One of my clients — I’ll call him Jonathan — came to me recently with concerns about his estate planning. Jonathan was a successful corporate manager who received a big payday when a major firm acquired the company he worked for. With no children of his own, he’d arranged for most of his wealth to be divided between two favorite charities: a local boys club and an organization that helped homeless people train for work and find jobs. Life had been good to Jonathan, and he wanted to give back.
But recently, there had been some management changes at the homeless support agency, and Jonathan was no longer confident that his gift would be well used. He was thinking about removing them from his trust.
We suggested something that sounded to him like a bold plan, but was really quite simple. Amend your trust, we told him, so that upon your death your funds go to a donor-advised fund — a type of investment that manages contributions made by individual donors.
Jonathan knew what a DAF was. He was already using one for his annual charitable giving because it let him donate appreciated securities, thus maximizing his annual tax deduction. Like many people, however, he’d never thought about donating all his wealth to a DAF after his death. He was under the impression that a donor needed to be alive to advise the fund.
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