Funding Matters with Bill Petruck | E225

Simple tools to help inform charitable giving.

On today’s episode of the Fintech Impact, Jason Pereira is going to talk to Bill Petruck, Founder and CEO of funding matters. Funding matters is a light fintech with a series of calculators and other tools that help not-for-profit charities. It helps generate donations more easily by showing people the actual tax implication of various donation schemes and options and helping kind of grease the wheels towards making that happen.

Episode Highlights:

  • 0.39: Funding matters were started 25 years ago to help small, medium-sized, not-for-profit organizations compete against the larger organizations. 

  • 1.08: Bill developed an application called gift tabulator, used as their secret weapon for illustrating tax-efficient charitable giving. A few organizations came to them and said - we would love to have your gift tabulator on our site. 

  • 3.10: You don’t just have to donate only in cash in many countries. You can donate assets, and those assets might have some sort of embedded gain in them already that if you sold them, you would pay tax, says Jason.

  • 7.15: People tend to look at the gross amount of the donation, not the net amount of the donation. Jason has seen the phenomenon of people not using shareable receipts because they feel guilty about benefiting from giving the charity.

  • 10.43: With the gift tabulator, we also want to reach out to the end-user or the potential donor and provide the opportunity to the donor to share this with their financial advisor, says Bill.

  • 12.28: Bill explains what is the user inputting as the variables, and what are they getting as a result?

  • 12.46: Bill says that their objective is to create a landing page with a bit of a narrative to it, and that landing page then says, select one of these assets, so the user or the donor can go everywhere, from cash to stocks to mutual funds, etc.

  • 15.23: 99% of all donations to charity come in the form of a check or credit card, and 1% of the donations come in the form of appreciated asset donations, and we want to see that number start to increase, says Bill.

  • 16.32: Bill says that in the gift tabulator, they have clearly illustrated why people need to have a current estate plan, but the major reason is that they want to leave as much money for their assets as possible.

  • 19.56: Bill explains that as a customer you get a share transfer from within the organization’s gift tabulator. The organization will give us their share transfer forms. They will also provide us with a PDF of their request language so that the individual can print this out, making it easier for the lawyer, accountant, or advisor.

  • 22.31: There was a very strong push back that tax credits do not influence charitable giving within the not-for-profit sector. A $50 donation is not driven by tax, but the tax drives the $50 million donations.

3 Key Points

  1. Bill explains how when you are starting to look at the $50,000 appreciated asset donation that is being transferred over to charity, you are getting the tax credit on it, but you are also getting tax avoidance.

  2. Bill explains how does the charity get your technical tools into the hands of possible people or people who might donate?

  3. Bill will be focusing on developing an educational curriculum through the college system as an online tool that will help organizations and individuals within those organizations become far more conversant and more comfortable in illustrating the positive outcome scenarios for their clients.

Tweetable Quotes

  • “Different countries have different schemes for how they recognize the donation. We live in Canada, and it depends on the provinces up to 50% or around there.” - Jason

  • “Our objective was why don’t we create a gift tabulator to be an outreach for the charity and allow them to see the most tax-efficient ways to give.” – Bill

  • “We have many charts available, and one chart says that this is the tax you would have to have paid, e.g., $5000, based on the taxable capital gain, and this is the actual cost to you of making this donation.” – Bill

  • “We wanted to start to elevate the thought of planning and the role that charities can play as well with their constituents, their donors, their friends, and their supporters, and tie that back into the financial services.” - Bill

Resources Mentioned:

Fintech ImpactJason PereiraFintech