Doing Good

September 5th is the International Day of Charity and its purpose, at least in part, is to raise awareness for charities all over the world. Helping many folks plan, as we do, how their wealth can most benefit themselves and their families and communities, it seems an appropriate occasion to share a few thoughts on charity from our perspective.

Rather than recite all the techniques that help maximize estate, gift and income tax benefits of charitable gifts, it may be more useful to say: If you plan to make a significant gift to charity, whether it is on a one-time basis or in the aggregate over the coming years, meet with your advisors in advance and make sure you are structuring your gift in an optimal manner.

In estate planning documents such as your Will or Trust, there are some strategies you can use that you may not have thought about. For one, it is possible to give partial interests to charity and receive substantial tax benefits for doing so, even where a noncharitable person (such as your children) will receive benefits from the property before or after the charity. For example, you might leave a charity the income from your investment for a period of years and then your children receive the asset.

And if you hadn’t considered including a charity in your plan at all, maybe it’s really a matter of where they fit. In other words, possibly your plan should provide, in effect: “If all of the named individuals are deceased, then I leave X to charity.” You can feel better about your legacy even if the gift is far from guaranteed and, in a very real sense, enough folks doing this could change the world for the better.

If you’d like to talk with any of our attorneys about legal techniques to add charities to your wealth planning, please contact us.

*Intended as general guidance only and not as legal advice.