PG Calc Featured Articles

It’s clear – even to Congress – that donors and charities have been very pleased with the temporary IRA charitable rollover provision contained in the Philanthropy Protection Act of 2006.  Although the IRA charitable rollover expired at the end of December 2014, the gift planning community is working hard to convince lawmakers to continue, and ideally to expand and make permanent, the tax incentives for using IRAs to make charitable gifts during life.

There’s always going to be some minimum funding amount for a charitable remainder trust (CRT). Anything less simply won’t be sufficient. In such a situation, do you somehow try to make a CRT work anyway, or is it better to focus on either a charitable gift annuity (CGA) or some other alternative? As you might expect, it depends.

Everyone needs to go to the doctor now and again.  Getting a checkup on a regular basis is important to good health.   The same can be said for your organization's gift annuity program.  Without the benefit of routine assessments, your program may not succeed as well as it could.

Why assess your gift annuity program

There are at least four reasons to assess your gift annuity program.

July and August is audit season for many of our clients. With this annual visit from the auditor comes an annual request for calculations to satisfy Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) requirements. These requirements are designed to create uniformity in how charities report their planned gifts, allowing more meaningful comparison of financial statements across charities. While the primary purpose of the FASB requirements is to guide charities to report planned gifts in a standardized way, it is worth considering how these calculations may help you accomplish other tasks. Might your charity’s management team use these calculations, or related ones, to assess the success of your planned giving program, estimate investment and longevity risk, and make adjustments where appropriate?