Nancy: My name is Nancy I'm a client of Schwab Charitable and we have a donor-advised fund there that has helped our family significantly support Catchlight which is an organization that I founded.

Tom: I'm Tom Myers, I'm the CEO and senior wealth advisor at Bordeaux Wealth Advisors.

Nancy: I met Tom originally actually was referred to their firm by my sister Robin who had worked with the firm for a few years before we came on board.

Tom: In the normal course of our conversations, we're talking about their charitable giving desires and how to do that in a tax smart and value maximizing way. A Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund was the obvious and natural thing and when I explained the benefits of having a donor-advised fund it was a very easy decision and very simple to implement. The beauty of a Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund is the money can be contributed, you can achieve a good tax result, but the funds can be invested so they could potentially grow and granted and gifted to charities overtime as desired by the donor.

Nancy: I have five children and they all have donor-advised funds.

Tom: We've worked together for about 20 years now and so I've literally seen her children grow up. What's really interesting is using donor-advised funds and philanthropy as a way of imparting and transferring values to the next generation.

Nancy: One of the benefits is that there really is no minimum so it's easy to bring the children in at a level that makes sense for them. I mean our children actually we started with something we called Alice's fund named after my mom and had our children set up to give away a relatively small amount of money every year and sort of begin to organize around the idea of what is it you care a lot about. Schwab Charitable’s donor-advised fund has been an area for our children to practice and train and how to think about philanthropy how to send money out into the world in areas that they care about, and we have one grandbaby she's three years old she's too little to be doing this yet but I assume that they will be doing the same thing with their children.

Tom: Her kids have really taken to this and it's really neat to see the values transferred from one generation to the next.

Robin: My name is Robin, and I am the founder and chairman of the Bluefield Project for Frontotemporal Dementia. My mother, my aunt, my grandfather, died of this. 

Tom: I remember vividly the meeting that I had with Robin when she told me that she and her siblings wanted to try to find a cure for this disease that her mother had died from. Robin came from kind of the mindset of the foundation as how you do charitable giving. 15, 20 years ago, donor-advised funds were not as common and so I took the opportunity to explain, hey, there's this new vehicle that I think is less costly, it's much more administratively convenient and simple to use and really accomplishes everything that you can do with a private foundation. She initially thought it sounded too good to be true, but she said let's give it a whirl and you know, the rest is history. 

Robin: The Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund has allowed the funding aspect just to be a no brainer and so that I can spend 100% of my time on the strategic aspect of what I want to achieve in the mission and so that just brings so much joy to the whole effort. I don't know that I would be enjoying myself nearly as much or if we would have this success without the ease that the donor-advised fund has given us to do this.

Tom: You know, we have multiple tools in the toolkit and always trying to find the right tool for the job. But in so many cases, a Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund is the right tool. 

Robin: A huge part of the story is just the fact that the donor-advised fund has been well stewarded, for sure it's increased my power of giving. The Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund allows me to be incredibly flexible with giving from small amounts to large amounts, from right away to over many years.

Tom: Getting involved with clients in their charitable gifting and philanthropy is just super rewarding. It really helps you understand the client and their family, what their values are, and the impact that they're trying to make on the world.

Help your clients increase their giving power.  

Will Ed: One reason I think I ended up in this business and being a financial advisor is, just, I just like helping. So, our mission is to help our clients achieve their goals so they can make life better today and for future generations. And so, in a conversation with the client around those goals, a lot of times it ends up including philanthropic endeavors, certainly. And they're thinking about causes that are important to them. Alex and I's relationship goes back to our law school days and then we reconnected when our daughters ended up in preschool together at an early age and our wives hit it off pretty quickly. 

Alex: My name's Alex. My late wife, Isse, was diagnosed with colon cancer in November of 2017. 

Will Ed: When Isse got sick, my reaction was, you know, how can we help as friends, how can I help as your financial advisor. 

Alex: He was naturally a person that I would turn to, that I trusted, that I had a relationship with. He understood what our concerns were with Isse's recent diagnosis, and he just had a connection with our family that nobody else did.  

Will Ed: Alex and Isse started doing a lot of planning. And they had had some professional successes, including the purchase of Isse's company. So, we started thinking about their resources and priorities. 

Alex: In being thoughtful and knowing who we were, he was then unable to turn us on to the Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund. 

Will Ed: They were in the midst of this health challenge with Isse's cancer, but we wanted to make sure that we established the donor-advised fund in the year, given Isse's company had been acquired and Schwab Charitable was a great solution to point them to because you can contribute significant assets in any one year take that deduction but then you may give your gifts over multiple years.So it is a very powerful tool to allow them to make contributions for years to come.  

Alex: I knew the money was there, that was just a component of it that was taken off the table in terms of, where do you plan to give, how much do you plan to give going forward? Initially I was not focused on that, you know, I was caring for Isse. And then I was caring for the kids after Isse's passing and making sure we were all managing ok. So it was just very comforting to know I could do what I wanted to, when I wanted to. 

Will Ed: And for Alex and Isse, actions speak louder than words. They wanted their children to see them being charitably inclined, to see them investing in causes that are important to them, in causes that can make a difference.  

Alex: Isse was an incredible human being. I mean, she just, was always thinking of others and just didn't want anyone to experience what we were going through as a family. So, it's always been at her core to be very thoughtful and giving. With the Schwab Charitable donor-advised fund, that definitely keeps her legacy alive. 

Help your clients increase their giving power. 

Cathy: I'm Cathy I've been in the financial industry for over 30 years. Very proud to be part of the process in helping clients realizing the benefits of Schwab Charitable.  Many clients don't sometimes realize how the Schwab Charitable account could help their situation. 

Jean:  I've always wanted to give back to the University of Hawaii, but I never thought that we had enough money to really have a charitable fund.  

Cathy: Many of the clients we work with do have trust in estate matters that need to be addressed. One of the offerings we can offer for a client would be the Schwab Charitable account.  

Jean: Without scholarships we wouldn't have been able to have the careers and the life that we had, and I said why don't we start a scholarship. We got help when we were students and so we want to show our gratitude in some kind of way.  

Cathy: It's important to offer Schwab Charitable because it's a piece of financial planning. It also from an estates and trust planning purposes that leaves a legacy for the next generation. 

 Jean: My husband and I have never tried to make a show of our giving. That's exactly what we can do with the Schwab Charitable  

Cathy: Schwab Charitable adds a lot to the Rice Partnership. As a firm, we believe in helping the community. 

Jean: The process of giving now is very easy. It's giving without fanfare. Giving because well, we think it's the right thing to do. 

Cathy: So, it's a great feeling to do this for Schwab Charitable because I believe in the product. I know how good it is and if I have it and I recommend it for clients it's because I think it's really really important that people understand giving back.