Giving Since the Beginning

Supporting the organizations that have changed his life has always been a priority for Bob Rifkin.

But it wasn’t until recently that Bob, who earned his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business in 1976, made a more substantial commitment to CMU — he named the university as an estate beneficiary of his donor-advised fund (DAF).

Bob started work at Texas Instruments in Dallas, where he ultimately was employed for 44 years, immediately after receiving his master's degree from CMU. It didn't take him long to decide that he wanted to make an impact at the schools he had attended.

“You get solicitation letters and a lot of them you throw away,” Bob says. “But a lot of them, you say, ‘Well, I believe in this cause — why would I say no?" 

Bob recalls that he started making donations to CMU, Northwestern University — where he earned his bachelor’s degree — and Omaha (Nebraska) Central High School during his first year of employment.

“(They) were some of the institutions that helped me a lot as well as other charities that were meaningful to me,” he says. “I wanted to make sure that I steadily gave and increased my giving every year. So, I was kind of a small- to medium-sized giver for a long, long time.”

As he was nearing retirement, though, Bob began to consider increasing the impact of his contributions. He has had a will in place for many years but, while speaking with a financial advisor, he learned that a DAF might help him better coordinate his estate and charitable goals.

“I started talking to my attorney, who mentioned the DAF and explained what that was,” Bob says. “He pointed me to one of the local foundations in Dallas that he was familiar with. I had a meeting with them and thought this DAF thing sounds like a good idea."

A DAF is a separate fund managed by a nonprofit charity and functions like a personal charitable account. Donors like Bob make a financial gift to that charity and receive an immediate tax deduction. Meanwhile, the charity establishes the fund, invests those assets and then grants money to other organizations — like Carnegie Mellon — on the advice of the donor.

Directing cash or appreciated assets into the DAF comes with immediate benefits.

“From a personal financial standpoint, the benefit of it all is you can get an immediate tax deduction when you put money into the fund, even though it may not yet have gone to the end charitable beneficiary,” he says.

Bob’s annual donations have continued, but his DAF with the Jewish Community Foundation of Dallas gives him the ability to make more significant contributions in the future. First, he named his DAF as an estate beneficiary of his personal retirement accounts. Second, he provided instructions to the foundation to eventually distribute those funds to his favorite charities, including Carnegie Mellon.

“I can still make my objectives work by setting it up so that the DAF can be a beneficiary of my 401(k), and then I just tell the donor-advised fund, ‘OK. When the DAF receives the money, I want you to give X to so and so,’” he says. “So basically, Carnegie Mellon and some other charities will get my money from my estate when I pass away.”

Bob says setting up his donor-advised fund was an easy thing to do, in more ways than one. The mechanics of setting up the fund were straight-forward, and will also simplify the future distribution of his retirement funds and other assets as directed by his current estate plans.

And giving to the schools and organizations that impacted his life is the easiest thing of all.

“I asked myself, ‘Where do I kind of feel an obligation to pay back?’” he says. “And certainly, the universities I went to would be very, very high on that list.”