Planning tools to keep in your back pocket

The team at the Delaware County Foundation understands that it sometimes can be hard to know where to start a conversation with a client about charitable planning. As you ask questions about the causes your clients love and how your clients intend to support the community in their estate plans, you’ll need quick access to a few go-to planning tools to inspire the dialogue. To help you do just that, we’ve assembled this list of a few of our favorite planning tools.

Qualified Charitable Distributions

Under the now permanent IRA charitable rollover laws, your 70 ½+ clients can direct up to $100,000 annually of required minimum distributions to charitable organizations, avoiding inclusion in taxable income. These distributions are called Qualified Charitable Distributions (QCDs). Although donor-advised funds can’t receive QCDs, there are still plenty of ways our team at the Delaware County Foundation can help your clients take advantage of this tool for lifetime gifts. Also, your clients can name their donor-advised fund as the beneficiary of a qualified plan, which is still a tax-savvy bequest strategy.

Charitable Remainder Trusts and Charitable Gift Annuities

They’re back! Tax reform’s elimination of the Pease provision, which limited charitable deductions for high-income taxpayers, means your clients can better leverage a single, upfront gift to a charitable remainder trust or a charitable gift annuity.

Bundling . . . or Is It Bunching?

Whether you call it “bundling” or “bunching,” clients who want to maximize their charitable deductions under the new tax laws can benefit from making two or more years’ worth of charitable contributions in a single year. This helps push taxpayers over the itemizing threshold, where they can reap the benefit of deducting the full value of their donations. (Quick stat: Because of tax reform, just 10 percent of taxpayers itemized deductions in 2018, compared with 30% in 2017.)

Talking with your clients about charitable giving

A conversational approach using plain language can ease the barriers to discussing community impact with your clients.

When the time comes to discuss philanthropy with clients, advisors are often left wishing there were an easier way to discuss the results achieved with a charitable gift than simply to rely on aspirational statements such as “Let’s be sure your money makes a big difference.”

Ask Good Questions

The key to engaging in a more productive planning conversation with your clients is to ask more questions. Think about the long list of questions you ask clients when you are advising them on investment vehicles, or drafting estate planning documents! A few good questions can give a big boost to charitable planning, too. Here are a few of our favorites:

• What problem raises your eyebrows the most when you read about it in the news?

• What are the pieces of the puzzle that would need to come together to solve that problem in your community?

• If there were one piece of that puzzle you could put into place with a magic wand, what would it be?

How We Can Help
The Delaware County Foundation helps you build a plan based on the answers to these questions and more. For example:

• Our team helps you refine the client’s definition of the “community problem” they want to solve.

• We work with you and your client to identify practical ways that change could happen and how philanthropic investment can support the change.

• We can connect your client with nonprofits that are working in the area of desired change, and identify meaningful and attainable milestones to measure success.

• We can advise on what level of investment is appropriate and help identify other likely collaborators to make change happen.