It makes you feel good (Greg and Veronica)
GREG: Most of our giving to-date has been… what I would say is reactive—there’s a natural disaster or there’s an event happening and we want to contribute to, you know, resolving that or… [helping]... or helping in… in… in some way. That’s how we’ve given most of our gifts in the past. Now that we’re putting money aside we can begin to think about our values and what’s important to us, what causes do we really want to support on a more aggressive basis. So we can still do both. We can react [yeah] to the natural disaster or we can react to some event, but we can also support an ongoing cause that’s important to us, as well. And having this money is… is make us have more of these conversations about it all. ‘Isn’t it sort of cool that, hey, we got X dollars aside and we can give that money to this charity?’ [yeah] It’s… it’s sort of a cool thing.
VERONICA: Yeah, something happens now and we feel like we can actually act on it and… and make a small difference.
VERONICA: before we had the donor-advised fund with Schwab Charitable, we would… we’d have good intentions about making donations, but it wouldn’t always fit in our monthly plans. And so having the donor-advised fund has really allowed us to give more frequently, give in higher amounts than we would have without the account at Schwab Charitable.
GREG: It certainly made it much easier to give, or… or eliminated an excuse for not giving [yeah]… the funds are there. You know, log-on, you have a couple clicks and you’ve… you’ve made a donation. it’s gratifying to give however you give, but I think having the account through Schwab Charitable has made the entire process easier for us.
VERONICA: It makes me think about actually pretty recently we went back and looked at all of the donations that we’ve made over the time that we’ve had… had the account, and actually went back and donated again to some of them, and we might not have done that otherwise. So it just kind of let us know what we had thought about, what… where we had already donated, and we thought, ‘Hey, let’s give some more there.’ And, you know, we do and it mak… you just feel so good.
GREG: Yeah, there are times where the world hasn’t felt like the safest or the best place in the world, so we sit down and say, ‘You know, let’s… let’s give some money.’ ‘we don’t have a tremendous amount of money, but let’s… let’s make a difference somehow today.’