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.
Advantages of a Community Foundation vs. a Private Foundation
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
Without legislation to prevent it, the sunsetting of current estate tax laws at the end of 2025 will dramatically reduce the federal estate tax exemption from $13.61 million per person in 2024 to approximately $7 million in 2026 (this includes adjustments for inflation). This change would affect many high net-worth individuals and families, likely exposing many more estates to federal estate taxes.
It is impossible to predict whether or not legislation will prevent the sunset. Even so, advisors need to prepare for client discussions and start considering estate planning strategies now, especially techniques that incorporate multi-generational gifts and charitable planning.
Your clients who are corporate executives have likely wondered at some point about the benefits of aligning their companies with philanthropy, whether specific causes or particular organizations.
In general, a community engagement strategy can be good for business, if well-executed. For example, almost half of consumers view a brand favorably when the brand supports a charitable cause. Community engagement programs can help with employee retention, too.
But what are the risks involved in mixing business with charity?
You know that donating highly-appreciated stock to a fund at the community foundation offers significant advantages for your clients over making cash gifts. Communicating this benefit, however, can be challenging when clients have emotional attachments to their shares.
How can you overcome this hurdle and help optimize your clients' charitable giving strategies?
As your go-to resource for charitable giving techniques, the community foundation team pays close attention to best practices in addressing the broad range of your clients’ charitable intentions to support both near-term and long-term community needs. This includes tracking legal developments that may impact philanthropy broadly, impact specific giving vehicles, and everything in between.
It’s relatively straightforward to see how philanthropy figures into the financial and estate plans you build for individuals and families. After all, many of these clients are already supporting their favorite community causes, and it’s your job to make sure they know about all the options for structuring both their near-term and long-term plans to give to charity using techniques that achieve both philanthropic goals and tax goals. The community foundation regularly works with attorneys, accountants, and financial advisors to help meet clients’ needs.
What you might not always consider, though, is that many of your clients are executives in companies whose leaders want the company itself to lean into charitable giving. That’s why it’s wise to be aware of best practices in corporate philanthropy and know the ways the community foundation can help.
At the end of 2024’s first quarter, an estimated 485,000 Americans could count themselves among the so-called “401(k) millionaires,” meaning the balance in their employer-sponsored retirement plans has reached the $1 million level. Thanks in part to stock market rallies during the first part of the year, that’s a larger number than ever before. Many of these 401(k) accounts will be rolled over into IRAs after retirement and the assets will continue to grow.
With so many of your charitably inclined clients holding large sums of money in 401(k)s and IRAs, now is an important time for a brief refresher course on the benefits of deploying these accounts toward achieving clients’ philanthropic goals.
