Creating Meaningful Year-End Plans with Your Clients

Imagine a family sitting around the dinner table as they talk about money. For some, such a picture may raise images of disagreements or avoidance. But as a financial advisor, you can help families have constructive and even fun conversations about wealth. Here are a few ways to help your clients create meaningful year-end decisions that merge values, wealth, and generosity together.

Encourage Creativity

End of year planning provides the opportunity to help clients practice creativity in their giving. The donor advised fund (DAF) provides a platform to do this through no matter your client’s stage of life. Through this platform, you can then explore potential strategies for their generosity.

For example, younger families could give their children an opportunity to come up with a problem that they want to help address, such as caring for sick children around the world or feeding the poor. The children identify a need and an organization, and the parents can facilitate the gift from their DAF on behalf of the child. These opportune moments provide insight for parents into their kids’ hearts and the ability to engage in meaningful conversations on the topics of what they care about most.

Families with older children could set up DAFs for each child and one for the parents. Parents can then supplement the child’s DAF with donations from their own in order to encourage generosity and planning at all ages. Financial advisors offering creative strategies like these have the unique opportunity to get to know not just the parents, but the family as a whole.

Identify Opportunities

Your clients look to you to present tools and strategies that will help facilitate their wealth for charitable giving. Here are two low hanging fruit strategies to discuss with your clients as you explore what fits best for these families’ year-end decisions:

1. Charitable Bunching. This is a method to help clients itemize their tax deduction and potentially maximize their tax break by making two years of donations in one year and then taking the standard deduction in the following year. Learn more here.
2. Complex Assets. 80% of giving is typically done in cash, but help your clients explore the non-cash opportunities they hold in order to maximize generosity and minimize tax liability. From real estate interests to publicly traded securities, these all can be contributed to a donor advised fund, which yields potential capital gains tax savings. Learn more here.
   By exposing your clients to some of these more efficient ways to give, you can add great value to the services you render them.

Take Action Now

So what can you do right at this moment to start on this journey? The simplest first step is to open up your own DAF with The Signatry and with any other financial institutions that you are considering recommending to your clients. Statistics have shown that clients want and have greater trust in the advice of advisors who are already actively engaged in charitable giving and personally understand the tools themselves.

Here at The Signatry, we have competitive fees and no minimum balances required to start a donor advised fund. To us, it is important to break down the artificial barriers to generosity. We do all we can to empower families giving and solving world problems. We care about impact over dollar amounts. Most importantly, as a faith-based organization, we provide a place for your clients to have alignment with their values at every level.

If you want to bring a family together around the topic of generosity, these are just a few of the ways that The Signatry can help you do just that.