audreyh1
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Last year we set up a donor advised fund for charitable gifting as part of our strategy of itemizing deductions every other year. Just like we pay property taxes for two years in the same year (Jan for prior, and Dec for current), we make charitable contributions to the fund every other calendar year - Jan for prior, and Dec for current.
In terms of donating from the fund - we are taking 30% of the value of the fund each year and gifting it to our charities of choice.
DH is running our "foundation". I need to work with him to coordinate which investments to pull funds from when he is ready to do so. It didn't even occur to him to consider this aspect and donations were automatically pulled from all investments proportionally.
Just wondering what other people do.
BTW - we had no trouble at all setting up donations to our charities of choice, even though almost none of them were on the pre-approved list, and some were quite tiny. Had a funny incident where one donation didn't go through. The envelope was addressed to the president rather than the treasurer of the organization, and check never was cashed and expired after 90 days. At which time we contacted the organization. Was easy to resubmit with a different addressee.
We are really enjoying the ease of using a donor-advised fund and the decoupling of tax timing for setting aside funds for donation with the actual gifting. We're also more disciplined about gifting now that the funds are already set aside and can't be used for any other purpose.
In terms of donating from the fund - we are taking 30% of the value of the fund each year and gifting it to our charities of choice.
DH is running our "foundation". I need to work with him to coordinate which investments to pull funds from when he is ready to do so. It didn't even occur to him to consider this aspect and donations were automatically pulled from all investments proportionally.
Just wondering what other people do.
BTW - we had no trouble at all setting up donations to our charities of choice, even though almost none of them were on the pre-approved list, and some were quite tiny. Had a funny incident where one donation didn't go through. The envelope was addressed to the president rather than the treasurer of the organization, and check never was cashed and expired after 90 days. At which time we contacted the organization. Was easy to resubmit with a different addressee.
We are really enjoying the ease of using a donor-advised fund and the decoupling of tax timing for setting aside funds for donation with the actual gifting. We're also more disciplined about gifting now that the funds are already set aside and can't be used for any other purpose.