You may want to give to charity when you are planning your estate. Your legacy could then live on after your passing as some of your resources are utilized to make the world a better place.
If you do have philanthropic aims you have to decide on a vehicle or vehicles of charitable giving. One option is the creation of a private foundation. When you look into the subject you may be surprised to hear that most of these foundations don’t have any employees, and the majority of them are working with total assets that don’t reach the seven figures.
So it is in fact possible for people who aren’t multimillionaires or billionaires to start private foundations.
Another popular option exists in the form of donor advised funds. These funds allow you to recommend that grants be endowed to any number of different charities. However, you don’t have to deal with all of these different entities; you can make a single contribution into the fund and subsequently support multiple causes that you find to be meaningful.
If you place appreciated securities into one of these funds the capital gains tax is not applicable, and you are entitled to a charitable deduction when you contribute into a donor advised fund.
The key to effective giving is to make sure that any charity that you may choose is efficiently operated. To find out all the facts you can visit CharityNavigator.org. This is a very useful resource that has thousands of charities in its database. You can do the appropriate research and go forward confident in the knowledge that your contributions are going to be utilized wisely and efficiently.
Mr. Kraft assists clients primarily in the areas of estate planning and administration, Medicaid planning, federal and state taxation, real estate and corporate law, bringing the added perspective of an accounting background to his work.
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