el unfiltered 1

A spurt of inspiration occurred. I'm free flowing. Unedited. May generally is when I celebrate my own New Year. It's spring. It's the month of mothers. I am one. It's also my birth month. It's also my career anniversary month. And so on. So forgive my reflective flow of unorganized thoughts tonight, here I am unedited, sentimental, thinking about the time we all get...

I spent an hour today over lunch at work on a break from my day job just helping to facilitate about 109 people's learning about charitable giving but from a tax strategist's perspective. It was at work with those of you Club Friends who are my co-workers on our Club's first home's internal intranet site. Over Teams, during lunch, where we're casual. But... no less serious. Now today I merely facilitated. But, I learned as much from my experienced-giver guest speakers as everyone else on the call.

I have those Club meeting minutes to write up still. I am a procrastinator and an incubator. I'll get to them soon. I love our lil Club for this reason. Club Friends show up to learn and they count on learning something new. And our lunch and learn sessions always deliver some good stuff - the post-recap write up delivers nuggets of learning too - eventually - and consistently. Then we riff. We add to the asynchronous conversation even more rich input and other considerations. Learning is infectious. And the thing is, I learn as much as everyone and anyone. So I keep at it. And today, this topic about charitable giving was absolutely illuminating.

Myself? I have only ever donated in cash or filled bins of tangible gently used items like clothing, books, and small appliances or other household gear. Once an old car. Sometimes, most times, my cash donations get matched by my company. Always I give to causes near and dear to my heart or to my friends' hearts. Cuz I'm always going to give at least $25 to a friend asking me to support their fave causes too. Of course. If I can. Oh gosh, I hate saying no; don't add me to your solicitation lists cuz I wrote that. ;-)

Today? I learned I can donate appreciated stocks instead of cash, and affect a reduction in my taxable income for the year - and even if I don't donate at an amount that together with all my other donations and any other deductions would amount to more than the standard deduction we all are going to get. So that was cool. And, even if I don't or can't afford to "bunch" and beat the standard deduction on a cadence that I can make work to really boost my lowering of my tax bill in a couple year span.... I learned there's better ways I can donate even at my capability level today than I knew about before today. And better plan for the year or two ahead, or the next couple few decades. It makes me think, why has no one ever mentioned all this to me before? Because financial literacy is a pull not a push model. You have to know to go find these answers. No one takes you aside to teach you how to optimize your giving. Or you miss it. Because you don't know what you don't know. My tax prep software could have popped up a pop up box to say, "we see you exercised stock/sold stock/had stock sales... did you know you could have donated some of those stocks to lower your taxable income and pay less taxes?" And I would have at least known sooner, could have saved potentially hundreds if not thousands over my last two decades of life since first learning what a stock even was. I think I kinda knew but didn't possess any to speak of til circa Y2K. So ugh. Live and learn.

In our lunch and learn session today we also talked about DAFs, and RMDs, and QCDs, and implications for Social Security and Medicare in our gold years. Truly mind blowing thoughts. Well they were for me. I loved it. I also learned that I can start now to think about how I will be able to set up my savings to be even more charitable when I'm in my 70s to really manage my tax bill in a couple/few decades from now. When you are ultimately forced (RMDs) to take money from your retirement savings, while receiving social security too, it will be taxed, and by how much? Well, it could be a lot bigger bill than you thought if you have to take a lot out that hasn't been taxed yet because it went in pre-tax and grew tax free all those years. Lowering that taxable amount in your 70s and 80s and 90s will be attractive to you, if it's time to pay all those deferred taxes. But, if you can enjoy your charitable vibe and reduce your tax bill too to boot. Win Win.

How I contribute to my retirement savings today has implications for what I plan to do in the future with my someday old giving heart. Knowledge is an amazing super power. So is the joy of giving. Plan accordingly.

I also must share I spent two hours after dinner tonight sitting with a 91-year old once career CPA. It was an honor to be sitting with a human who's lived so many decades longer than I have. My friend's daddy. I'd met him only a few times since about 2005. We had to IM each other with a shared dry erase pen we handed back and forth to each other because he could no longer hear me. I wrote on the white board, something like, "today, I helped facilitate 100+ people's learning about charitable giving and income tax reduction strategies. I learned about QCDs and RMDs." and he wrote back "that's amazing, I forget." And I agreed it was amazing and I hoped I would ultimately remember. And then I wrote, "I'm going to visit you tomorrow, and I would like you to tell me one of your favorite tax tips." He pondered a while and wrote back, "I will sleep on it."

Also today... I received back a restated trust document meant to encompass all my needed revisions that I let simmer years too long after the attorney who instantiated it for me had retired. The new attorney I found is so sharp and new and improved wielding all the latest and greatest legal language protections a gal could want. She's got my back, as I have my family's back.

Mortality was the theme of the day.

I opened Facebook a bit ago, a detour on my way here, and on my feed was a reel from a stranger about home owner's insurance and how despite how grateful she was she and her family of five all survived it, her house burned to the ground and she's only getting FMV from her insurance coverage and not replacement value and why that mattered. The commenters I can't help but sample either showered her with thoughts and prayers or blasted her for not reading her policy's fine print sooner.

I'm always learning.

What I can tell you is this: Life is short. Not many days I've spent have proved to me more than today the old adage that says there is nothing certain in life except death and taxes. We all will live and then die. In a blink, if we make it, we too will reach 91.

We may likely forget all we learned backwards and forwards and inside and out back when we were young. Some of us may even live out our days facilitating tax or money tips for others or rather maybe you will have spent it learning the hard way about what that fine print had actually once tried to convey to you. You may forget you even once read it, if you read it at all. But no matter, it remains a generally accepted fact that money matters. It does. Whether you read about its fine print or not.

If you are going to live to be 91, I want you to be sure you know how to make your money last, how to be charitable wisely, how to protect your wealth against the unimaginable, how to transfer your legacy as you design, and I hope you will think about how to help others learn these lessons too. Live your best life. Learn to love reading the fine print. Set your money up to: work for you, bring you happiness, peace, a warm bed, a legacy, and an eventual content and peaceful exit strategy.

Tell the others.

Yours,

el*

*not an expert, just care. please forgive the typos.