What is Planned Giving?
Planned giving is the process of including charitable giving as part of your personal financial plans. Typically planned giving includes a variety of tools such as wills, bequests, life insurance, annuities and even stocks or bonds. Planned giving is usually a method to make significantly larger gifts to a charity or cause you care about.
The Canadian Association of Gift Planners (CAGP) has an excellent program called Leave a Legacy designed to educate Canadians about gift planning. CAGP’s top ten advice when planning gifts to charity:
- Prepare a will
- Leave a gift
- Be Specific
- Consider assets
- Name an alternate beneficiary
- Existing life insurance
- New life insurance
- Memorial gifts
- Encourage others
- Ask your advisor
CFI Canada, as a registered charity, is eligible to issue charitable tax receipts, which may be of significant value to you whether you are planning your estate or taking advantage of annual tax credits. Here are a few additional tips to consider:
Legal Language: Leaving a gift to Centre For Inquiry Canada in your will is a generous way to support the organization. It is important to ensure that you stipulate your gift preferences in clear language that does not leave room for challenge or dispute. Our Legal name is “Centre For Inquiry Canada – Le Centre Pour L’enquete”. If you wish to designate your gift to a specific service or programme that you care about, that should be clearly stated in your will. Contact ned@cficanada.ca if you’d like sample language for a bequest or to advise us of your gift intentions.
Life Insurance: Can be a way to make a much larger gift to CFI Canada. Premiums paid are tax deductible gifts and a life insurance policy can allow you to make a gift of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Endowments: Are you interested to see your gift work for CFI Canada indefinitely? Endowments are gifts which are intended to be invested and grow over the long term. A named endowment can be directed to specific uses with a designated portion of earned income of the endowed funds being directed annually to our charitable work.
Legal and Financial Advice: Always seek legal and financial advice from your own advisors and experts. Any gift planning strategy you undertake must ethically meet your needs and objectives as a donor.