4 Ways to Work Charitable Giving into Retirement
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4 Ways to Work Charitable Giving into Retirement


When you’re dedicated to giving to evidence-backed charities, your donations don’t stop when you hit retirement. To you, the goal for retirement is to continue to maximize your impact and generosity and to see that your donations are making a difference around the globe. Here are four easy ways to ensure effective lifelong giving.  

Incorporate effective giving into estate planning

In a previous blog post about making effective giving part of your estate plan, we introduced our partnership with an effective estate-planning resource, Charity Science. This free service will help you to draft a will that designates highly-effective charities as your beneficiaries, allowing you to make a powerful and effective impact far into the future! Get started with Charity Science by visiting their website, or contact Katherine Savoie at Charity Science for guidance on how to incorporate effective giving into your estate planning.    

Set up a Donor-Advised Fund

A Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) is like a charitable savings account that allows you to contribute as-desired to a fund, receive a tax benefit, and recommend charitable grants when you are prepared to do so.

Setting up a Giving Account through organizations like Fidelity Charitable allows retirees to make a tax-deductible contribution to their fund (from your pension, personal savings, stocks, mutual funds, real estate and more) and then provide instruction for which charitable organization you would like portions of your contribution to go toward. Meanwhile, your donation to Fidelity Charitable is invested, tax-free and based on your preferences, and has the potential to grow until the next time you make a decision for charitable giving. The money in your fund is also available as your retirement savings account, from which you can personally withdraw to sustain yourself in retirement.

Read how one couple took advantage of a Fidelity Charitable DAF, and visit the Fidelity Charitable website to learn more.

Make a Qualified Charitable Distribution (QCD)

As of this past December, 2015, people who are at least 70 ½ may make gifts of up to $100,000 per year to nonprofit organizations from their Individual Retirement Account (IRA), without a tax penalty, as a part of the new IRA charitable rollover law that has now become a permanent part of the federal tax code in the United States. If you are a US citizen, take a thoughtful approach to effective giving through your IRA throughout 2016!  

Maximize extra time and resources

Finally, simply take the time you didn’t have during your working years and the resources you have built up, and put them to new use! Use some of your extra time to volunteer locally and to research effective giving strategies such as identifying your priority areas, setting goals, and evaluating evidence to select charities that match your giving goals and the resources you are able to contribute. Read more about maximizing your giving in our previous blog posts.

Ready to start working on your retirement giving plan? Take the pledge for effective giving, and get started on one or more of these strategies for giving during retirement!


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About the author:

Bethany Bloise

Bethany works in volunteer coordination and development in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can find her on the Effective Altruism Hub as a Co-Organizer of EA Pittsburgh (http://eahub.org/groups/effective-altruism-pittsburgh), or contact her at bbloise91@gmail.com.

The views expressed in blog posts are those of the author, and not necessarily those of Peter Singer or The Life You Can Save.