10 ms·

Donor Advised Funds get big tax breaks but little oversight

78 points by jaboutboul 8y ago

cjensen 8y ago
I enjoy backseat driving as much as the next person. It's fun to tell someone with money that they should spend it on X and not Y. But it's probably not productive, though it does lead to lots of clicks and outrage. Would it be more productive to simply promote specific unmet needs in the Valley?
- protomyth 8y ago
  The problem really isn't what they do with their money (it is their money), but when they get a charitable tax break without doing any charity, it does get somewhat annoying.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  The outrage isn't over what these people do with their money, but over a tax loophole that allows rich people to get tax breaks for effectively doing nothing. As for promoting specific unmet needs in the Valley, there's no shortage of that, but apparently the rich would prefer to get big tax breaks than actually meeting those needs.
  - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
    It's really amusing to see people who were outraged when the Trump Foundation was taking advantage of tax law turn around and suddenly find it acceptable when Silicon Valley does the same. For the record, neither are acceptable -- the actions described are a clear perversion of the intention of charity.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      What advantage of tax law did the Trump Foundation take? The reports I'm seeing[1] say they broke tax law, which isn't really the same [1] https://www.ft.com/content/28c71c58-b0df-11e6-a37c-f4a01f1b0fa1 https://www.ft.com/content/28c71c58-b0df-11e6-a37c-f4a01f1b0...
  - icebraining 8y ago
    It's not "doing nothing". It's legally pledging the money for use on charitable purposes, rather than buying mansions or yachts. And they only get a tax break on that money.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      That pledge is worthless if that money never actually gets spent, which is apparently just what's happening with a lot of these "charities". In those cases the pledges help no one except rich donors, who get tax breaks.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Even if the money is never spent, those rich donors are still worse off than if they had kept the money. So I have to wonder what you think is their goal.
        Retric 8y ago
        I am not convinced that's always true. They are double dipping on tax breaks. If you invest 1$ and it's worth 1,001$ you would normally pay taxes on that of 15% federal + state. However, if you 'donate' it you get to take a deduction on other incomes for the full 1,001$ and those incomes could be taxed at 39.6% federal + state. So it costs you 850$ - state taxes to save 397$ + state taxes. California is 13.3% so I am not 100% but I think that works to spending 717 to save 530$ net cost 187$. So, the question is can you make back more than 187$ from a 1,001$ donation. Our president for example would host charitable events at his golf courses which could likely cross that threshold. But, political donations seem like a good option also work, even just employing family is a classic. PS: If the numbers are a little different aka you are taxed at 39.9% not 15%, then it's a clear net gain. Other possibility is something which is nominally worth X, but you would have trouble liquidating for the full value.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - cheald 8y ago
    This is a misguided line of thought - you don't contribute to a DAF in order to preserve your wealth. Said rich person would be richer if they kept the money and paid taxes on it than if they just didn't give it away. There is no legal strategy in which a rich person ends up with more by parking money in a DAF than by just not giving anything to charity in the first place. Once you've put the money in a DAF, it legally doesn't belong to you anymore, and you can't recapture it. For the purposes of purchasing power, you've lost 100% of that money rather than $marginal_rate% of it. If you aren't going to actually execute a gift to charity through the DAF, just paying taxes and keeping the money is the more rational play.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      Do these people deserve tax breaks for spending money in a way that doesn't actually get used to help people? That's the core question.
      - cheald 8y ago
        Yes, according to our tax code, they deserve to not pay taxes on money that they give to a 501(c)(3) rather than spending on consumption or investment to enrich themselves with. To withhold the tax benefits on money no longer owned by the taxpayer until a secondary party has disposed of those gifts in a manner that meets some arbitrary criteria of "having helped people" is impractical to impossible. If you give money directly to a charity, but that money sits in the charity's bank account, should you pay taxes on the gift until the charity has demonstrated that they spent your dollars to provide medicine to a poor child? What if they spend those dollars repainting their offices - should you pay taxes on those dollars that you contributed which they didn't spend on helping people? When money is contributed to a DAF, one of two things happens with it: it remains in the stewardship of the DAF, or it is disbursed to an eligible charitable organization. The contributor can't change their mind and take that money back later; the money is committed to charitable organizations, either now or at some indeterminate point in the future. The point of ownership change of that money is the most reasonable and enforceable point to consider the change in taxability of those dollars. You contend that this money "doesn't actually get used to help people", and that's true today, but it's not particularly useful to say that's true of that money in perpetuity; the only "out" for those funds is charitable disbursal or attrition to management fees. The lack of distribution now should not be confused for a lack of distribution ever. Framing DAF contributions as a means for the rich to protect their wealth by dodging taxes is bad math at best. What incentive do you think there is for a wealthy person to contribute to a DAF rather than to a charity directly? What do they gain from doing so?
tomc1985 8y ago
Another thing ruined by businesspeople optimizing for numbers...
- twblalock 8y ago
  Businesspeople optimizing for numbers is the reason enough money exists that some can be given to charity.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    "Charities" that exist only to give tax breaks to their rich donors.
    - twblalock 8y ago
      Some of that money does get to the public.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - pmoriarty 8y ago
        Enough to justify the tax breaks? Without transparency, it's hard to tell -- which is the other problem the article is about.
      - tomc1985 8y ago
        ALL, or nearly all, of that money needs to go to the public. What we see here doesn't even count. It nauseates me that even in forced charity (forced, as in, you're donating to avoid taxes) these fucks won't support their local communities. These individuals and their businesses should be destroyed for their greed.
- Nomentatus 8y ago
  meaning, a species of "corporate narcissism", making a better show even if that means doing less good - all hat and no cattle.
pmoriarty 8y ago
TLDR: "tax-subsidized contributions are being set aside indefinitely -- subject to no obligation for them ever to be put to active charitable use"
tunesmith 8y ago
I must be missing something about the benefit. Given that these funds charge a fee, what is the benefit of them, over just making charitable contributions directly to non-profits? It's not a tax benefit, is it, since the contribution size can be written off either way?
- ASinclair 8y ago
  They do provide a tax benefit. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor-advised_fund#Tax_efficiency_example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor-advised_fund#Tax_efficie...
  - wilg 8y ago
    It seems like that tax benefit is really reducing taxes on the donation itself, rather than enriching the donor (as implied)? Am I understanding that right?
    - xur17 8y ago
      That is correct. You can donate appreciated assets (such as stock) to a charity directly, and you get to deduct the current market price on your taxes without having to pay capital gains on the asset. Donor advised funds simply make this process simpler. You can donate your appreciated asset to a donor advised fund (which acts as a 'charity') and immediately realize the tax write-off, and then later decide what charity to give the money to. This article seems to be making a big issue out of the fact that there are a lot of donor advised funds in Silicon Valley that are waiting to give the money out, or giving it out over time instead of making one big donation immediately. I fail to see the issue - this is just people moving money around to optimize for taxes - the money will still be given to a charity.
- blue11 8y ago
  The benefit is decoupling the timing of setting funds aside for charity and the timing of donating to organizations. For example, let's say that your income this year was unusually high (you sold your company, you received a bonus, or some other one-time event) and you plan to donate $100,000 to charity. If you put the money in a donor-advised fund you get the tax deduction immediately, but you can decide what exactly to do with the money later. For example, you can choose to donate $10,000 per year over the next ten years. Yes, there are fees, but on the plus side the money can be invested in a mutual fund while it's sitting in the donor-advised fund. Eventually the money will be donated, there is no way to get it back.
jefftk 8y ago
This is a weird article. It strongly implies that donor advised funds (DAFs) are storing money indefinitely and not distributing it, but the average disbursement for DAFs is about 15% per year. In general, people committing the money to charity now even if they haven't decided what they want to fund is something I strongly support, because it means they can't later change their minds and keep the money. The article also seems to evaluate DAFs primarily on how much they spend in the Bay Area: And even when it did give out money, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation often spent it outside of California. Last year, it gave out $436 million in grants to the nine-county Bay Area, which was just 34 percent of the $1.3 billion in grants it dispersed. The Bay Area is one of the richest regions of one of the richest states of one of the richest countries. There are definitely people in the Bay Area who need help, but overall I think it's really good that donors are becoming more interested in figuring out where their money can do the most good as opposed to only donating to organizations targeting the region they happen to live in.
- yodon 8y ago
  Please don’t use code formatting for quotes. It makes the text unreadable on mobile devices.
  - danvayn 8y ago
    What app do you use? I'm not on mobile but I think code formatting for quotes probably looks fine on https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidroh.materialistic https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      Safari
    - a_t48 8y ago
      Chrome iOS.
    - dmach 8y ago
millstone 8y ago
DAFs are great for giving. The 2018 tax law changes increased the standard deduction and limited itemized deductions. This is certain to depress charitable giving, and DAFs are one thing that will help protect it. The reason is they allow donors to separately time the tax benefit from fund disbursement. Say you wish to donate $10k a year to charity. In 2018, this may not provide any tax deduction! However a DAF allows you to make a much larger donation of $100k, realize a tax deduction, and then dish it out in $10k increments over the years. DAFs also shields donors from providing contact info to the charity, allowing donors to escape the never-ending solicitation mail and calls. (Charities really dislike this, for obvious reasons.) The concerns about money sitting in DAFs is overblown. A charity with an endowment also has money that "sits" and isn't being spent, but you wouldn't describe that as a "black hole."
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  > But it is notable that the biggest recipient of DAFs’ gifts is none other than Fidelity [Charitable]. The third-biggest is the American Endowment Foundation, another DAF supplier. In practice, money is for the most part churning between DAFs, not actually being "spent". https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/23/a-philanthropic-boom-donor-advised-funds https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/23/a...
- skybrian 8y ago
  Seems like a large donation wouldn't be deductable due to AMT? Particularly when there are high state taxes.
  - jefftk 8y ago
    The AMT excludes many deductions, but it doesn't exclude the charitable deduction.
  - toast0 8y ago
    In addition to charitable deductions being deductable for AMT, you may also want to know deductions for state and local taxes are very limited in the 2018 tax year (and beyond), so AMT is likely to mostly disappear (if it wasn't abolished for individuals? There was some talk of that, but I didn't follow up, because state tax was my big deduction)
NelsonMinar 8y ago
I set up a DAF when Google went public in 2004. I've spent 25-50% of it in the intervening 13 years, despite best intentions. I sure took that full tax break in 2004 though and have compounded the value of that annually. So in my case the DAF has not worked as a great way to funnel money to actual charities. It just sits idle, compounding. The tax break I got seems to outweigh the public benefit. The psychology of having the DAF is funny. I sort of feel the virtue of having donated to charity every single year, just looking at the balance. When I do make a grant from the DAF I don't really feel like I'm doing anything more worthwhile. Also it's a bit impersonal because you have to recommend the grant then wait several days for the DAF to actually allocate. OTOH it's nice having a pile of money I've already "spent" that I can use to give to things at a whim. I think the solution is to require DAFs spend some large portion of their balance every single year. Charitable foundations are required to distribute something like 5%, but I think 10% or more makes more sense for an individual's DAF. There's also a strong argument that charitable donations shouldn't be tax deductible at all, remove this whole tax gimmick and economic distortion. I'm not sure I fully buy it (and the transition would be brutal) but it is worth reading: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2012/06/09/sweetened-charity https://www.economist.com/briefing/2012/06/09/sweetened-char...
- cbhl 8y ago
  I really wish non-profits could have for-profit endowment components in them, instead of having to ask for money every year. Rather than giving now or giving later, we could be giving forever by only spending the interest on the capital.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    One of Bill Gates ambitions is to have his foundation be done when he dies. He doesn't want it to go on forever with the mission drifting away from his and so on. How does what you are thinking line up with Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation? The corporation does most of the stuff we think of as Mozilla and is wholly owned by the foundation.
  - namibj 8y ago
    Germany has/had some old institutions [0] that work(ed) that way. The keyword is Stiftung [1]. There seems to be nothing comparable in the US though, and you don't get a tax break for the donation, even though any business it conducts in the states is treated like a 501(c), provided it would be classified a 501(c) if it were a US based institution. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerspital_zum_Heiligen_Geist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerspital_zum_Heiligen... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung
Digory 8y ago
The unappreciated risk in a setup like this is that multiple donors could inadvertantly give the DAF sizable impact in voting shares. As I understand it, the Fund, not the donor, owns and votes any donated shares. If two cofounders sign the Giving Pledge and each give 50% of their voting shares to the same, local DAF, the DAF winds up with more shares than either donor. And it can vote them as a block.
- bklyn11201 8y ago
  "Generally, a DAF and its disqualified persons together may own no more than 20% of the voting stock, profits interest, capital interest, or beneficial interest in a business enterprise." http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/donor-advised-funds/ http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/donor-advised-funds/
  - Digory 8y ago
    Interesting. It appears there are two big loopholes to the 20% limit: a general five-year exception that allows DAFs to wind out of large donations, and a new exception where the DAF acquires 100% of the voting interest.[0] [1]https://clarknuber.com/articles/private-foundations-receive-excess-business-holdings-relief-bipartisan-budget-act/ https://clarknuber.com/articles/private-foundations-receive-...
omegaworks 8y ago
DAFs let you get a nice fat tax break with your startup windfall that you can then promise to the college of your child's choice. This is not charity.
sevensor 8y ago
I found it odd that the article talked throughout about "dispersal" of funds, which sounds a bit like scattering money to the winds. Is this a standard use with which I'm unfamiliar, or did the author mean "disbursal?"
russnewcomer 8y ago
The two major problems with DAFs stem from the fact that they are designed to give advantages to donors immediately but not require any further interaction. Problem - the organization most benefited by DAFs seem not to be charities, but Vanguard/Fidelty/etc that take management fees for the DAF for the next 10 years. Just running a ballpark with 4% interest and a 1 percent total management fee, putting 500k into a DAF makes the manager about 70k, and grows the fund about 170k. Not bad, but the benefit goes almost entirely to the fund manager. Problem - Giving to organizations is deferred to a later point in time, leading to grander visions. Theoretically, this should result in charities in the future receiving large checks, which is good. One problem with this, however, is that as numbers being donated get larger, it seems that charitable giving becomes more 'results' or 'mission' oriented. People give big chunks to bigger picture, systemic problems like curing cancer, fighting climate change, etc. These are good things. But the charities working on day-to-day problems get marginalized. My argument is certainly not that we should look for structural fixes to problems like pandemics, homelessness, or institutional racism. But a society that only gives to research universities to look for cures for pediatric cancer, and doesn't also help fund something like St. Jude, is a society with deep problems. DAFs have significant advantages and good things. But perhaps we have, as an American society, gone the wrong way to give incentives to high-net-worth individuals to give mainly to big causes, and not to day-to-day problems.
- namibj 8y ago
  You are implying that Vanguard takes 1%. It's under 0.14% for the Total Stock index, which broadly goes f or marketcap weighted US stocks. If the DAFs broker takes that much of a premium, they have the wrong broker. E.g. at the volumes you are talking about, Motif Investing seems to have significantly lower costs. Please don't think that these are what you should choose, they are just an example for what I'd potentially (depending on what the specific goals are) choose if I'd be running a DAF in the US.
  - russnewcomer 8y ago
    Going by this : https://www.philanthropy.com/article/What-Donor-Advised-Funds/156495 https://www.philanthropy.com/article/What-Donor-Advised-Fund... it looks like average fees are around 1% for DAFs. Vanguard is cheaper, at .6 percent, but the SVCF, referenced in the article, is at 1%.
Erem 8y ago
My Fidelity DAF is the linchpin of my family's giving strategy -- I don't know how we could achieve what we want to achieve without it. The plan has been simple: put 5% of our monthly income into mutual funds through the DAF until it hits 100k, then start additionally supporting charitable organizations from the annual interest forever, without ever donating the principle. I view the impact of this account as probably my lasting legacy on Earth and enjoy the idea of passing it's stewardship on to my children. So it troubles me to read that this giving strategy is somehow contentious. And I don't yet understand whether what I'm doing is somehow abusing the original intent of the vehicle, or why it would upset people that we give in this way.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  The issue is that, maybe not in your case, but certainly in the cases of wealthier people, they're getting the tax break, but the money isn't actually going to anything charitable. If the money isn't actually going to charity, then why are we, as a society, giving a tax break for it?
  - yellowstuff 8y ago
    DAFs can invest the money or make grants to charities. All the money eventually goes to charity except for management fees, but any investment account pays management fees. That's why there's a tax break.
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      Does it? What's the thing that forces it to eventually go to charity, as opposed to laying around in limbo for ever?
      - Erem 8y ago
        From what I understand, nothing forces it to ever go out. But if it does go out, it must go out to charity.
      - toast0 8y ago

78 points by jaboutboul 8y ago

I enjoy backseat driving as much as the next person. It's fun to tell someone with money that they should spend it on X and not Y. But it's probably not productive, though it does lead to lots of clicks and outrage. Would it be more productive to simply promote specific unmet needs in the Valley?

protomyth 8y ago
The problem really isn't what they do with their money (it is their money), but when they get a charitable tax break without doing any charity, it does get somewhat annoying.
pmoriarty 8y ago
The outrage isn't over what these people do with their money, but over a tax loophole that allows rich people to get tax breaks for effectively doing nothing. As for promoting specific unmet needs in the Valley, there's no shortage of that, but apparently the rich would prefer to get big tax breaks than actually meeting those needs.
- TAForObvReasons 8y ago
  It's really amusing to see people who were outraged when the Trump Foundation was taking advantage of tax law turn around and suddenly find it acceptable when Silicon Valley does the same. For the record, neither are acceptable -- the actions described are a clear perversion of the intention of charity.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    What advantage of tax law did the Trump Foundation take? The reports I'm seeing[1] say they broke tax law, which isn't really the same [1] https://www.ft.com/content/28c71c58-b0df-11e6-a37c-f4a01f1b0fa1 https://www.ft.com/content/28c71c58-b0df-11e6-a37c-f4a01f1b0...
- icebraining 8y ago
  It's not "doing nothing". It's legally pledging the money for use on charitable purposes, rather than buying mansions or yachts. And they only get a tax break on that money.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    That pledge is worthless if that money never actually gets spent, which is apparently just what's happening with a lot of these "charities". In those cases the pledges help no one except rich donors, who get tax breaks.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      Even if the money is never spent, those rich donors are still worse off than if they had kept the money. So I have to wonder what you think is their goal.
      - Retric 8y ago
        I am not convinced that's always true. They are double dipping on tax breaks. If you invest 1$ and it's worth 1,001$ you would normally pay taxes on that of 15% federal + state. However, if you 'donate' it you get to take a deduction on other incomes for the full 1,001$ and those incomes could be taxed at 39.6% federal + state. So it costs you 850$ - state taxes to save 397$ + state taxes. California is 13.3% so I am not 100% but I think that works to spending 717 to save 530$ net cost 187$. So, the question is can you make back more than 187$ from a 1,001$ donation. Our president for example would host charitable events at his golf courses which could likely cross that threshold. But, political donations seem like a good option also work, even just employing family is a classic. PS: If the numbers are a little different aka you are taxed at 39.9% not 15%, then it's a clear net gain. Other possibility is something which is nominally worth X, but you would have trouble liquidating for the full value.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
- cheald 8y ago
  This is a misguided line of thought - you don't contribute to a DAF in order to preserve your wealth. Said rich person would be richer if they kept the money and paid taxes on it than if they just didn't give it away. There is no legal strategy in which a rich person ends up with more by parking money in a DAF than by just not giving anything to charity in the first place. Once you've put the money in a DAF, it legally doesn't belong to you anymore, and you can't recapture it. For the purposes of purchasing power, you've lost 100% of that money rather than $marginal_rate% of it. If you aren't going to actually execute a gift to charity through the DAF, just paying taxes and keeping the money is the more rational play.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    Do these people deserve tax breaks for spending money in a way that doesn't actually get used to help people? That's the core question.
    - cheald 8y ago
      Yes, according to our tax code, they deserve to not pay taxes on money that they give to a 501(c)(3) rather than spending on consumption or investment to enrich themselves with. To withhold the tax benefits on money no longer owned by the taxpayer until a secondary party has disposed of those gifts in a manner that meets some arbitrary criteria of "having helped people" is impractical to impossible. If you give money directly to a charity, but that money sits in the charity's bank account, should you pay taxes on the gift until the charity has demonstrated that they spent your dollars to provide medicine to a poor child? What if they spend those dollars repainting their offices - should you pay taxes on those dollars that you contributed which they didn't spend on helping people? When money is contributed to a DAF, one of two things happens with it: it remains in the stewardship of the DAF, or it is disbursed to an eligible charitable organization. The contributor can't change their mind and take that money back later; the money is committed to charitable organizations, either now or at some indeterminate point in the future. The point of ownership change of that money is the most reasonable and enforceable point to consider the change in taxability of those dollars. You contend that this money "doesn't actually get used to help people", and that's true today, but it's not particularly useful to say that's true of that money in perpetuity; the only "out" for those funds is charitable disbursal or attrition to management fees. The lack of distribution now should not be confused for a lack of distribution ever. Framing DAF contributions as a means for the rich to protect their wealth by dodging taxes is bad math at best. What incentive do you think there is for a wealthy person to contribute to a DAF rather than to a charity directly? What do they gain from doing so?

tomc1985 8y ago

Another thing ruined by businesspeople optimizing for numbers...

twblalock 8y ago
Businesspeople optimizing for numbers is the reason enough money exists that some can be given to charity.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  "Charities" that exist only to give tax breaks to their rich donors.
  - twblalock 8y ago
    Some of that money does get to the public.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      Enough to justify the tax breaks? Without transparency, it's hard to tell -- which is the other problem the article is about.
    - tomc1985 8y ago
      ALL, or nearly all, of that money needs to go to the public. What we see here doesn't even count. It nauseates me that even in forced charity (forced, as in, you're donating to avoid taxes) these fucks won't support their local communities. These individuals and their businesses should be destroyed for their greed.
Nomentatus 8y ago
meaning, a species of "corporate narcissism", making a better show even if that means doing less good - all hat and no cattle.

pmoriarty 8y ago

TLDR: "tax-subsidized contributions are being set aside indefinitely -- subject to no obligation for them ever to be put to active charitable use"

tunesmith 8y ago

I must be missing something about the benefit. Given that these funds charge a fee, what is the benefit of them, over just making charitable contributions directly to non-profits? It's not a tax benefit, is it, since the contribution size can be written off either way?

ASinclair 8y ago
They do provide a tax benefit. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor-advised_fund#Tax_efficiency_example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donor-advised_fund#Tax_efficie...
- wilg 8y ago
  It seems like that tax benefit is really reducing taxes on the donation itself, rather than enriching the donor (as implied)? Am I understanding that right?
  - xur17 8y ago
    That is correct. You can donate appreciated assets (such as stock) to a charity directly, and you get to deduct the current market price on your taxes without having to pay capital gains on the asset. Donor advised funds simply make this process simpler. You can donate your appreciated asset to a donor advised fund (which acts as a 'charity') and immediately realize the tax write-off, and then later decide what charity to give the money to. This article seems to be making a big issue out of the fact that there are a lot of donor advised funds in Silicon Valley that are waiting to give the money out, or giving it out over time instead of making one big donation immediately. I fail to see the issue - this is just people moving money around to optimize for taxes - the money will still be given to a charity.
blue11 8y ago
The benefit is decoupling the timing of setting funds aside for charity and the timing of donating to organizations. For example, let's say that your income this year was unusually high (you sold your company, you received a bonus, or some other one-time event) and you plan to donate $100,000 to charity. If you put the money in a donor-advised fund you get the tax deduction immediately, but you can decide what exactly to do with the money later. For example, you can choose to donate $10,000 per year over the next ten years. Yes, there are fees, but on the plus side the money can be invested in a mutual fund while it's sitting in the donor-advised fund. Eventually the money will be donated, there is no way to get it back.

jefftk 8y ago

This is a weird article. It strongly implies that donor advised funds (DAFs) are storing money indefinitely and not distributing it, but the average disbursement for DAFs is about 15% per year. In general, people committing the money to charity now even if they haven't decided what they want to fund is something I strongly support, because it means they can't later change their minds and keep the money. The article also seems to evaluate DAFs primarily on how much they spend in the Bay Area: And even when it did give out money, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation often spent it outside of California. Last year, it gave out $436 million in grants to the nine-county Bay Area, which was just 34 percent of the $1.3 billion in grants it dispersed. The Bay Area is one of the richest regions of one of the richest states of one of the richest countries. There are definitely people in the Bay Area who need help, but overall I think it's really good that donors are becoming more interested in figuring out where their money can do the most good as opposed to only donating to organizations targeting the region they happen to live in.

yodon 8y ago
Please don’t use code formatting for quotes. It makes the text unreadable on mobile devices.
- danvayn 8y ago
  What app do you use? I'm not on mobile but I think code formatting for quotes probably looks fine on https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidroh.materialistic https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.github.hidr...
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Safari
  - a_t48 8y ago
    Chrome iOS.
  - dmach 8y ago

millstone 8y ago

DAFs are great for giving. The 2018 tax law changes increased the standard deduction and limited itemized deductions. This is certain to depress charitable giving, and DAFs are one thing that will help protect it. The reason is they allow donors to separately time the tax benefit from fund disbursement. Say you wish to donate $10k a year to charity. In 2018, this may not provide any tax deduction! However a DAF allows you to make a much larger donation of $100k, realize a tax deduction, and then dish it out in $10k increments over the years. DAFs also shields donors from providing contact info to the charity, allowing donors to escape the never-ending solicitation mail and calls. (Charities really dislike this, for obvious reasons.) The concerns about money sitting in DAFs is overblown. A charity with an endowment also has money that "sits" and isn't being spent, but you wouldn't describe that as a "black hole."

TAForObvReasons 8y ago
> But it is notable that the biggest recipient of DAFs’ gifts is none other than Fidelity [Charitable]. The third-biggest is the American Endowment Foundation, another DAF supplier. In practice, money is for the most part churning between DAFs, not actually being "spent". https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/23/a-philanthropic-boom-donor-advised-funds https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2017/03/23/a...
skybrian 8y ago
Seems like a large donation wouldn't be deductable due to AMT? Particularly when there are high state taxes.
- jefftk 8y ago
  The AMT excludes many deductions, but it doesn't exclude the charitable deduction.
- toast0 8y ago
  In addition to charitable deductions being deductable for AMT, you may also want to know deductions for state and local taxes are very limited in the 2018 tax year (and beyond), so AMT is likely to mostly disappear (if it wasn't abolished for individuals? There was some talk of that, but I didn't follow up, because state tax was my big deduction)

NelsonMinar 8y ago

I set up a DAF when Google went public in 2004. I've spent 25-50% of it in the intervening 13 years, despite best intentions. I sure took that full tax break in 2004 though and have compounded the value of that annually. So in my case the DAF has not worked as a great way to funnel money to actual charities. It just sits idle, compounding. The tax break I got seems to outweigh the public benefit. The psychology of having the DAF is funny. I sort of feel the virtue of having donated to charity every single year, just looking at the balance. When I do make a grant from the DAF I don't really feel like I'm doing anything more worthwhile. Also it's a bit impersonal because you have to recommend the grant then wait several days for the DAF to actually allocate. OTOH it's nice having a pile of money I've already "spent" that I can use to give to things at a whim. I think the solution is to require DAFs spend some large portion of their balance every single year. Charitable foundations are required to distribute something like 5%, but I think 10% or more makes more sense for an individual's DAF. There's also a strong argument that charitable donations shouldn't be tax deductible at all, remove this whole tax gimmick and economic distortion. I'm not sure I fully buy it (and the transition would be brutal) but it is worth reading: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2012/06/09/sweetened-charity https://www.economist.com/briefing/2012/06/09/sweetened-char...

cbhl 8y ago
I really wish non-profits could have for-profit endowment components in them, instead of having to ask for money every year. Rather than giving now or giving later, we could be giving forever by only spending the interest on the capital.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  One of Bill Gates ambitions is to have his foundation be done when he dies. He doesn't want it to go on forever with the mission drifting away from his and so on. How does what you are thinking line up with Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation? The corporation does most of the stuff we think of as Mozilla and is wholly owned by the foundation.
- namibj 8y ago
  Germany has/had some old institutions [0] that work(ed) that way. The keyword is Stiftung [1]. There seems to be nothing comparable in the US though, and you don't get a tax break for the donation, even though any business it conducts in the states is treated like a 501(c), provided it would be classified a 501(c) if it were a US based institution. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerspital_zum_Heiligen_Geist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerspital_zum_Heiligen... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiftung

Digory 8y ago

The unappreciated risk in a setup like this is that multiple donors could inadvertantly give the DAF sizable impact in voting shares. As I understand it, the Fund, not the donor, owns and votes any donated shares. If two cofounders sign the Giving Pledge and each give 50% of their voting shares to the same, local DAF, the DAF winds up with more shares than either donor. And it can vote them as a block.

bklyn11201 8y ago
"Generally, a DAF and its disqualified persons together may own no more than 20% of the voting stock, profits interest, capital interest, or beneficial interest in a business enterprise." http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/donor-advised-funds/ http://www.nonprofitlawblog.com/donor-advised-funds/
- Digory 8y ago
  Interesting. It appears there are two big loopholes to the 20% limit: a general five-year exception that allows DAFs to wind out of large donations, and a new exception where the DAF acquires 100% of the voting interest.[0] [1]https://clarknuber.com/articles/private-foundations-receive-excess-business-holdings-relief-bipartisan-budget-act/ https://clarknuber.com/articles/private-foundations-receive-...

omegaworks 8y ago

DAFs let you get a nice fat tax break with your startup windfall that you can then promise to the college of your child's choice. This is not charity.

sevensor 8y ago

I found it odd that the article talked throughout about "dispersal" of funds, which sounds a bit like scattering money to the winds. Is this a standard use with which I'm unfamiliar, or did the author mean "disbursal?"

russnewcomer 8y ago

The two major problems with DAFs stem from the fact that they are designed to give advantages to donors immediately but not require any further interaction. Problem - the organization most benefited by DAFs seem not to be charities, but Vanguard/Fidelty/etc that take management fees for the DAF for the next 10 years. Just running a ballpark with 4% interest and a 1 percent total management fee, putting 500k into a DAF makes the manager about 70k, and grows the fund about 170k. Not bad, but the benefit goes almost entirely to the fund manager. Problem - Giving to organizations is deferred to a later point in time, leading to grander visions. Theoretically, this should result in charities in the future receiving large checks, which is good. One problem with this, however, is that as numbers being donated get larger, it seems that charitable giving becomes more 'results' or 'mission' oriented. People give big chunks to bigger picture, systemic problems like curing cancer, fighting climate change, etc. These are good things. But the charities working on day-to-day problems get marginalized. My argument is certainly not that we should look for structural fixes to problems like pandemics, homelessness, or institutional racism. But a society that only gives to research universities to look for cures for pediatric cancer, and doesn't also help fund something like St. Jude, is a society with deep problems. DAFs have significant advantages and good things. But perhaps we have, as an American society, gone the wrong way to give incentives to high-net-worth individuals to give mainly to big causes, and not to day-to-day problems.

namibj 8y ago
You are implying that Vanguard takes 1%. It's under 0.14% for the Total Stock index, which broadly goes f or marketcap weighted US stocks. If the DAFs broker takes that much of a premium, they have the wrong broker. E.g. at the volumes you are talking about, Motif Investing seems to have significantly lower costs. Please don't think that these are what you should choose, they are just an example for what I'd potentially (depending on what the specific goals are) choose if I'd be running a DAF in the US.
- russnewcomer 8y ago
  Going by this : https://www.philanthropy.com/article/What-Donor-Advised-Funds/156495 https://www.philanthropy.com/article/What-Donor-Advised-Fund... it looks like average fees are around 1% for DAFs. Vanguard is cheaper, at .6 percent, but the SVCF, referenced in the article, is at 1%.

Erem 8y ago

My Fidelity DAF is the linchpin of my family's giving strategy -- I don't know how we could achieve what we want to achieve without it. The plan has been simple: put 5% of our monthly income into mutual funds through the DAF until it hits 100k, then start additionally supporting charitable organizations from the annual interest forever, without ever donating the principle. I view the impact of this account as probably my lasting legacy on Earth and enjoy the idea of passing it's stewardship on to my children. So it troubles me to read that this giving strategy is somehow contentious. And I don't yet understand whether what I'm doing is somehow abusing the original intent of the vehicle, or why it would upset people that we give in this way.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
The issue is that, maybe not in your case, but certainly in the cases of wealthier people, they're getting the tax break, but the money isn't actually going to anything charitable. If the money isn't actually going to charity, then why are we, as a society, giving a tax break for it?
- yellowstuff 8y ago
  DAFs can invest the money or make grants to charities. All the money eventually goes to charity except for management fees, but any investment account pays management fees. That's why there's a tax break.
  - s73v3r_ 8y ago
    Does it? What's the thing that forces it to eventually go to charity, as opposed to laying around in limbo for ever?
    - Erem 8y ago
      From what I understand, nothing forces it to ever go out. But if it does go out, it must go out to charity.
    - toast0 8y ago