More to give (Greg and Veronica)
VERONICA: Every time we go in to the… to the donor-advised fund, I… I look at how it’s grown. And I think we’ve certainly been really lucky with the market and we have invested it a little bit more aggressively, but I do think about, ‘Wow! That’s just free money that we can then use in… in ways that matter to us.’ So I think that’s a great piece of it.
GREG: And the times we’ve made contributions to our donor-advised fund, we haven’t necessarily had a specific cause we wanted to give to at that time. So in the past, that money would just sit in our checking. and we wouldn’t have donated it until we needed to. Now, you put that money in your donor-advised fund and it’s hopefully going to grow because it’s invested [uh-huh], and then we’re ready to give to a specific cause, the money’s there and hopefully it’s even more than we put in there. [yeah] And that’s actually sort of cool… we have more money to give because of the donor-advised fund than we would have had we just written a check at any point in time.
VERONICA: That’s exactly right.
GREG: …I would encourage anyone to start this process as early as [oh, my gosh] possible in their investing career. … anyone who’s thinking about philanthropy or giving, however you want to define it, is to open one of these accounts and start giving now. Even though you may not be thinking about your legacy, or growing old, or retirement, or what’s that going to look like, even if you’re at a younger age and you like the idea of giving, this is a tremendous tool [yeah] that’ll help that process, and one that I think you appreciate more as you do get older.
VERONICA: …So having this dedicated account that we can pull from on things that are important to us, I think it’s made us a lot more thoughtful about our giving, and in a lot of ways we’ve donated more because we have this special account.
GREG: I wish I had known about this tool 10-, 20 years ago [uh-huh, yeah] because I would have loved to have started contributing to it then.
GREG: We tell everybody about donor-advised funds now, anybody we… all our close friends who we know are… want to give [yeah] to varying degrees that this is a great tool to have in your… in your portfolio. [absolutely] Yeah. It can make a difference. It can make a difference on a lot of different levels.