Customer Reviews

Harnessing the Power of the Charitable Remainder Trust, 5th Edition

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I call them the animals in the zoo. The "CRT." The "flip unitrust." The "four-tier system." The "50 percent maximum payout" and the "10 percent minimum present value of remainder interest." The "net income with makeup unitrust."

Yikes. What ARE these creatures? And why are they wearing makeup? Well, they inhabit the odd world of US charitable gift planning. Not all of it, mind you - just the part of the gift-animal kingdom having to do with "charitable remainder trusts," otherwise known by zo-gift-ologists as "CRTs."

These and other oddities have been skillfully captured and caged in the latest edition of Harnessing the Power of the Charitable Remainder Trust, earlier editions of which have inhabited by book shelves for years. This one, too, will abide there.

In the just-released Sixth Edition, Marc and Lee Hoffman, two brothers who, while forging separate careers, are leaders in the planned giving world (what did their mother feed them, anyway?), once again write a book that is among the "must haves" for any development officer who wants to understand the technical aspects of the charitable remainder trust. Attorneys and accountants will find it more on the order of a hornbook than anything else; it's a good place to start but it isn't always going to be sufficient. For one thing, it lacks sample trust forms. For another, it grows obsolete between editions.

The book's strength is also its weakness: It is the gift-planning equivalent of one of Scottie's technical manuals of the Enterprise - if you already know a good deal about warp drive and why warp drive even matters, you'll find it useful, even titillating. In other words, this book will mean little to you unless you are somehow already down the road in the US gift planning world and have "some" idea of how a CRT can help meet donors' needs in specific gift transactions.

The weakness, then, is that it gives scant attention to the creative uses of the CRT as planning tools for donors. Instead, it focuses on the technical aspects that govern their creation and operation. I find it useful because I'm in my third decade of gift planning as a lawyer, and can put the technical aspects into their proper context; I seriously doubt it would be useful to fund development officers just starting out in the field unless the person has other sources -- an instructor perhaps -- to put the CRT in its proper financial, gift and estate planning context.

One other thing. Harnessing the Power of the Charitable Remainder Trust focuses only on the CRT. It does not discuss other gift-planning instruments or techniques. This is not a criticism so much as a caveat: If you want a well-rounded view of charitable planning techniques, you'd better keep looking. This isn't it.

Despite the limitations, the U.S. gift planning field needs this kind of book. I for one am appreciative that the Hoffmans (and their legal editors, Doug Freeman and Fred Marcus, both lawyers) continue to update this book and get it into our hands. I routinely recommend it to my colleagues who are in gift-planning situations and need a solid reference. I do not recommend it to those unfamiliar with gift planning at all - at least, not until they've come along a bit.