On May 22, at the age of 100 1/2, my grandmother Flora passed away. This post is transcript of the eulogy that I gave at her memorial service. My previous post about my grandfather is here.

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It is hard to speak about my grandmother without also speaking about my grandfather. They were such different people, and yet their lives were so deeply woven together that it feels somehow complete that they are together again now.

But I will try.

When someone lives to be 100, you learn very quickly that they did not get there by accident. In my grandmother Flora’s case, I think part of the secret was that she wasted absolutely nothing.

Not food. Not money. Not paper. Not a single rubber band.

When I was little, I would come over to her house and there was a drawer that seemed magical to me. It had two things in it: piles of S&H Green Stamps and countless rubber bands from the newspapers. I would lick the stamps and put them carefully into booklets. A full booklet of 1,200 stamps was worth $1.20 in cash, or $2 off household items, and Grandma Flora made sure we understood that those stamps were worth saving.

And the rubber bands? I turned those into rubber band balls.

Looking back, I realize she was teaching me something. Flora was a child of the Depression, and frugality was not just a habit for her. It was a way of respecting what you had, taking nothing for granted, and understanding that small things, saved and cared for, could add up to something meaningful.

That lesson stayed with me.

Years later, when I was in college, I had jobs and internships, and after my first high-paying internship at Hewlett-Packard. It paid $2,235 a month, which felt like a fortune at the time, and Grandma Flora taught me about saving and investing. She taught me about CDs and mutual funds, and I remember driving down to the Fidelity office in Palo Alto to open my first account in person, because the web wasn’t really a thing yet.

She understood money in a deeply practical way. She did her taxes by hand, in pencil. She believed in being careful, being prepared, and learning how things worked. And for me, those conversations were not just about finances. They were about responsibility, independence, and building a future one careful decision at a time.

This year marks my 10th year teaching Personal Finance at Stanford, and thousands of students have now heard me explain the Rule of 72, a simple way to figure out how long it takes an investment (or a debt) to double in size. They all hear that it’s a lesson I learned from my grandmother.

But when I think about Grandma Flora, I always think about her together with my grandfather. They were very different people, and yet they were always somehow in sync. There was something special about their relationship. It created a home that became a center for our family.

Their house was where we gathered for birthdays, holidays, celebrations, and even weddings. It was not just a house. It was a place where family gathered.

That is something Carolyn and I still aspire to today: to build a home that is not only where we live, but where the people we love feel welcomed, rooted, and connected.

A meaningful life is built the same way those stamp books were filled — one small act at a time. One stamp, one meal, one lesson, one holiday, one conversation, one kindness, one careful choice.

And in the end, if we are lucky, those small things become a legacy.

Grandma Flora’s legacy is all around us. It is in the family she helped build, the home she helped create, the lessons she passed down, and the love that continues in each of us.

May her memory be a blessing.