Congratulations! If you’re reading this far, you might fit the title, in which case I’m very happy for you. Maybe a wire transfer landed on Tuesday from the business you spent thirty years building. Maybe you’ve sold the company and can finally enjoy the retirement you’ve been dreaming about, or a trust distribution arrived on what would have been your mother’s birthday. Perhaps your IPO shares vested all at once, or trickled in over years, or the money came with the estate settlement that finally cleared through probate months after you thought you were done grieving the paperwork. Whatever the story, the money is here, and something has shifted.
For many people, it’s during this time, or when they meet with their financial advisor or CPA, that they think seriously about philanthropy and what the wealth is really for. Honestly, that makes sense. Most of us don’t spend our working years imagining what a giving plan looks like at scale, because we’re too busy building the thing that gave us the wealth in the first place. According to Cerulli Associates, an estimated $84 trillion will transfer between generations and to charity by 2045 in the United States alone.
Every liquidity event opens a planning window. Some of these windows are urgent, with lockups expiring, tax years closing, and distribution deadlines arriving in ways that make you feel like you’re being rushed through a doorway with your shoes untied. Others are quieter, where the executor completes the estate work, the buyer’s final payment lands, or the vested shares clear without any noise around it. Either way, the window opens, and what happens inside it tends to shape what happens for the next decade of your giving life.
The default, for most people, is reactive. You give to the causes that ask, you set up a donor advised fund because the advisor suggested it, and you continue the giving your parents did, or your spouse did, or the giving you did before the money was quite this significant. Reactive giving is not wrong, and it can be genuinely meaningful. It’s just less than the moment can hold, and less than most people would choose if they paused long enough to think about it.
The alternative is to plan for this time, much like you’ve been doing with your investments. Ask the strategic questions before the money starts moving. What do we want this wealth to do? Which values are we trying to express through it? Who else is at the table with us, and what do they think? What are we doing on purpose, and what are we doing simply because it’s easy?
The tax year matters, and December 31 is a real deadline, so I would never tell you otherwise. But the deeper opportunity in a liquidity event isn’t the tax deduction, as satisfying as that is. It’s the clarity that comes from making a plan before the year ends, so that January opens on a foundation rather than a scramble.
For advisors, the window is a conversation to open, not a form to fill out. Ask your clients if they’ve considered philanthropy as part of their legacy plan, or as a way to underpin tax mitigation, and whether they’ve thought about what this might actually entail. This means thinking about values, family, and legacy, and figuring out which causes they can genuinely stand behind and be proud of supporting for years to come.
Strategic philanthropy begins with values. That is the work we do at Jonesing for Good.
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