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FEATURE STORY
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CharitablePlanning.com
It's one-stop shopping for the
charitable gift or charitable organization planner
By Donald H. Kelley
Kelley Rating (one asterisk = lowest, to five asterisks = highest):
- Ease of navigation, design of interface and learning curve
*****
- Instructional documentation and help system ****
- Carries out the goal of the product as advertised ****
- Overall usefulness ****
CharitablePlanning.com,
or CPC, is a website that provides a comprehensive variety of resources
for professionals addressing planned-giving arrangements as well as the
formation and administration of charitable organizations.
It includes current news; commentary and articles on charitable
tax subjects; plus a table of contents linking to an Internal Revenue
Service library, federal tax regulations and other legislation; cases
and IRS pronouncements affecting charities and planned giving; as well
as IRS sample documents. The site also includes calculators for various
charitable trust devices.
CharitablePlanning.com
is published by Emanuel Kallina,
II, principal, K. Brigid
Peterson, associate, of Kallina & Associates, LLC in Baltimore, Md.,
with Russell A.
Willis, III, a consultant with Timberline Investment Company in Blue
Springs, Mo. The three also contribute to the site.
CharitablePlanning.com
aims to provide the financial and estate-planning professional with the
tools and research resources needed to deal with, as the site puts it,
"the ever-changing legislative, legal and regulatory landscapes" of the
charitable-planning world." A Welcome page
highlights the content, features and functionality of the site.
Topical articles are posted not only by the publishers but also
by other contributors, such as Greg Baker, president of Renaissance
Charitable Foundation and André R. Donikian, president of Pentera
Gift Planning, both in Indianapolis, and Kathryn W. Miree, president of
Kathryn W. Miree & Associates, Inc. in Birmingham, Ala.
Comparable Websites
Two sites come close to doing what CharitablePlanning.com
does:
Planned Giving Design Center
offers free access (registration required) to current news, extensive
articles, case studies, technical reports and discussion forums.
Information on planned-giving topics is available at "Articles" (a
compilation of monthly professional articles), "News" and "Technical
Reports." Site resources are indexed by category and include IRS forms
relating to charitable organizations and the Donor Direct
and Compliance
NOW planned-giving calculators.
Another site, Planned Giving
Resources, offers resources for pooled income funds, gift annuities,
state regulations, the basic Donor Direct
calculators, and much more. That site, which has some areas that need
updating, was created by James ("Jim") Benton Potter (May 17, 1935 to
March 8, 2006.) The family is seeking someone to continue Jim's work.
For those interested, send an email to Lee Potter at leep345@hotmail.com.
(continuation
of article)
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Helping Professionals Help Others! with
NumberCruncher, the leading estate and financial planning
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easy-to-learn and use, estate and financial planning software. This
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compute, QPRTs, GRATs, Charitable Remainder & Lead Trusts, Private
Annuities, Capital Punishment by Confiscation and much much more! www.leimberg.com
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(continuation of article)
What's It All About?
CharitablePlanning.com's
home page features current events. For example, the Feb. 29, 2008,
publication reported on:
- a suggestion by Roger Colinvaux, legislation counsel for the Joint
Committee on Taxation, that Congress consider minimum payouts for
college endowment funds;
- published letters and reports, including a letter dated Feb. 4,
2008, from Kelly R. Berg to Philip T. Hackney of the IRS Office of Chief
Counsel, relating to the expenditures test for Type III supporting
organizations;
- Derby v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2008-45, disallowing
deductions for doctors' gifts of intangibles to a foundation; and
- Private Letter Rulings 200809023, 200809024, 200809025, 200809026
and 200809027 approving conversion of a pre-1985 multi-generational
trust to a total return trust.
Each news item is summarized and presented in historical context, with
commentary and links to related primary and secondary sources.
You also can search current events by day, month, year, selected
highlights, "Current Events Relating to the Congress," IRS current
actions, tax shelters and alleged abuses.
Under "Tools & Calculations," the website links to IRS sample forms for
charitable trusts. This area also includes basic online calculators for
charitable remainder unitrusts, charitable remainder annuity trusts (one
life, two lives, and terms of years), charitable lead unitrusts,
charitable lead annuity trusts (one life, two lives, and term of years),
pooled income funds (one life and two lives), charitable gift annuities
(immediate, for one and two lives), and even a zeroed-out grantor
retained annuity trust.
The calculators are easy to use. You simply enter data on one
web page and the Internal Revenue Code Section 7520 rate for the date of
gift shows up automatically. You then click on a "Save & Calculate"
button and open a web page on which the results are displayed.
In addition to saving your calculations, you can review, edit or delete
them. But the calculators do not include error trapping or rate
optimization for charitable trust calculations. Because CharitablePlanning.com is a
work in progress, the publishers are looking to add more calculation
functions, including calculators for deferred, commuted and flexible
gift annuities as well as for remainder interests in residences and
farms. Subscribers are informed of upcoming developments with the site
via email.
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Presenting The 2008 Wealth Management Resource Guide
For more than 40 years, attorneys, bank trust officers, financial
planners and investment consultants have relied on the Trusts &
Estates Wealth Management Resource Guide as the industry's only
one-stop source of trust institutions and related products and services.
To order your copy click
here
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(continuation of article)
The "Library" provides uniquely well-organized and convenient access
to the IRC, regulations, cases and relevant IRS pronouncements. The
"Legislation" area includes acts, bills, congressional reports,
Congressional Budget Office documents, and Joint Committee on Taxation
documents. Cases are listed for the Supreme Court, Federal Circuit
Courts, Court of Claims and Tax Court. IRS pronouncements are listed by
type (including chief counsel advice, PLRs and technical advice.) In
each area, documents can be located by entering the citation, by word
search or by browsing.
The publishers say that the Library includes more than 800,000
documents. From a given document, you can click on "Document Info" to
view any commentary on that document and a list of other documents
referring to it. Recent updating to the document is flagged. The search
facility includes prompts for word strings and a selection of other
criteria for each area of the Library. You can sort search results by
relevance to your search criteria or by date.
Under "My Research," you can save your searches, mark any documents on
the site for future reference and create research folders to manage the
data you want to revisit.
There also is a free email service that periodically summarizes recent
additions to the site.
What About Help and Support?
CharitablePlanning.com
includes a Help Center with web pages introducing you to the site and
explaining the organization of the Commentary and the Library sections.
The Help Center includes detailed text and graphic explanations of how
to get the most out of searching the Library and how to save searches
and earmark documents for future reference.
Email support is also available. The site includes a convenient fill-in
feedback form that goes directly to the publishers.
(continuation of article)
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(continuation of article)
How to Gain Access
CharitablePlanning.com is
available in two versions: "CPC Light" includes access to the current
events reports and the articles that are published on the site. It costs
$60 a year. "CPC Professional" provides access to all of the site's
features for $50 per month or $550 a year. A free one-month trial is
available for CPC Professional.
You can purchase access to this online service by registering on the
site at www.charitableplanning.com/register.
(No downloading of software is necessary as the services, including
calculations, are all web-based.) To register, you create an account and
choose a username and password. Then you select a subscription type
(one-month free trial, CPC Light or CPC Professional) and establish a
payment method. Upon completing the transaction, you'll receive a
confirmation online and via email. All personal information is kept
private pursuant to the site's privacy policy. Once your account is
established, you can go online anytime to change your contact or account
information.
At the time of registration, you may select to be on the CPC email list,
which highlights content recently published on the website, and elect to
receive these summaries either daily or weekly.
Bottom Line
CharitablePlanning.com
gives you quick and convenient access to current news affecting
charitable planning and charitable organizations with the publishers'
commentary on these events. With its IRS materials, regulations, cases,
and charitable trust calculators, this site enables you to do a lot of
your work in one place. In many respects, it is one-stop shopping at its
best.
Trusts & Estates magazine is pleased to present the monthly
Technology Review by Donald H. Kelley -- a respected connoisseur
of the software and Internet resources wealth management advisors use to
further their practices.
Kelley is a lawyer living in Highlands Ranch, Colo. and is of counsel
to the law firm of Kelley, Scritsmier & Byrne, P.C. of North Platte,
Neb. He is the co-author of the Intuitive Estate Planner
software, (Thomson — West 2004). He has served on the governing
boards of the American Bar Association Real Property Probate and Trust
Section and the American College of Tax Counsel. He is a past regent and
past chair of the Committee on Technology in the Practice of the
American College of Trust and Estate Counsel.
Trusts & Estates has asked Kelley to provide his unvarnished opinions
on the tech resources available in the practice today. His columns are
edited for readability only. Send feedback and suggestions for articles
directly to him at dhkelley@qwestoffice.net.
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Act Now To Be Included In The 2008 Guide To Charitable Giving
Each year, Trusts & Estates publishes a special guide on the
current state of charitable giving. If you're a charity, philanthropic
advisory firm or insurance or annuity company, don't miss this
opportunity to reach advisors to the affluent for an entire year. For
more information, contact Adam Strominger at adam.strominger@penton.com
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