Planned Gifts
God directs the events of our lives to draw us closer to Him (Acts 17:26-27). He also uses specific times and events in your life to impact your gift planning, which can result in great benefits for both you and the children and families served by Christian Family Care.
Important events include the sale of appreciated assets, sale of a business, sale of a farm and retirement. All of these are excellent times to consider a Planned Gift. Planned Gifts may be made either during your lifetime or at death. They usually involve the assistance of professionals such as your accountant, attorney or financial planner.
Estate Planning
Estate Planning is not only for the wealthy; it is for everyone. It is simply the process of deciding where your assets should be distributed not only after your death but during your life. For Christians, Estate Planning isn’t just a legal process, it is also an act of worship, as we lay everything we are and have before the Lord for His purposes.
Excerpts from
“How Did You Do That?”
By Jay Link, Stewardship Ministries
Concept #1: Compression Planning
There are many creative and effective ways to “shrink” the size of various assets through what we call Compression Planning. Depending on the particular asset, how the title is held and the percentage of ownership, these discounts can often go as high as 50% or more, meaning, for example, a $1,000,000 asset could be reduced in value for estate tax purposes to as little as $500,000.
Concept #2: Charitable Planning
Unfortunately, this area of advanced planning is the most under-utilized of the three. Yet, in our opinion, it is the most powerful for several reasons. These tools are routinely overlooked during planning considerations because few wealthy families and their advisors are intimately familiar with these very effective planning tools and their many and varied strategic applications in the wealth planning process. In addition, many times a family’s advisors tend to carry a general, negative bias against charitable planning that prevents them from objectively evaluating the effective use of these powerful planning tools and techniques in their overall planning.
Concept #3: Leverage Planning
There are a number of techniques and strategies that can be used to leverage your wealth producing substantially greater planning results when they are effectively incorporated into the Master Stewardship Planning process. Unfortunately, we have found, as with the charitable planning concepts, that quite often both the affluent family and their advisors often have major misunderstandings of the proper and various leveraging techniques and tools and, consequently, carry a strong but unnecessary negative bias against them. As a result, they often avoid them altogether which greatly diminishes the overall effective leverage of the family’s financial capacity.
Combining the Three Concepts
Each one of these three planning concepts by itself is extremely powerful and effective. But when any two of these three techniques is utilized in tandem, there is an exponential increase in their combined effectiveness. And when you can creatively combine all three of these powerful planning concepts into one comprehensive plan, which is our planning objective, the bottom line results are often absolutely beyond belief.
Contact Gary with questions on how to get started with your planned giving and estate planning at gmiller@cfcare.org.
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