Professional Planned Giving Web Pages for Gift Planning

DATE: January, 2001

The following is intended as general information and does not represent legal or tax advice. Individual circumstances vary - please consult your legal and tax advisors about your specific situation.

This is not about planned giving, but it is a practice that is affecting more and more seniors and we briefly want to touch on it. "Cramming" is billing consumers on their telephone bills for services they never ordered. Con artists (telemarketing or otherwise) are using the telephone bill as a method of payment, and cramming has become a major scam.

To fight cramming: Check your telephone bill carefully, If you find a questionable charge, instruct your telephone company to remove the charge, If the charge isn't removed, complain to the Federal Communications Commission by calling (888) CALL-FCC.
excerpted from www.help4srs.org

At a recent forum conducted by the Heritage Foundation, Karlyn Bowman, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute stated that the government will not institute a broad, general tax cut in the near future…tax cuts "will more likely happen on the state or local level."

The forum, "Possibilities for Policy Consensus in the New Congress and Administration," was held to discuss the legislative outlook for the 107th Congress.

"The public is sick and tired of mindless partisanship," said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. The general consensus among the participants was that bipartisanship must play a critical roll in the next Congress.
http://www.ncpg.org/grcnewsdec.html (Government Relations Page of National Committee on Planned Giving)

When you watch Jim Barksdale reading to kids in his home state of Mississippi, it's hard to imagine him as a high tech business mogul whose net worth is upward of $700 million. But the man who once concentrated on building companies now has a different goal: "We're going to teach little children to read whether they want to learn how to read or not," he says.

And to do it he and his wife Sally are giving Mississippi a huge chunk of the fortune he made when Netscape, the Internet company he helped run, was sold to America Online two years ago. The Barksdales didn't have the big money very long before they decided to give it away. "We couldn't figure out what to do with it," explains Sally Barksdale. "You can only spend so much on yourself before it just gets ridiculous. So why not do something with it while we're here to see what happens to it?"
CBS Worldwide Inc

On December 15, House and Senate Passed the Community Renewal Tax Relief Act of 2000. This statute creates favorable tax benefits for up to 40 renewal communities, . extends (through calendar year 2002) the medical savings accounts and renames them as "Archer MSAs," to honor retiring Chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, William Archer, and makes minor corrections in the consumer price index ("CPI") for 2001 and following years. These will have a small impact on the indexed income tax brackets for 2001.

A benefit included for corporations to note is a change that encourages deductions of computer technology and equipment. Property may be donated as long as 3 years after construction and the computers may be given to both educational institutions and public libraries.
Information taken from GiftLaw.com

In Treasury Decision 8923, the IRS has finalized the "ghoul" charitable lead trust Regulations proposed on April 5, 2000 (see article in April archives referring to vulture charitable lead trust).

As finalized, the Regulations permit the measuring lives to include someone who, with respect to all of the noncharitable remainder beneficiaries, is either a lineal ancestor or a spouse of a lineal ancestor of the noncharitable remainder beneficiaries. The final Regulations provide that a trust will satisfy the requirement that all noncharitable remainder beneficiaries are lineal descendants of the individual who is the measuring life, or that individual's spouse, if there is less than a 15% probability that individuals who are not lineal descendants will receive any trust corpus, as computed on the date of transfer to the trust.
Information from www.giftplan.org

The preceding is meant as general information and does not represent legal or tax advice. Individual circumstances vary - please consult your legal and tax advisors about your specific situation.

FIGHT CRAMMING | BROAD TAX CUTS NOT LIKELY | AN ATTITUDE OF GIVING | COMMUNITY RENEWAL ACT OF 2000 | FINAL WORD ON VULTURE CHARITABLE LEAD TRUSTS