Playing the long game: Encouraging your clients to plan ahead in 2025
January 10, 2025
Whether your client is tax planning, updating wills and trusts or structuring retirement portfolios, the mix of money, family and mortality is a potent combination that almost always creates an emotionally charged planning environment.
A strong grasp of the client’s big picture allows you to truly recognize opportunities for charitable planning that are a win-win for both their favorite causes and their tax and financial plan.
Benefits of a year-long giving strategy
- Leveraging employer matching gifts programs early in the year when dollars are available and there is plenty of time to process the paperwork.
- Increasing predictability of cash flow and therefore being proactive, not reactive, in supporting the causes your clients love. Your clients might consider setting up automatic contributions to their fund at GCF to formalize this component as part of an ongoing plan.
- Including children and grandchildren in the charitable giving conversation and tax-planning structures as a learning experience for the whole family.
- Avoiding the year-end scramble to gift a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD) from an IRA directly to an eligible charity, such as a designated fund at GCF, by executing in the first quarter.
- Leaving enough time to explore options for more complex giving techniques, such as gifts of closely held business interests, that might provide major tax benefits as well as meet a client’s charitable goals.
- Helping nonprofit organizations meet their budgets all year long, which can save them from worrying as much about whether constituents’ ongoing needs can be addressed.
- Utilizing GCF’s expertise and resources to learn more about the causes a client plans to support so that a client can be an even more informed and impactful donor.
Our goal at GCF is to be your trusted partner in philanthropy. We help you ensure that your clients can fully carry out their charitable wishes for 2025, maximizing tax benefits and avoiding crunch time come December.
