Tax-wise giving - Why a field of interest is good for the future

BY JOHN W. SHEPPARD Retired Estate Planning Attorney, Trustee of the Southwest Florida Community Foundation

Many years ago my father told me that when he was a young boy he visited his uncle's farm in Deep Step, Ga. While in the field alone one day, my father saw the strange sight of a man flying, sitting on some kind of noisy winged machine. He ran home and told his uncle, who promptly whipped him for lying and making up stories. His uncle said, "Who ever heard of a man being able to fly? You might just as well say a man could fly to the moon!"

Some 35 years ago my then teenaged son came home from Edison College and said they had a device called a computer there, which occupied an entire room and could do wonderful technical things. Things that today would be dwarfed by the computer technology of a small cell phone.

Could any of us have imagined a generation ago the scientific, technological, and medical advances made in the last 30 years?

I recall in 1963, my uncle went to Houston and was hospitalized for three months to have what today would be a rudimentary heart procedure by Dr. Denton Cooley, who, in 1968, performed the first human heart transplant in this country.

By the same token, how can you and I know today what the critical needs of this community will be, much less how and by what method, or by whom, those needs will be met a generation or even a decade from now. We may know that we have an interest in helping the elderly, the sick, underprivileged children, treating patients with a particular disease, or preserving the environment, but not know how those needs will be met, or even if the need will exist.

This is precisely the reason the Community Foundation has a class of endowed funds available to donors which may be created during lifetime or at death called a field of interest fund.

We just don't know today what the services and needs will be in the many tomorrows to come. However, if we do have passion to help a particular type of cause that may be important to us, a field of interest endowed fund will be flexible enough to meet whatever the needs may be in that cause that is dear to you and can adjust to meet the changing times.

And to top it off, there are some wonderful tax benefits now and in the future, which can be achieved with such a fund. For more information, please call the foundation office at 274-5900, or visit www.floridacommunity. com.

The Southwest Florida Community Foundation has been supporting the communities of Lee, Charlotte, Collier, Glades and Hendry through endowed funds for more than 30 years. With assets of more than $57 million and 313 endowed funds, the community foundation has provided more than $30 million in grants and scholarships to the communities it serves.