As a financial planner, you play a pivotal role in shaping your clients’ legacies. Beyond the dollars and cents, your guidance can help clients align their wealth with their values — often in ways they may not have considered. One of the most powerful and underutilized strategies for accomplishing this is incorporating charitable giving into estate planning.
Charitable bequests provide a meaningful opportunity for clients to support the causes they care about long after they are gone. These gifts can take many forms — outright bequests, beneficiary designations, charitable trusts, Donor Advised Funds and more. What they all have in common is their ability to create lasting impact, often while offering significant tax benefits to the donor’s estate.
In fact, charitable giving can be a key tool in mitigating estate taxes. For high-net-worth individuals, bequests to qualified nonprofits are fully deductible from the estate, potentially reducing or eliminating tax liability. Even for clients whose estates fall below federal or state thresholds, charitable giving can be a smart and satisfying use of assets that might otherwise be subject to capital gains or other taxes.
But beyond the numbers, charitable planning adds a layer of purpose to your clients’ financial legacy. Many individuals want to leave the world better than they found it, and estate gifts offer a powerful way to do just that. As a trusted advisor, you are uniquely positioned to initiate conversations that help clients identify their passions — education, health, environment, the arts — and explore how their estate plans can reflect those values.
Start by asking simple but powerful questions: “Are there causes or organizations that have been important in your life?” “Have you thought about what kind of legacy you want to leave behind?” These questions open the door to more personal, values-based planning, often leading to deeper engagement and satisfaction for both the client and the planner.
Collaborating with Kalamazoo Community Foundation is a valuable resource. We can help clients structure gifts that are both impactful and flexible, adapting over time to changing needs. We can also provide reassurance that the client’s intentions will be honored in perpetuity.
Incorporating charitable giving into estate planning is not just about generosity — it is about strategy, impact and helping your clients find meaning in their wealth. When you bring charitable planning into the conversation, you do more than help clients manage their assets — you help them shape a legacy.
Here is an example of how even a very modest estate bequest can have a powerful impact that lasts forever: A single $10,000 estate gift made to an endowment here at KZCF will, over 20 years, result in more than $11,000 in grant funding that can be awarded to their chosen charity, and its endowment principal will have grown to over $16,000. *
*Based on an average investment return of 7% (net of fees) and an annual 4.5% withdrawal.
