Building a Foundation for Future Giving
In 2015, Michael and Cathy Baer established the Baer Family Futures Fund at MCF as a starting point for their long-term giving plans. “It was intended to be a placeholder for now,” Michael said. “Our goal was a way to start growing a fund and investing in long-term community support.”
As a financial advisor, Michael spends his time devising strategies for his clients, and he applies these same strategies to his own philanthropic plans. “I’m a firm believer in creating a framework to support organizations over the next 50 or 100 years,” he said. “While Cathy and I contribute to various organizations with annual donations, we wanted to complement this with an endowment to ensure our support continues long after we’ve stopped making yearly gifts.”
Michael’s strategy to enhance his philanthropic impact will accelerate as he begins to take the required minimum distributions from his retirement accounts. By using qualified charitable distributions, he can leverage their tax benefits to direct more funds toward his charitable giving.
“If my planning was successful, we should have accumulated more in our retirement accounts than we’ll need,” Michael noted.
The Baer Family Futures Fund currently supports MCF’s Community Impact grantmaking. “We wanted the funds to be unrestricted so that MCF could strategically decide their best use. Today that’s grantmaking, but it could evolve in the future,” Michael said. MCF’s deep local knowledge was, in fact, part of what drew Michael to MCF, both for himself and his clients.
“With MCF, I don’t need to be an expert on every aspect of charitable giving. Their talented staff brings strong expertise about charitable giving to the table,” Michael added. He values this expertise for himself and for his clients. “MCF’s team shares the same goal: to help people realize their charitable and legacy goals.”
“MCF offers the strategies and tools that financial advisors and donors need to make informed decisions about how to achieve their individual philanthropic goals. Also, MCF has its finger on the pulse of our community’s evolving needs.”
Speaking of his own giving, Michael concluded, “Organizations come and go and change. We trust MCF to be here and to make smart decisions for allocating resources to make our community caring, active and vibrant.”