Click below to listen to Episode 133 – Creative Giving Strategies
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Creative Giving Strategies
Learn about unique ways that you can pay-it-forward through creative giving techniques.
Is creative giving something that has crossed your mind when it comes to your investments and legacy? If giving back is part of how you want to be remembered, then this episode is for you! Christian Financial Advisors is here to help you find unique ways to give back and help create a positive impact in our world.
This is such a great episode that coincides with the giving season we are in right now at the end of the year! Bob and Shawn discuss unique and creative ways that you can give using devices like donor-advised funds or even creating your own family-giving fund. Really, no matter which way you decide to give back with all that God has blessed you with, paying it forward is a way to love your neighbor as yourself.
HOSTED BY: Bob Barber, CWS®, CKA®
CO-HOST: Shawn Peters
Mentioned In This Episode
Christian Financial Advisors
Bob Barber, CWS®, CKA®
Shawn Peters
National Christian Foundation
Bible Verses In This Episode
PSALM 24:1
The earth is the Lord’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it.
Want to ask a question about your specific situation? Schedule a complimentary 15 minute phone call.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Intro:
Welcome to Christian Financial Perspectives, where you’re invited to gain insight, wisdom, and knowledge about how Christians integrate their faith life and finances with a biblical worldview. Here’s your host, Christian investment advisor, financial planner, and coach, Bob Barber.
Shawn:
Welcome to another episode of Christian Financial Perspectives. When this episode airs, it should be run around Christmas time. So we thought it would be a good time to share some giving strategies. Now, these are not necessarily giving strategies that have to be used at the end of the year, but that’s a usually a good time. So, Bob, why don’t you introduce our topic.
Bob:
So what I’m going to be doing today, Shawn, is I’m gonna be giving a workshop that I have given many times in a lot of churches, so I know this material very well. I developed this program and we call it the 10-4-4 giving strategies, and it’s all about planned giving. So we’re gonna, today, we’re gonna share 10 planned giving strategies, 4 planned giving time periods, and 4 planned giving tools. That’s why I call it 10-4-4. I just thought right around Christmas time, it’s always good to talk about giving because that’s what Christmas is.
Shawn:
Yeah. Amen.
Bob:
All right. So we’re gonna get right into this. This is a long presentation, but I’m gonna try to do all this in 20-25 minutes max, and this is something that you might wanna tell your church about. If you’d like us to come present this in your church, then we certainly can, and we get a lot more in detail when we do a live presentation. But we’re gonna do a PowerPoint today. So you can see this as we go through it, this is the actual PowerPoint presentation that we give. So the first planned giving strategy is your estate plan. Such a simple thing. This is where you take your estate plan and you include your church, your favorite charities, a family giving fund, we’ll explain that in a little bit, in your will or trust as one of the heirs and beneficiaries.
Shawn:
Pretty straightforward.
Bob:
It is. Very much so. The second one is, go ahead, Shawn. I’m gonna let you there.
Shawn:
Number two is based on retirement plan assets, so including your favorite charity or charities or family giving fund as one of your primary or contingent beneficiaries. So some examples of this would include any IRAs, 401Ks, 403Bs, TRP – thrift savings plan, or annuities.
Bob:
And Shawn, I see this, this is one of the most efficient ways to give to a ministry or a church because you’re taking money that would normally be taxed that would go to your children and now have to pay tax on on it, and you’re giving it to a ministry that’s a 501c3, so they won’t have to pay tax.
Shawn:
So, Bob, what’s this chart that we have shown on screen? What are these numbers actually giving us an indication of?
Bob:
This gives us an an indication of how much is in the different plans and the billions and billions of dollars. All right. The third giving strategy is highly appreciated stocks, might be a little low this year, but the bull markets will come back, and last year would’ve been a great time. So that’s where you take the stocks and instead of giving cash from your bank account to a charity, you donate appreciated stock, and then you don’t have to pay the capital gain tax on that.
Shawn:
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense. So instead of selling it and then giving them the cash, you just donate the stocks directly?
Bob:
That’s correct. We can help you do that. That’s one of the services that we do for free of charge here at Christian Financial Advisors.
Shawn:
All right. Number four involves real estate. So whether that’s land such as residential, commercial, farm and ranch, maybe a house or houses, condo, condos, apartments, office buildings, but no timeshares,
Bob:
Timeshares are way, way too complicated. We’ve had actually, people say, well, can I dump my timeshare over on in it? No, you can’t. It’s too complicated. But we have run across people over the years, we had a client about six years ago, and she had nearly an acre in the middle of San Antonio that had been in her family for years. She sold that in the millions and gave that away. But I mean, she didn’t celebrate. She actually gave it away and turned it into a charitable gift annuity with a major Christian university. So that’s a great example of using real estate. So planned giving number five, strategy number five is just looking at your business interest. You know, we’ve got here in the picture, I mean, this is an example of a major business, Caterpillar, and they could donate some of their stock to the business. Or, I could even just, you take a business and the National Christian Foundation works with this where they become a part owner in your business. Okay. Maybe like a 2% share or a 3% share.
Shawn:
But you can set that up as a non-voting interest.
Bob:
That’s right.
Shawn:
So yes, they do have a partial ownership, but that doesn’t mean that all of a sudden the charity’s gonna tell you how to run the business.
Bob:
No.
Shawn:
I guess that’s kind of an important thing.
Bob:
This comes up to the part of Psalms 24:1 with, “The earth is the Lords and everything in it,” and where you believe your business belongs to the Lord, you can take a percent of your business and actually give it to charity. So what it earns, and you know, I need to look at doing this myself because I just think about this, this would be pretty, pretty powerful.
Shawn:
Well, planned giving strategy number six is oil and gas interest. So this could be related to mineral rights, oil, natural gas, water rights, a lot of different options there.
Bob:
And you can give a percentage. You don’t have to give it all. So you can give a percentage in that case. Then just think about that old vehicle you might have and your car, or maybe it’s some artwork that you have. Maybe it’s a boat, and you’ll hear their advertisements, Cars 4 Kids. So that’s an example of where you donate an old car, you donate an old boat that you have, or doesn’t have to be old, it could be new as well. That can be turned, actually, into a gift to charity.
Shawn:
So planned giving strategy number eight. We have precious metals and stones. So gold, silver, diamonds, emeralds, really just any kind of valuable jewelry.
Bob:
Remember that gold and silver do not carry near the tax advantages that other investments do. So this is a very viable, great thing to do by giving that to a charity. You’ll get the tax deduction, though, for the value that the gold is. And all these, you get the tax deduction for the that it is. All right. Then again, we just mentioned this earlier, like your IRAs, your 401ks, not only that, but any life insurance policies you have, there’s always a part that’s the main primary beneficiary, and there’s contingent, and you have a percentage, and you could make a life insurance policy a percentage beneficiary of your life insurance policy. Then the 10th giving strategy that we believe in is if you’re selling a major asset, like a piece of property, it’s actually give before selling. I have an example here of a $300,000 asset that’s been fully depreciated. In the first example, we have where you sell the property. Then, you take $30,000 and you give that as a cash gift. The net after tax capital gain is gonna be $195,000 in this case, okay, after you pay all the capital gains that are due on the $300,000.
Shawn:
And you gave the gift.
Bob:
That’s correct. But if you took that piece of property and you gave a portion of that asset before it was sold, now you can increase that gift to $40,000. So you’ve gone from a 10% giving to, what is that? Near 14, about 14, 13.5-14% of the gift. So you’ve increased the gift size and you haven’t hurt yourself at all.
Shawn:
You still get the same net after the capital gains tax and giving the gift. But the benefit in this case is the receiving charity ended up getting a larger amount.
Bob:
And we also use vehicles like a charitable gift annuity and charitable remainder trust. I’m going to explain how that works later.
Shawn:
So now we’re gonna get into the 4 planned giving time periods. Remember, this is the 10-4-4. We just went over the 10 types of strategies. Now, we’re gonna cover the planned giving time periods, and those are 1. Give now, 2. Give later 3. Give asset now, but keep the income, and 4. Keep the asset, but give the income.
Bob:
Okay. So these are things that you can give now. We mentioned some of these earlier, things like stocks, real estate, collectibles, business interests, precious metals, miscellaneous valuable goods, and oil and gas interests. Or you could give later. You could do the same thing. Like your estate plan is where you’re giving later, your beneficiary of your IRAs, annuities, beneficiary of life insurance policies, or even a donor advised giving fund.
Shawn:
And number three, the give now, but keep the income for your lifetime. So the two very popular ones, options for those, charitable gift annuity as well as charitable remainder trust.
Bob:
And we’re gonna get into how that works here in just a second.
Shawn:
We will. Yes. Stay tuned.
Bob:
The fourth one is to keep the asset, but give the income. This is where you can create a passive income for yourself, rental income, dividends, oil and gas revenues, and business income. So, the tools that we use for this are the donor advised giving fund, the charitable gift annuity, the charitable remainder trust, and the charitable lead trust. So let’s get into how these work.
Shawn:
The giving tool number one, this is the donor advised fund as well as the family giving fund.
Bob:
Yeah, it’s the same thing. It’s just what a lot of people call it.
Shawn:
So the first thing similar to a family foundation, but without the headaches you receive an immediate tax deduction of up to 50% of your adjusted gross income. Recommend grants to your church and favorite ministries at any time in the future. In any amount.
Bob:
That’s right.
Shawn:
And they’re advantageous in a year of high income for tax purposes.
Bob:
So we’ve used this in cases where somebody maybe gets a big bonus, and their income’s way up this year, but it’s not gonna be next year. So they could use the donor advised fund and actually do pre giving. This is where you can take stocks and give it to the donor advised fund. All these things that we’ve mentioned, you can give it to the donor advised fund, get the tax deduction for it. They sell the asset, it becomes cash, and now you can invest it, and then that’s like a family foundation. We call it a family giving fund because you can actually name it. I have one, it’s called the Barber Family Giving Fund. Our Barber family giving fund is set up to where 20% of our estate goes to that fund, and then we name the charities that we love.
Shawn:
And then obviously would support the charities of your choice.
Bob:
Exactly. So you got it. So then there’s the charitable gift annuity. This is very favorable for someone that says, I have the asset, but I need that asset for income.
Shawn:
Right.
Bob:
So they can give the asset, and that gift now is gonna give back a guaranteed income for life, but it’s considered a gift, and then it turns into a lifetime annuity. So actually, cause it’s a gift, you get a tax deduction. It’s tax advantaged income. So here’s an example. We got Betty Smith or John Doe, age 75. They donate $100,000 to a charitable gift annuity. In return, they’re gonna receive 5.8% for their life.
Shawn:
Or in this case, $5,800 tax advantaged annual payout for life.
Bob:
And when we say tax advantaged, for the first few years, they won’t have to pay any tax on that. So you think about this, are you getting that at your bank? Are you getting nearly 6% today? The answer of course is no, not right now. Not yet.
Shawn:
If you got a mortgage recently, you’re probably paying at least that much or more.
Bob:
Yep. So here, in this case, you’re getting a $44,000 charitable tax deduction.
Shawn:
Okay. But that also generates a $24,270 immediate gift for, in this case, Betty Smith’s church or her favorite ministry.
Bob:
So isn’t that neat. You can take that tax deduction. So you got the $5,800 coming at you, I mean if Betty’s 75, if she lives to 95, she’s gonna live 20 years.
Shawn:
And Bob, question? Why is it the $5,800 in the first number of years you don’t pay anything? Is that because of the fact the $24,270 was generated as immediate gift? So basically that $5,800 goes kind of towards that?
Bob:
Well, exactly. You can use up the $44,000 charitable tax induction towards that.
Shawn:
Gotcha.
Bob:
Then we have example number two where we have a couple, so the payout’s gonna be less, Shawn, because it’s based on two lives. But this is a $100,000 gift that they give. They get a 4.6% payout, a $29,000 charitable tax deduction, and an immediate gift to their church of $16,000. Now, these are examples, and we use the National Christian Foundation to help. They’re the ones that underwrite these charitable gift annuities, which is one of the largest Christian foundations in the entire world.
Shawn:
So for our viewers, listeners, would that be considered kind of like the administrator, almost?
Bob:
It is. It is.
Shawn:
In the setup?
Bob:
They could go to ncfgiving.com and they’ll see the National Christian Foundation. These are the sample payouts. Now you’ll see the older you are, the higher the payout, the younger you are, the less payout.
Shawn:
I mean, makes sense.
Bob:
Does it? Yeah, because you live longer.
Shawn:
The older you get, the less likely you’re to live much longer.
Bob:
Exactly. That’s true. And you’ll see for a married couple, the rates are a little bit lower, but not bad payout rates. Now, I do wanna mention that these payout rates are subject to change. They change with the interest rate environments.
Shawn:
This is just kind of an average example.
Bob:
Right. And so if someone actually wanted to do this, we’ll get the actual rates of what they would be at the time. All right.
Shawn:
All right. So let’s do giving tool number three, which is a charitable remainder trust. Just some of the different aspects of that. This one is used for giving an asset now, but keeping the income for life, offers major tax advantages when selling a highly appreciated asset, creates an immediate income tax deduction when the asset is donated, when asset is sold, no capital gain taxes due.
Bob:
You hear that?
Shawn:
Which is nice. Offers a higher income base for life due to elimination of capital gain tax on the sell of the asset, and reduces or eliminates estate taxes.
Bob:
That’s because it’s not part of your estate. So, you’ve got this asset. Remember, I mentioned that we had a client and she had a property in San Antonio that sold for in the million. So, let’s take a $2 million example. Your basis in that property is basically zero. You’ve depreciated it out, you sell it for $2 million, you’re gonna owe a good $400,000-$500,000 in tax. If you put your property in the charitable remainder trust before you sell it, you will owe zero tax. You won’t owe any tax. You’ll receive a tax deduction. Now remember, you’ve given your property to the charitable remainder trust, but you’ll receive income. So now all that $2 million, instead of income being on 1.5 million or 1.4 million after tax, you’re actually gonna have a higher income, because now you’ve got what would’ve gone to tax is now gonna go towards income.
And that income could not only be on, just take myself as an example, not only my life, it could be on my children’s lives as well. So they can receive income from that. But see what it said, “charitable remainder”? By the second generation, the remainder will go into a charity. Here you use your giving fund. So now you’ve created an endowment in your family name.
Shawn:
That’s cool.
Bob:
Pretty neat. Pretty amazing giving tool. The giving tool number four is what we refer to as a charitable lead trust. I’m gonna let you read that off and then I’ll explain what this means.
Shawn:
Sounds good. So, charitable lead trust – for keeping an asset, but giving the income for a set number of years. So instead of for life. Donor receives a charitable income tax deduction in the year the trust is created and good for donors who desire to make a multi-year charitable pledge and accelerate the charitable deduction.
Bob:
So what you’re doing here is let’s take like I own a hous , and it’s completely owned and I’m getting rent from it. Well, what I can do is I can give that asset to a charitable lead trust and keep that income for a set number of years, and then it can revert to the trust, and I can receive it back. I can actually give the asset and bring get the asset back. So, as the example, I’m giving the house, the income from it’s gonna go to the charity, and then I take it back after 10 years, but it gives me the tax deduction up front for doing that to a certain percentage. These are very complicated types of giving tools, but they’re in a high tax bracket.
Shawn:
There’s a price sometimes. Yep.
Bob:
Really, really great. Really great one to use. So now we did it, we got through this very quickly. And like I say, in a live setting, I’ll go into detail a lot more in all of these, but for times sake, here we are.
Shawn:
No one has to sit here and either watch or listen to a 45 plus minute presentation.
Bob:
That’s right.
Shawn:
Okay. So we’re gonna go over the summary of benefits of planned giving. So number one, income tax advantages.
Bob:
Number two, capital gain tax advantages.
Shawn:
Number three, helps charities further their mission.
Bob:
Number four, giving is thought out and intentional.
Shawn:
Number five teaches your family the importance of giving. That’s s good one.
Bob:
Number six, it is releases the stronghold of materialism.
Shawn:
Amen. Number seven, it’s scriptural that it is more blessed to give than receive.
Bob:
It’s an excellent estate planning strategy.
Shawn:
And number nine, helps fulfill the great commission.
Bob:
And it creates positive change in the lives of others and society. So we can help you give in many ways here at Christian Financial Advisors using many gift instruments to accomplish your giving goals. Here’s basically what we are trying to accomplish here, is we’re taking those taxes that would normally go to the government and instead turning those into giving dollars. You’re still living on the same amount. You’re still growing the same amount, but we’re basically turning that into a gift because you’re gonna have to pay those taxes anyway.
Shawn:
I don’t know about you, Bob, but I’m pretty sure our listeners and and viewers would agree, would you rather the money go to the government or would you rather go to a charity or your church that you wanna support? I mean, that’s kind of a no brainer, right.
Bob:
And you know, also, Shawn, it’s known most of your Christian charities, especially the ones that are members of the EFCA, Evangelical Financial Accountability Organization, every dollar you give to that, about 90% to 85%, 85% to 90% goes to where it’s supposed to go.
Shawn:
Wow. And the government is about the opposite.
Bob:
It’s the opposite.
Shawn:
About 10-15 cents of every dollar actually does the thing it’s supposed to.
Bob:
Does the good.
Shawn:
Rest is all the administration.
Bob:
Yeah. So it’s very, very wasteful when we give to the government. It just doesn’t get to where it needs to. So think of it like this, God gives to us and we receive, and then we give and others receive. Then when they give, what happens here is just kinda like dropping a rock in a small pond.
Shawn:
Dropping in the water.
Bob:
Yeah. You increase the ripple of influence, and with planned giving strategies, you can do that. We wanna bring a biblical worldview to all of wealth and to all of financial planning because we believe wealth comes from God. It belongs to him and it should honor him. Wealth is for…
Shawn:
Yeah. We believe wealth is for providing for the family, supporting the church and ministries that spread the gospel, and helping those in need.
Bob:
We also wanna make sure before we do planned giving that everything else is taken care of, all your financial planning, investment management, retirement planning, tax planning. So don’t think because you’re doing planned giving that you’re not gonna be taken care of. We make sure that happens first and then we do the planned gift later.
Shawn:
Well, and as you can kind of see from our graphic with the puzzle pieces, the planned giving is just part of the puzzle. I would argue that you don’t want to just immediately go into the planned giving because what about your own financial planning, your existing tax planning, your investment management, the income you need. I mean, there’s so many other pieces, and so you don’t wanna look at it in isolation because how do you really know how much you can even afford to give until you know the other pieces?
Bob:
Until you’ve done all your planning. That’s right. Well, I hope today has really opened your eyes to the different types of giving strategies there is during this time that we think about giving and Christmas coming right up.
Shawn:
Yep. I mean, we won’t be able to outgive God after He gave us His son, but we can do the best we can with what we’ve been given.
Bob:
Well, it’s more blessed to give than receive. If you’d like help with some planned giving, give us a call at (830) 609-6986 or text us during business hours or go to www.christianfinancialadvisors.com.
Shawn:
Thank you for joining us and God bless. Bye-bye.
Outro:
We invite you to listen to all of our past episodes, covering many financial topics from a Christian perspective. To make sure you don’t miss any of Bob’s upcoming episodes. You can subscribe to Christian Financial Perspectives on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Amazon Music to learn more about integrating your faith with your finances. Visit Christianfinancialadvisors.com or call (830) 609-6986.
Disclosures:
Investment advisory services offered through Christian Investment Advisors, Inc DBA Christian Financial Advisors also known as Christian Financial Advisors Management Group, a registered investment advisor. Comments from today’s show for informational purposes only, and not to be considered investment advice or recommendations to buy or sell any company that may have been mentioned or discussed. The opinions expressed are solely those of the host Bob Barber and his guests. Bob does not provide tax advice and encourages you to seek guidance from a tax professional. While Christian Investment Advisors believes the information to be accurate and reliable, we do not claim or have responsibility for its completeness, accuracy, or reliability.