Charitable Giving
Establishing your legacy
Establishing how to share your wealth will allow your legacy to live on for the people and causes you care about, including philanthropy, charitable giving, and intergenerational wealth and estate planning.
We’ll help you determine what works best for you to support your chosen charities. This may include setting up a donor-advised fund, making a bequest in your will, a beneficiary designation or donating an insurance policy. You may also enhance tax savings by donating publicly traded securities.
We can help you incorporate family members in your charitable giving discussions. This will ensure everyone understands how your wishes will factor into your overall estate plan while also helping reinforce communication and philanthropic values across generations.
With you, we’ll explore timing strategies to ensure you are giving in the most effective way. For example, giving during your lifetime may help you maximize tax benefits today while already making an impact for others.
A carefully constructed, tax-efficient giving plan can enhance the benefits to you, your family, and the causes you care about.
Where to begin
At Copper Leaf Financial, we simplify things for our clients when it comes to determining how they want to engage in charitable giving. The choices can be overwhelming, so we work with you to ensure you feel good about your decisions.
When we meet with our clients, we cover all the bases. We discuss the charitable planning process that encompasses:
Once you know what’s needed to meet all of your lifetime needs, then we will help you determine how much of your resources can reasonably be devoted to family giving and philanthropy.
Articulating your motivations and values allows you to develop a proactive, effective giving plan instead of giving reactively to donation requests.
The simplest way to organize your giving is to focus on specific causes or issues rather than giving across many.
Crafting a giving statement defines the What, Who, Where and Whys of your giving plan.
Philanthropy offers a unique opportunity to include family (however you define your family) in creating a family legacy.
Once you have completed the above steps, we can now develop a well-defined and thoughtful structure for your philanthropy.
It is at this point that we integrate your giving plan with your overall financial plan.
It is prudent to consider the following three segments when deciding how much you will give away: proactive giving, reactive giving, and emergency giving
The vehicles you use will provide a structure to help you carry out your giving plan. Some of the numerous vehicles to consider are:
- Check book or other direct giving
- Donation bunching to maximize tax deductions
- Donor advised funds (DAFs)
- Private foundations
- Donating appreciated capital gain assets
- Charitable remainder trusts
- Charitable lead trusts
- Designated funds and field of interest funds
- Gifts of retirement plan assets
- Program related investments through estate planning and bequests
- Giving circles
Having a clear structure in place will enable you to determine which organizations align with your giving goals and they can be added to your plan.
Once you’ve created a list of your organizations, the next step is to decide how to allocate your giving budget.
Keep up with the organizations you support by reading their annual reports, following them on social media, visiting their websites, signing up for their newsletters, and staying close to news shared by their boards and key decision-makers.
With a solid tracking plan and tracking process in place, it is important to review and refine your plan periodically
Resources
We have the tools to help you maximize your charitable potential.
Related Services
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