How to start a charitable foundation in USA

Financial Planning - Financial planning in general. (Moderated) 

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Subject Author Date
How to start a charitable foundation in USA goyald 10-19-2006
Posted by on October 19, 2006, 4:59 am
Hello
I usually contribute some amount (2-3K per year) to charitable
organizations, but want to do something closer to my heart, i.e setting
up a library in USA dedicated to my native language from India. I know
that 2-3K will not do much. I am willing to put 10K per year (a
substantial part of my annual salary) for few years in a charitable
trust or foundation and in few year, use that to implement my dream of
establishing this.


My question is -
1. How to setup such a foundation trust etc? Can I contribute tax free
to this?
2. Do I need professional help in setting this up? Typically what
should I expect to pay for such help? Will it be a recurring expense?

Any suggestions will be welcome and appreciated.


Posted by on October 19, 2006, 1:40 pm

goyald@gmail.com wrote:
> Hello
> I usually contribute some amount (2-3K per year) to charitable
> organizations, but want to do something closer to my heart, i.e setting
> up a library in USA dedicated to my native language from India. I know
> that 2-3K will not do much. I am willing to put 10K per year (a
> substantial part of my annual salary) for few years in a charitable
> trust or foundation and in few year, use that to implement my dream of
> establishing this.
>
>
> My question is -
> 1. How to setup such a foundation trust etc? Can I contribute tax free
> to this?
> 2. Do I need professional help in setting this up? Typically what
> should I expect to pay for such help? Will it be a recurring expense?
>
> Any suggestions will be welcome and appreciated.

Do you have a community foundation in your area? If so talk to them
about setting up a charitable trust.


Posted by dumbstruck on October 19, 2006, 7:11 pm
> Any suggestions will be welcome and appreciated.

You might google up a discussion of finding and rating existing tax
deductable charities in this forum. One web site (IRS?) lets you
identify local charities and find their tax number, such as you need to
direct your IRA to pay upon your death (a handy way for folks to fine
tune such things without changing wills).

So you can find folks to confer with, and see the official jargon such
as the type of tax number you probably have to request with an online
IRS form. Was pretty eye opening to me, for other reasons. Many of the
local charities appeared to be kook or sick jokes - maybe that means
they aren't hard to set up. Others may be familiar/respectable, but you
can now tell from context they are not exactly what they claim. Oh, and
now some charities may get scrutiny for possible funneling of money to
certain hostile causes...


Posted by rick++ on October 20, 2006, 10:27 am
Brokerages such as Fidelity will set up charitable trusts for you.
(Probably because they get to invest the money in the meantime.)
A more important issue is that nioether you or the trust can
take a tax deduction for organization not registered with the US
government as a charity. This came up during recent
large international disasters when only some charities qualified.


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