Planned Giving Insights and Information

The Donor Must Be the Owner

We frequently work to assist our clients in situations involving married couples. In some cases, the spouses are looking to establish a 2-life charitable gift annuity (CGA), whereby they will both be donors and they will both be beneficiaries (annuitants). There is no issue with potential gift tax consequences in cases where the couple’s marriage is recognized by federal law – such spouses may transfer unlimited amounts of wealth to each other without any possible gift tax. And if the CGA is funded with cash, there also is no issue with possible income tax, because there are no capital gains involved in the transfer of cash. If the gift annuity is funded with appreciated securities, however, there can be significant tax issues tied to the long-term capital gains inherent in the appreciated securities.

IRS Announces Tax Schedules, Exemptions, and QCD Limits for 2025

Many federal tax items are indexed annually for inflation, such as the income tax brackets for individuals and trusts, the standard deduction, the gift and estate tax exemption, and qualified charitable distribution (QCD) limits. The IRS recently announced what the new amounts will be for all 63 of these items in 2025. The new values will increase about 2.8% over the 2024 values they will replace. All of these changes are minor and should have little effect on the tax incentives that encourage donors to make charitable gifts.

Counting What Counts

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” insisted the CFO, parroting what is often accepted as revealed wisdom and usually attributed to management guru Peter Drucker (although the Drucker Institute insists he never said it). And yet, this “what gets measured gets managed” sentiment persists despite its obvious defect, namely, “But what are we going to count?” No less than theoretical physicist Albert Einstein is said to have stated, “Not all things worth counting are countable and not all things that count are worth counting.” Nevertheless, we in planned giving must hold ourselves and our programs accountable to our organizations and our donors. Doing that requires that we count … count something, but what? Before we delve into an integrated approach to counting planned gifts as a component of all fundraising, let us acknowledge that determining the value of a specific planned gift can be quite difficult. Significantly different values can be calculated for the same planned...

I Made My QCD CGA, Can I Have a QLAC Now?

Some early adopters of the qualified charitable distribution (QCD) charitable gift annuity have begun to turn their attention to another opportunity to reduce their required minimum distribution: the qualified longevity annuity contract (QLAC). If, like several clients we have heard from, your organization is receiving calls from donors asking if they “can do a QLAC” with your organization, here’s a primer on this vehicle, how it can be used to reduce required minimum distributions from an IRA, why a donor might confuse it with a deferred gift annuity, and some advice on how to redirect a donor’s interest towards a flexible gift annuity.