Legacy Planner

How it works

List each charity you want to remember in your will. For each one, note the name you know it by, its full legal name and, if you can, its Employer Identification Number (EIN), the nine-digit federal tax ID the IRS assigns to businesses, tax-exempt organizations and other entities. The legal name and the EIN help your executor find the right organization. For U.S. charities, the IRS Tax Exempt Organization Search finds both by name or EIN, and shows whether an organization can receive tax-deductible gifts.

Then choose the kind of gift and how the charity may use it. The planner builds a one-page summary with sample wording for each gift, labeled as sample language to discuss with your estate attorney. Print summary prints that page alone. Everything stays in this browser.

The kinds of gift

• A specific amount, such as $5,000, written into the will as a fixed sum.
• A percentage of your estate, such as 10 percent, so the gift grows or shrinks with your estate.
• A share of the residue, which is what is left after your debts, taxes and expenses are paid and your other gifts are made.
• A contingent gift, which takes effect only if a condition is met, such as when the people you named don’t survive you. The charity is your backup beneficiary.

Unrestricted or restricted

A will may take effect decades after it is written. By then a charity’s programs, and the problem itself, may have changed. An unrestricted gift lets the organization use your money where it is needed most when it arrives. Fred Hutch Cancer Center’s guidance for donors, for example, calls unrestricted bequests the most valuable to it, because it can apply them to the area of greatest need.

A restricted gift can get stuck if its purpose ends. Redirecting it may then take a court, applying a doctrine called cy pres, which means “as near as possible” to what you intended. If you restrict a gift, the sample wording lets the charity use it for the closest purpose instead. Charitology calls the habit of tying gifts to narrow purposes the Restriction Reflex. A gift in a will is a gift to the future, which makes it a natural way to fund work on the timescale of the problem, the treatment for the Short Horizon.

The flexibility clause covers a different risk: the organization itself may no longer exist, may have merged, or may no longer be a charity when your estate is settled. The clause lets your executor give the gift to its successor or to a charity with similar purposes.

What it isn’t

It isn’t legal or tax advice, and it doesn’t make a will. Rules differ between countries and between states. In U.S. states with an elective share, for example, a surviving spouse can claim part of the estate whatever the will says. Taxes differ too: U.S. federal estate tax deducts gifts to qualifying charities from the taxable estate, and other places treat them differently. An estate attorney where you live can tell you what applies to you and draft the final wording. Nothing you type is sent anywhere.