ATHOL DICKSON

Give Like a Smarty

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How to give taxes to charity.
Give your taxes to charity!

How would you like to pay your taxes to the charity of your choice instead of to the government? Sound too good to be true? It’s not. Read on.

The IRS does not apply capital gains taxes to a charitable contribution of stock if it’s transferred directly from a donor’s account to a registered not-for-profit organisation such as a church. Also the IRS does not tax any gains when a not-for-profit sells stock and transfers the cash to its bank account. This can result in a sizable windfall for both you and for the charity of your choice. For example, compare these two scenarios:

Say you want to donate about $5,600 to charity this year, but your Christmas shopping has depleted your ready cash so you decide to sell some stock. You own 100 shares of Microsoft which you (after consulting your crystal ball) bought at the very bottom of the great recession for $15.50. Now those shares are worth $63.40. So those shares are now valued at your original investment plus a long term capital gain of $4,790. Most of us would have to pay a 15% long term capital gains tax on that amount, meaning Uncle Sam’s cut would be $718.50 ($4,790 x 15%). That leaves you with $5,621.50 to give to your favorite charity.

But what if your charity has a brokerage account? In that case you can transfer the 100 shares directly from your account to theirs. The capital gains are not taxed, neither when you transfer the stock to the charity, nor when the charity cashes out on their end. So instead of giving them $5,621.50, they get the full $6,340.

Cool deal, right?

It gets better.

In the first scenario you only get to deduct $5,621.50 from your taxable income this year. In scenario two, you can deduct the full $6,340. If your average tax rate ends up being in the 20% range, that could save you as much as $143.70 in taxes. Or, since your original goal was to give $5,600 anyway, instead of transferring the full 100 shares you could transfer just enough meet that goal and keep the rest, or give it to an additional charity.

If you’d like to do a little year end giving this way but don’t have any thoughts on who should get the dough, kindly allow me to suggest three excellent possibilities.

I like to use this strategy to support charities with stock I would otherwise sell anyway for other reasons, especially when rebalancing. The IRS doesn’t allow this strategy in a tax deferred account like an IRA or 401(k) until you’re 70.5 years old. After that you can transfer stock from deferred accounts and it counts toward your Required Minimum Distributions, which could be a very handy tax planning tool for those who give to charity during retirement. And yes. this strategy does apply to mutual funds and exchange traded funds.

If you’d like to do a little year end giving this way but don’t have any thoughts on who should get the dough, kindly allow me to suggest three excellent possibilities. All three of these outfits have brokerage accounts, and they are all familiar with this process. My wife and I have supported their work for some time now. We like them because we know for a fact that a large percentage of our donation is used in direct support of people who really need our help and we know people in the leadership teams personally, so we’re sure their hearts truly are in the right place.

Youth Believing In Change – an organisation that tutors and feeds underprivileged children after school and during the summer break. Email Vincent Gaddis – YBC at sbcglobal dot net

Morning Star News Service – a team of reporters focused on the horrific persecution of Christians that’s happening in some of the world’s most dangerous countries. Email Jeff Sellers – editor at morningstarnews dot org

The Salvation Army – we have personally witnessed the miraculous results they achieved in a homeless alcoholic family member’s life.  Email Bruce Branstine – bruce dot branstine at usw dot salvationarmy dot org

You probably noticed I’ve spelled out those email addresses to avoid subjecting these charities to robotic spam. When you type the addresses in your email, simply substitute the @ sign for the word “at” and use a period (.) where I wrote “dot” and do not include any spaces. For example, “me at myaddress dot com” would be: me@myaddress.com. Tell them Athol sent you!

They’re Not All Misogynists

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Ronald Reagan letter to his son
A man who loved his wife.

With the way things have been going lately, I thought it would be nice to hear from a politician who really loved his wife. Michael Reagan, son of Nancy and Ronald, got married in Hawaii in 1971. Sadly, his father could not attend, but the future President of the United States sent his son a heartfelt letter, which I offer below in its entirety for your reading pleasure. Make sure you have some Kleenex handy.

Michael Reagan
Manhattan Beach, California
June 1971

Dear Mike:

Enclosed is the item I mentioned (with which goes a torn up IOU). I could stop here but I won’t.

You’ve heard all the jokes that have been rousted around by all the “unhappy marrieds” and cynics. Now, in case no one has suggested it, there is another viewpoint. You have entered into the most meaningful relationship there is in all human life. It can be whatever you decide to make it.

Some men feel their masculinity can only be proven if they play out in their own life all the locker-room stories, smugly confident that what a wife doesn’t know won’t hurt her. The truth is, somehow, way down inside, without her ever finding lipstick on the collar or catching a man in the flimsy excuse of where he was till three A.M., a wife does know, and with that knowing, some of the magic of this relationship disappears. There are more men griping about marriage who kicked the whole thing away themselves than there can ever be wives deserving of blame. There is an old law of physics that you can only get out of a thing as much as you put in it. The man who puts into the marriage only half of what he owns will get that out. Sure, there will be moments when you will see someone or think back to an earlier time and you will be challenged to see if you can still make the grade, but let me tell you how really great is the challenge of proving your masculinity and charm with one woman for the rest of your life. Any man can find a twerp here and there who will go along with cheating, and it doesn’t take all that much manhood. It does take quite a man to remain attractive and to be loved by a woman who has heard him snore, seen him unshaven, tended him while he was sick and washed his dirty underwear. Do that and keep her still feeling a warm glow and you will know some very beautiful music. If you truly love a girl, you shouldn’t ever want her to feel, when she sees you greet a secretary or a girl you both know, that humiliation of wondering if she was someone who caused you to be late coming home, nor should you want any other woman to be able to meet your wife and know she was smiling behind her eyes as she looked at her, the woman you love, remembering this was the woman you rejected even momentarily for her favors.

Mike, you know better than many what an unhappy home is and what it can do to others. Now you have a chance to make it come out the way it should. There is no greater happiness for a man than approaching a door at the end of a day knowing someone on the other side of that door is waiting for the sound of his footsteps.

Love,

Dad

P.S. You’ll never get in trouble if you say “I love you” at least once a day.

Source: Reagan: A Life In Letters

A Duty to Be Great

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excellence-mediocrity-sign-100816There’s a list over at over at GoodReads, called “The Worst Books of All Time.” As a novelist and as a Christian, that list saddens me. Why? Because some of those titles include To Kill a Mockingbird, Billy Budd, The Red Badge of Courage, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Forest Gump, Fahrenheit 451, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Pearl.

While discussing it with some fellow novelists, one said many books by Christians are poorly written. She then felt the need to qualify her statement by affirming that she thinks there are lots of well-written novels by Christians. Probably she didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings, and that’s laudable, but it seems to me she had it right the first time.

It’s true many novels by Christians are poorly written. That’s also true of many other kinds of novels. In fact it’s true of most novels of every kind, and readers let writers get away with it because readers too are mediocre. Most of us don’t really care about excellence in literature, or in architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, drama, government, commerce, marriage, or anything else in life that ought to matter. The list at GoodReads is just one of countless proofs of this which can be seen around us everywhere.

What interests me, is why. In our discussion about the “Worst Books” list, some of my author friends speculated that so many people dislike those novels because they were forced to read them in school and disliked them then. But these books truly are works of genius—most of them are, anyway—so why didn’t we love them in the first place?

The answer has to do with what it means to live in a fallen world. As creatures made in the Creator’s image, we were designed to use our gifts to their utmost, and to savor excellence in our neighbor’s use of their gifts. It’s impossible to imagine the words “good enough” being spoken in the Garden before the Fall. But we did fall, and one of the things we lost was our ability to throw ourselves into living with complete abandon. “Good is the enemy of great,” as Jim Collins wrote (paraphrasing Voltaire). Thus, in settling for good enough, we have rampant mediocrity in the world.

It’s impossible to imagine the words “good enough” being spoken in the Garden before the Fall.

Another thing we abandoned in the Fall was our ability to perceive the true extent of what we’ve lost. When expediency and ego dilute the full potential of even our best writers and artists, the audience, being also lost, doesn’t know enough to care. Therefore they applaud what little they can get, and their applause rewards mediocrity. This in turn inspires the production of more mediocrity, and the cycle builds more and more support for itself until mediocrity seems normal, or even (God forbid) good. Because that lie has become pervasive, the true nature of goodness is difficult for even Christians to remember. Thus we have rampant mediocrity even in the church.

The faithful Christian’s life should always include a sense of resisting mediocrity at every turn. It’s a command and a duty. “Whatever you do, do it will all your heart, as if for the Lord and not for men.” (Col 3:23) It’s no coincidence that this command includes the same requirement for wholeheartedness as the Greatest Command of all, to “love the Lord your God with all your heart….”

How can we love the Lord with all our heart? By living every part of life with all our heart. By not settling. By always striving to improve. In other words, as with all of His commands, the Creator simply wants us to live (write, marry, work, etc.) as we were originally created to live…with complete abandonment to what we truly are, which will reveal itself in the constant exercise of excellence in all our gifts.

Don’t believe the lie of “good enough.” You were created to be so much better than that. Strive for excellence in everything you do. In little things as well as big, live with all your heart.