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For Professional Advisors

As a professional advisor, you expect your clients to depend on you to help them reach their charitable giving goals. The Fremont Area Community Foundation stands ready to lend a helping hand, and strengthen your relationship with your clients along the way.

For over four decades, the Fremont Area Community Foundation has helped countless local philanthropists and their advisors connect with meaningful causes and make a real charitable impact.  

As the Fremont area’s philanthropic hub, our knowledge of the evolving community needs, as well as the work of nonprofit organizations in our area makes us uniquely qualified to help you help your clients achieve their charitable dreams. We can help to identify nonprofits or causes that are important to your clients, seek options for creating endowed funds today, or determine future gifts through their estate plans.

For a printable brochure on helping your clients achieve their charitable goals, click here.

Advantages of a Community Foundation vs. a Private Foundation

Professional Advisors

Donor-advised funds within a community foundation may provide a very attractive alternative for clients who might otherwise consider setting up a private foundation. Benefits may include:

  • Ease of administration; no set-up costs
  • Permanence - the fund may be donor-advised by client and their children, and set up to continue at the end of the donor-advising period
  • Recognition - or anonymity, whichever the client desires
  • Tax advantages - contributions may have higher deductibility limits than are allowable for private foundations.

Contact Melissa Diers at mdiers@facfoundation.org or 402-721-4252 for more information.

Sample Language for Bequests

If your client wishes to include the Fremont Area Community Foundation in his or her estate plans, he or she will want to use our proper, legal name. Suggested language is:

“I hereby give, devise, and bequeath (dollar amount, percentage of estate, or residuary) to the Fremont Area Community Foundation, Inc., now or formerly in the city of Fremont, Nebraska, 1005 East 23rd Street, Suite 2, in the State of Nebraska, for its general purposes.”

The Internal Revenue Service recognizes the Fremont Area Community Foundation as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

Information for a Gift of Retirement or Life Insurance Benefits

The following is the information generally required for a client to name the Fremont Area Community Foundation as a beneficiary of a retirement plan or life insurance policy:

Legal Name: Fremont Area Community Foundation, Inc. 
Address: 1005 East 23rd Street, Suite 2, Fremont, NE 68025

Federal Tax ID #: 47-0629642

Date Established: November 24, 1980

NEWS ARTICLES

Attorneys, CPAs, and financial advisors certainly are not strangers to tough questions. Indeed, the mix of money, family, and mortality is a potent combination that almost always creates an emotionally charged planning environment, whether the matter at hand is tax planning, updating wills and trusts, or structuring retirement portfolios.

Why, then, are so many advisors reluctant to bring up charitable giving during client meetings when the topic itself is so uplifting? In some cases, you may feel like you don’t know enough about the technical tax planning aspects of charitable giving to be able to offer sound advice. In other cases, you may be concerned about taking the planning process off course into areas where the client doesn’t want you involved. Or maybe you don’t feel you have a good enough grasp of the client’s big picture to truly recognize opportunities for charitable planning that are a win-win for the client’s favorite causes and the client’s tax and financial plan.

Guess what? There is no need to worry! The community foundation has you covered. Consider this...

Many of your philanthropy-minded clients certainly enjoy attending fundraising events for their favorite charities. Especially as community events start ramping up this fall, you’ll want to be aware of a little wrinkle in the IRS rules that may surprise your clients so much that they ask you about it.

Humans crave certainty, and that is certainly not what we have right now during election season, especially where taxes are concerned.

Your clients who support charitable causes may be wondering how the election outcomes might impact their philanthropic plans. You’re probably wondering that, too!

The community foundation team keeps a finger on the pulse of current events and legal developments that could impact the way you work with your charitable clients. Here are three notable items that you’ll likely want to keep in mind this fall.

Giving stock is an important strategy for any private business owner to explore. Not only can these gifts help implement a business succession plan that calls for transferring the business to the next generation if that is your client’s goal, but gifts of stock can also help your business owner client achieve charitable goals and avoid estate tax.

In light of recent legal developments and pending tax law changes, more and more financial and estate planning advisors are encouraging their clients to consider implementing gifts of closely-held stock to a fund at the community foundation or other public charity. Notably, two developments could have a big impact on your work with these clients.

Procrastination is a drain in ways that go far deeper than the incomplete task itself. We know this intellectually, but it can be so hard to break the procrastination habit. It seems that the more daunting the task, the harder it is to tackle. This surely is a major reason some of your clients routinely put off important planning discussions. And of course, many of those discussions are tax-sensitive, which means year-end can get very hectic and stressful for clients who wait until the last minute. You may discover that the uplifting topic of philanthropy makes it easier to at least start a conversation.

As the year begins to wind down, consider tapping into your clients’ philanthropic interests as a catalyst to motivate them to start addressing year-end planning items right now rather than waiting until November or December.