>It's kind of his money that he controls. He can do a lot with it, but he can't buy a yacht with it... You don't get the favorable tax treatment without a ton o

>It's kind of his money that he controls. He can do a lot with it, but he can't buy a yacht with it... You don't get the favorable tax treatment without a ton of restrictions on how you can spend the money. Bill Gates would never need to buy a yacht with his foundation money because he would buy a yacht before he made it foundation money. It's like saying I can't buy a new TV with my retirement funds, but, I can certainly buy a new TV and contribute less to my retirement funds -- the end result is the exact same dollars went to the exact same end, I just organized them differently. A version of this is that every kid who got scholarship money or loans knows how to bucket expenses to use your "limited use" dollars on qualifying expenses that would otherwise be paid by general funds, freeing up general funds for things. The net result is that the loans paid for nonqualified expenses, but they were organized appropriately.