samwick family fund

The Samwick Family Fund

Last year at this time, I was scrambling to make charitable donations

to all manner of local and national organizations. The year-end

scramble comes from the desire to claim the tax deduction for 2007

instead of 2008--the year of delay would reduce the present value of

the deduction.

a charitable organization. The VoxWife is having a college reunion

commemorate that. Giving appreciated securities generates the same

of cash, but it also eliminates the capital gains tax that we would

eventually pay on the sale of those securities. I had a particular

stock in my portfolio that I thought was overvalued at the time, and

so I would have looked to sell it anyway. So this was a real tax

saving.

I thought at the time that it would be nice to have the same

opportunity to lessen capital gains tax liability via all of the usual

year-end giving, except that the year-end giving tends to be a lot of

small donations to a number of organizations. For example, it is time

securities for the few hundred bucks that we send to the United Way

each year.

Earlier this fall, I discovered the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, and

so now that's a possibility. In a nutshell, the CGF is itself a

securities to it is tax-deductible and avoids the capital gains tax

that would occur on a sale. The CGF then allows us to disburse the

proceeds in our account to the charitable organizations we like in

amounts as small as $100. The CGF invests in Fidelity mutual funds, so

the giving capacity continues to grow along with the market.

There are a number of advantages to this setup. It avoids the year-end

that we want for all of the charities, and then direct the CGF to give

to the individual charities at our convenience. It saves on some of