Let’s Build Your Legacy Together
At the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, we believe that planned giving is about more than just financial transactions. It’s about transforming lives and strengthening our community.
Creating A Lasting Legacy
At the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, we work with individuals, families, and organizations to develop thoughtful, impactful giving strategies that extend their generosity beyond their lifetime. Planned giving is a strategic approach to philanthropy that enables you to support charitable causes in a way that fits within your overall financial, tax, and estate plans. Coordinating your future giving is a powerful way to curate a lasting legacy by supporting causes important to you. It can also serve as an enduring representation of the values that matter the most to you. These gifts can provide you or your loved ones with financial benefits while ensuring that your generosity continues to create positive change for future generations.
Why Planned Giving?
Planned giving offers a unique opportunity to make a lasting difference in the Baton Rouge community. With careful planning, you can:
- Create a Legacy: Make a lasting contribution to the causes and values that matter most to you.
- Achieve Financial Goals: Potentially reduce taxes, generate income, and support your heirs.
- Maximize Impact: Planned gifts often allow you to make a more significant contribution than you thought possible.
- Ensure Long-Term Support: Provide sustained funding for nonprofits and programs that improve lives in our region.
The Foundation can help you meet these goals through vehicles —like charitable trusts, donor advised funds, IRA rollovers, and more— that best fit your specific need.
What Can I Give?
Planned gifts can take many forms, allowing you to give in a way that works best for your personal situation.
Common options include:
- Cash Gifts: Simple and straightforward, these gifts can be made during your lifetime or through your estate.
- Securities: Donating appreciated stocks, bonds, or mutual funds can provide significant tax advantages.
- Real Estate: Gifts of real estate can be used to establish a fund or support a specific cause.
- Life Insurance: Naming the Foundation as a beneficiary of your policy is an easy way to create a legacy. Alternatively, you can give your paid-up life insurance policy and receive an immediate charitable income deduction.
- Retirement Assets: Designating the Foundation as a beneficiary of your retirement plan can reduce tax burdens on your heirs.
- Personal Property: Gifts such as artwork, jewelry, or other valuables can also support your philanthropic goals.
Different Charitable Giving Vehicles
The Baton Rouge Area Foundation offers a variety of giving vehicles.
Here’s how you can make an impact:
- Bequests: Include a gift in your will or living trust. It’s a simple way to leave a legacy without affecting your current finances.
- Charitable Gift Annuities: Provide you with fixed payments for life, with the remainder supporting your chosen causes.
- Charitable Remainder Trusts (CRTs): Allow you or your beneficiaries to receive income for life or a set term, with the remainder benefiting your selected charities.
- Charitable Lead Trusts (CLTs): Provide income to charity for a set number of years, with the remainder transferring to your heirs, potentially reducing gift and estate taxes.
- Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs): Establish a fund today and recommend grants to nonprofits over time, benefiting from immediate tax deductions and long-term impact. DAFs can be established for your children and grandchildren as a way ton continue your legacy of giving.
- Endowment Funds: Create a permanent fund that supports your chosen causes or favorite nonprofits year after year, ensuring that your legacy endures.
- IRA Charitable Rollover: If you are 70½ or older, you can make a tax-free distribution from your IRA directly to the Foundation, supporting your favorite causes.
How do I know if I can make a planned gift?
Talking to your professional advisors like estate and tax lawyers, CPAs, and financial advisors, about your estate plan is the best way to start. They can help you determine which of your assets are most advantageous to leave to your family, which would be better to leave to charity, and which giving vehicles best meet your goals.
When you’re ready to move forward, the Foundation will work with you and your advisor(s) to ensure that your philanthropic plan is developed thoughtfully and impactfully.
Contact Us
Our team is here to work with you and your professional advisors to develop a giving plan that reflects your values, achieves your goals, and ensures that your impact is felt for generations to come.
Contact us today to learn more about how planned giving can help you make a difference in Baton Rouge and beyond.
Carissa Graves
VP of Philanthropic Advancement