarian, but let the clients or whomever I was serving know that there’s nothing I can’t do, nothing I won’t do, whatever. And so I ended up with two monikers at two different law firms I worked for. One group of lawyers nicknamed me "the Queen of Sleaze." The other group called me "Mad Dog Donaldson." And the reason these names came up was because I branched out beyond what a traditional law librarian would do. And that’s research about "Find me a case," or "When was this law passed" or "Can you do a legislative history on something like this?" Early, early, you know, 30 years ago, before it became in vogue, they would ask me for background information on witnesses, or potential parties, or adverse parties, etc. I love the thrill of a chase, and that goes across my whole life. So I loved the idea that I could, quote, dig up the dirt.
MARK: In addition to her professional success, Mary Anne’s sister Virginia had other passions, pursuing multiple hobbies and volunteer activities.
MARY ANNE: She played tennis a lot. She went skiing a lot, through the course of her time. She had a lot of hobbies, but she also was very active in the nursing societies. She then … when she moved to Hingham and bought this antique house, she became very active in the Hingham Historical Commission. She was on the Hingham Historical District’s Commission. She was president of the Hingham Historical Society. And she had goals and missions for each of those entities.
MARK: When Mary Anne started thinking about retirement, she, of course, consulted Virginia—especially about whether relocating made sense.
MARY ANNE: I was 10 years past when a normal person retires. Virginia and I used to talk about it, "Should I move back?" And she said, "Mary Anne, you can do whatever you want, obviously." But she said, "You have to have something to do. You have a plan, or you’re going to be unhappy." And I think what she was also saying was, "And I don’t want to be pestered if you’re bored."
So, you know, I sort of just stayed in Los Angeles, kind of waiting for propitious moments. The firm gave me a lot of … gave everybody a lot of vacation, and so we used to travel a lot. Virginia and I would travel at least four times a year and had great fun doing it. If she was going to give a party, I would fly back. And so she would come out. Neighbors in California used to say to me, "When is Virginia coming out?" And I said, "What am I, chopped liver?" You know, so there was a great deal of cross-pollination across the country.
MARK: In November 2019, Mary Anne and Virginia took a month-long trip to Africa together. They were both in great spirits and great health. But a few months later, in March of 2020, that all changed.
MARY ANNE: Well, you know, we don’t get our choices in this world. And so I got a call 4:30 on a Thursday afternoon from a Hingham cell phone. And I thought, "I wonder what this is." And I knew it couldn’t be good. And so it was a police detective and … saying … verifying who I was, and then saying, "Your sister has died." I said, "What?" And she died in her house, sudden cardiac death, which I think means a heart attack. Patients had come to the house, and she had not unlocked the doors to open it for them. And they came back again, knowing something was wrong. So they called the police. And that’s how the progression took place.
MARK: Mary Anne's husband had passed away years before, and her sister was all the family she had left.
MARY ANNE: It never occurred to me that Virginia was going to die young. Well, it did. I used to say, "Remember, Daddy died at 73. You have a disposition like him. You know, watch it." She was a nurse. She knew more than I did. And she used to say, "You know, Mary Anne, if one of us should go, it should be me first, because I could cope better than you would be able to cope."
So totally unexpected. We had spent a month in Africa in the prior November together. Picture of health.
MARK: Mary Anne took some solace in the fact she was able to have a proper funeral for her sister before the world closed due to COVID.
MARY ANNE: Hers was the last funeral to take place in the Archdiocese of Boston. They closed down the churches the afternoon of her funeral. She slid by in everything she did. She worried about nothing and just slid by.
It was a great funeral. And I say that not so much from me, but from everybody else who attended. And we had an antique hearse that took her from the funeral home to the church in Hingham Square, the center of town. And then the antique hearse took her from the church to the cemetery. And the funeral director said to me, "Now you can walk behind that hearse, but nobody else can because we don’t want to stop traffic." And I just turned around to everybody and I said, "Come on, we can walk to the cemetery." And so this whole throng of people from the church, with the bagpiper, walked up to the cemetery. It was just great. People still talk about it. And that was two and a half years ago.
MARK: The day of the funeral, Mary Anne decided she would move back to the East Coast and take over Virginia's historic Main Street home in Hingham. And she decided she would fulfill one of her sister's dreams by creating a speaker's series in Hingham.
MARY ANNE: I got the idea because she had always wanted to set up a distinguished speaker series, and we had talked about it. After she left the Historical Society, we had talked about it, but really didn’t do anything about it. And I thought, because of the feedback I had gotten from her friends and people in town and everything, I thought, "You know, this is the time to do this." This is the time when … I had sold my house in California, which is a wonderful place to sell a house. And it was a wonderful time to sell a house. But I also decided that, you know, Uncle Sam didn’t need to share all of that, that I could … you know. And so I decided I should do something for the town of Hingham, for her friends. She loved to party, and so we should combine education and then a reception afterwards.
MARK: Mary Anne threw herself into event planning mode. For the speaker, she wanted to get Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jon Meacham. She wanted the event to be educational without being overtly political, and Meacham was her first choice to be the speaker.
MARY ANNE: And I had first heard him speak at Barbara Bush’s funeral, and I thought he was humble, he was incisive, he was smart, he was humorous. And then I had heard him a couple of times, you know, on the internet, YouTube, and stuff like that. So I thought, "You know, I’m going to call him."
So I called his agent, and somebody said to me, "Mary Anne, you’ll never get him." I said, "Well, you don’t know until you try." So I sat down on my porch, and I called the agent, and the receptionist said, "Oh, I’ll have the agent call you back." I thought, "Yeah, right. OK." So I went about my business, and the agent called me back, and he said, "Tell me why you want to do it." And I said, "I want to do this because I want to leave a legacy in my sister’s name for people in the town, for her professional peers, for my friends, my professional peers."
MARK: The event was a huge success—over 300 people attended the lecture. And Mary Anne knew her sister would have been proud.
MARY ANNE: If I didn’t remember it, everybody came up to me and said, "Virginia would love this." They have reminded … and my retort was, "Yes, she’d be shocked that I could do this." She couldn’t have done it any better, because every single thing I did I bounced by in my head, "What would Virginia say?" We both had the same sense of taste and things like that. She was much more fastidious, probably, about things than I would tend to be. Well, I grew fastidious, infinitum over this past year. She would be thrilled, absolutely thrilled.
MARK: Mary Anne was able to use her donor-advised fund to pay for the event in her sister's honor.
MARY ANNE: It was the most simple, beneficial thing I’ve ever done. And will continue to do.
MARK: Mary Anne has great advice for anyone facing a similar circumstance in life, and that is to focus on the positive.
MARY ANNE: One is you cannot let adversity run your life. So, therefore, as sad as I could be, as quizzical as I could be about why it happened, why it happened to Virginia, why it happened to me, I divorced myself from all of those questions over time and said, "You are going to be productive. You’re not going to whine. When you get sad, you’re going to screw your head the other way and look at something to brighten the day. You’re going to look at … you’re going to be grateful for what you have. It’s not Virginia, but you know what? It was 73 years of having Virginia, who can inform, you know, my next 20 years." And so I looked to what Virginia instilled in me, I looked to what my parents instilled in me, I looked to what my husband instilled in me, and thought, "You can do this, Mary Anne. You can move on."
And so that’s the most important thing is that I moved on and that I moved on doing something for somebody else, as well as for myself. And that it was so well received. I planned a party without Virginia, and everybody had a good time. I planned an event without Virginia, and everybody thought I was just as good as she was. I mean, nobody ever compared us. We were different personality-wise. You know, you just … you put your head in the sand when you have to, and you pick it up when you have to and just move on and make sure … I like to have fun—I don’t like pain—so make sure that you have fun doing it.
MARK: Mary Anne Donaldson is a retired law librarian. She lives in her historic home in Hingham, Massachusetts. We have a link to the Hingham Historical Commission in the show notes.
Mary Anne's story about her sister illustrates several things we've discussed in previous episodes of this show.
First, it's important to have a plan. Planning for the unexpected makes it easier on surviving relatives and allows them to focus on what really matters.
Second, if you want to honor someone through a legacy, charitable giving can help you achieve that goal. Mary Anne knew she wanted to create a speaker series in her sister's memory—and her financial consultant helped her make that happen in a way that was tax-smart and sustainable.
Finally, I really like what Mary Anne said at the end about not letting adversity run your life. We try to help investors with their financial decisions on this show—and we know that a lot of them are facing very real crises and disasters.
Our founder, Chuck Schwab, says, "Investing is an act of optimism." It could be that you are facing a messy divorce or the loss of a loved one, or maybe you've faced a huge decline in your net worth. Getting into the right mindset to even approach the problem is often the hardest part. But you can do it.
And once you get started, the momentum can be unstoppable.
Thanks for listening to this special episode of Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab.
If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app.
For important disclosures, see the show notes and Schwab.com/FinancialDecoder.
