Calendar of
Events
Gilead Ministries Celebration Scramble
Call 664-3734 to register a team
6th Annual Circle of Friends
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David Crouse
Mary Eckerle
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Donate Online
to any fund by clicking on our donation button.
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Round Robins Scholarship Fund,
Thank You so much for awarding me the $2000
scholarship. It was a moment of great enjoyment in my house
when we received the letter saying I had been chosen to receive
it. I'm a Criminal Justice major at Indiana Wesleyan University
and although I graduated from Marion High School in 2009, I plan to
graduate from IWU in December of 2011 with a B.A. degree. I
worked very hard in high school to complete a number of college
classes to cut down on expenses and it has really helped. I am
supposed to be a first semester sophomore this coming fall but I will
be a second semester junior. Thank you very much for your
monetary gift, it is so greatly appreciated.
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Just For You
Protect Your Dreams
Would you like to transfer
the balance of your IRA at death and avoid paying hefty taxes? Click
here to receive our brochure
entitled Protect Your Dreams and learn how smart retirement
asset planning can reduce or avoid taxes.
Personal
Planner
Integrity
and Initiative
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Barbara and
Allen were talking about their three children. They are empty
nesters and the three children are off making their way in the
world.
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Savvy
Senior
How
to Protect an Elderly Parent
Dear Savvy Senior,
"My 80-year-old mother lives alone about an
hour from me and I worry about her health and safety. Outside of the
telephone, what types of caregiving devices can you recommend that
can help me keep tabs on her?"
Washington
Hotline
Top
Rates Will Increase - Speaker Pelosi
Members of both Parties joined the debate this week on
income taxes. Without action by Congress, all of the tax reductions
in the 2001/2003 tax acts will be phased out on January 1, 2011.
Finances
Amazon
Shares Fall on Missed Expectations
Shares of Amazon slid 15% this week after the media
retailer's second-quarter earnings report failed to meet Wall
Street's expectations. Amazon reported earnings of $207 million for
the quarter, which was well below market analysts' estimates.
Treasuries
Rise and Fall on Uncertain Economy
Treasury prices rose early this week following testimony
from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke before Congress concerning
the state of the U.S. economy.
Mortgage
Rates Reach Record Lows
Freddie Mac reported mortgage rates at record lows this
week. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) averaged 4.56%, down from
last week when it averaged 4.57%. Last year at this time, the 30-year
FRM averaged 5.20%.
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$250 Medicare checks
coming
by
Julianne
Pepitone, staff reporterJune 7, 2010: 1:17 PM ET
NEW YORK
(CNNMoney.com) -- The government is mailing $250 checks this week to
seniors who fall into the gap in Medicare's prescription drug
coverage.
The first checks will be sent June 10, three weeks
earlier than scheduled, to about 80,000 people. The rebates are the
first step in closing the Medicare "donut hole."
The Department of Health and Human Services
estimates that about 4 million seniors will get the rebates in 2010.
The move is one of the first tangible results of
the health reform law. At a press conference last month, HHS
Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said closing the donut hole is "one
of the biggest ways the new law is going to help seniors."
Seniors get stuck in the donut hole if their
prescription drugs cost too much to be paid for through basic
Medicare coverage, but aren't expensive enough to qualify for
catastrophic coverage.
"We think our members will see these checks
as a good faith down payment on what they've been looking for so
long: closing this coverage gap," said Cheryl Matheis, AARP's
senior vice president for health strategy.
"Many Medicare patients are on a fixed income,
so every dollar helps," she added.
What's the donut hole? In addition to a $310
deductible, Medicare beneficiaries pay 25% of their drug costs until
the total reaches $2,830 for the year. Then, they fall into a
coverage gap. At that point, enrollees must pay all costs out of
pocket until their annual expenses exceed $6,440. After that, seniors
pay 5% of drug costs for the rest of the year.
Starting in 2011, seniors who fall into the donut
hole will receive a 50% discount on brand-name drugs. The discount
for generic drugs will be 7%. Those figures will rise over the years,
eventually reaching a total 75% discount that effectively will
eliminate the gap in 2020.
0:00/2:08Who funds health care
reform?
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
said checks will be mailed monthly throughout the year as Medicare
beneficiaries hit the donut hole. Those who qualify can expect to
receive their check within 45 days of reaching the gap.
The CMS also warned of potential scams, noting
that qualifying seniors will receive their checks automatically and
are not required to fill out any forms. Seniors don't need to provide
any personal information such as Medicare or Social Security numbers
in order to receive the rebate.
"Medicare beneficiaries
waited a long time to get prescription drug coverage in the first
place," said AARP's Matheis. "Once we close the gap, that
need will finally be truly fulfilled."
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The $600 Billion Challenge - Part II
And billionaires? Here, the
best picture -- though it's flawed -- emerges from statistics that
the IRS has for almost two decades been releasing on each year's 400
largest individual taxpayers, a changing universe obviously. The
decision of the government to track this particular number of
citizens may or may not have been spurred by the annual publication
of the Forbes list. In any case, the two 400 batches, though surely
overlapping, cannot be identical -- for one reason because the IRS
data deal with income, not net worth.
The IRS facts for 2007 show
that the 400 biggest taxpayers had a total adjusted income of $138
billion, and just over $11 billion was taken as a charitable
deduction, a proportion of about 8%. The amount deducted, we need
quickly to add, must be adjusted upward because it would have been
limited for certain gifts, among them very large ones such as
Buffett's $1.8 billion donation that year to the Gates Foundation.
Even so, it is hard to imagine the $11 billion rising, by any means,
to more than $15 billion. If we accept $15 billion as a reasonable
estimate, that would mean that the 400 biggest taxpayers gave 11% of
their income to charity -- just a bit more than tithing.
Is it possible that annual
giving misses the bigger picture? One could imagine that the very
rich build their net worth during their lifetimes and then put large
charitable bequests into their wills. Estate tax data, unfortunately,
make hash of that scenario, as 2008 statistics show. The number of
taxpayers making estate tax filings that year was 38,000, and these
filers had gross estates totaling $229 billion. Four-fifths of those
taxpayers made no charitable bequests at death. The 7,214 who did
make bequests gave $28 billion. And that's only 12% of the $229
billion gross estate value posted by the entire 38,000.
All told, the data suggest
that there is a huge gap between what the very rich are giving now
and what the Gateses and Buffett would like to suggest is appropriate
-- that 50%, or better, of net worth. The question is how many people
of wealth will buy their argument.
The seminal event in this
campaign was that billionaires' gathering in May 2009 -- the First
Supper, if you will. The Gateses credit Buffett with the basic idea:
that a small group of dedicated philanthropists be somehow assembled
to discuss strategies for spreading the gospel to others. The Gateses
proceeded to arrange the event. Bill Gates says, with a grin,
"If you had to depend on Warren to organize this dinner, it
might never have happened." In his office, meanwhile, Buffett
scrawled out a name for a new file, "Great Givers."
The first item filed was a
copy of a March 4 letter that Buffett and Gates sent to the patriarch
of philanthropy, David Rockefeller, to ask that he host the meeting. Rockefeller,
now 95, told Fortune that the request was "a surprise but a
pleasure." As a site for the event, he picked the elegant and
very private President's House at Rockefeller University in New York
City, whose board he has been on for 70 years. He also tapped his son
David Jr., 68, to go with him to the meeting.
The event was scheduled for 3
p.m. on Tuesday, May 5 -- a day urgently desired by Bill Gates, who
wanted to fit the meeting into a short U.S. break he'd be taking from
a three-month European stay with his family. Because Melinda elected
to remain in Europe with their three children, she did not attend the
first dinner, but lined herself up for any that followed. (The
Gateses have considered this campaign to be a personal matter for
them, not in any way a project of the Gates Foundation.)
Melinda also insisted from
the start that both husbands and wives be invited to the dinners,
sure that both would be important to any discussion. Her reasoning:
"Even if he's the one that made the money, she's going to be a
real gatekeeper. And she's got to go along with any philanthropic
plan, because it affects her and it affects their kids."
The letter of invitation,
dated March 24, went to more people than could come. But the hosts
and guests who arrived on May 5 certainly had enough economic tickets
to be there: a combined net worth of maybe $130 billion and a serious
history of having depleted that amount by giving money to charity.
Leaving aside the semi-observers, Patty Stonesifer and David Rockefeller
Jr., there were 14 people present, starting with the senior
Rockefeller, Buffett, and Gates. The local guests included Mayor
Bloomberg; three Wall Streeters, "Pete" Peterson, Julian
Robertson, and George Soros; and Charles "Chuck" Feeney,
who made his money as a major owner of Duty Free Shoppers and has so
far given away $5 billion through his foundations, called Atlantic
Philanthropies. When Feeney was dropped from the Forbes 400 in 1997,
the magazine explained his departure in words not often hauled out
for use: "Gave bulk of holdings to charity."
The out-of-towners included
Oprah, Ted Turner, and two California couples, Los Angeles
philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad, and Silicon Valley's John and
Tashia Morgridge, whose fortune came from Cisco Systems (CSCO). Both the Broads and the
Morgridges had equivocated over whether to accept the invitation,
regarding the trip as an inconvenience. But there were the signatures
at the bottom of the letter -- from left to right, Rockefeller,
Gates, Buffett. "Impressive," Eli Broad thought.
So on the appointed day the
Broads found themselves seated with everyone else around a big
conference table, wondering what came next. They mainly got that
message from Buffett, whose quick sense of humor left him playing,
says David Rockefeller Jr., "the enlivener role." He
remembers Buffett as keeping the event from being "too
somber" and "too self-congratulatory." Buffett set the
ball rolling by talking about philanthropy, describing the meeting as
"exploratory," and then asking each person, going around
the table, to describe his or her philosophy of giving and how it had
evolved.
The result was 12 stories,
each taking around 15 minutes, for a total of nearly three hours. But
most participants whom Fortune has talked to found the stories riveting,
even when they were familiar. David Rockefeller Sr. described
learning philanthropy at the knees of his father and grandfather. Ted
Turner repeated the oft-told tale of how he had made a
spur-of-the-moment decision to give $1 billion to the United Nations.
Some people talked about the emotional difficulty of making the leap
from small giving to large. Others worried that their robust
philanthropy might alienate their children. (Later, recalling the
meeting, Buffett laughed that it had made him feel like a
psychiatrist.)
The charitable causes
discussed in those stories covered the spectrum: education, again and
again; culture; hospitals and health; the environment; public policy;
the poor generally. Bill Gates, who found the whole event
"amazing," regarded the range of causes as admirable:
"The diversity of American giving," he says, "is part
of its beauty."
...Check
out our eNews next week to see the 3rd and final excerpt
from the Billionaire's Challenge
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Sherrie
and Ron,
One week ago today my family
joined the families of the Ole Miss Youth Sports Minor League
Tournament Champion Blue Team on a "field trip" to
celebrate a season of hard work and good
sportsmanship.
Nearly 40 people made the
trip to Indianapolis to see an Indians game at Victory Field.
It was an incredible
night! Many of the kids, mostly 9-10 years olds, had never
been to a Minor League Game. They really couldn't believe it
when they found out the players get paid to play!
Although it's hard to pick
the best part of that night, there are two that stick out in my
mind: (1) when the double-decker bus from Upland's Lightrider
Ministries pulled up to pick them up and take them to Indy in
style and (2) when the entire team rushed to the outfield fence
to take a look at a "real" baseball field up close and
personal.
 
Lightrider Ministries is a
local non-profit organization, has a fund here at the
Community Foundation, and welcomes donations.
They also pride themselves in chartering longer trips as their bus
sleeps 30!
The entire week reminded me
of what a privilege it is to live in a smaller community where you
really get to know and spend time with other families, yet it's big
enough that we had some wonderful amenities like Lightrider.
This Grant County resident if
feeling very blessed today.
 
Dawn Brown, CFRM
Community Development Officer
Community
Foundation of Grant County
Feel free to visit
www.comfdn.org
to see all
eNewsletters and
articles.
Our
website is open 24 hours a day!
Find Us:
505 West Third Street, Marion, Indiana 46952
Read Us:
www.comfdn.org
foundationoffice@comfdn.org
Fax Us:
765.662.1438
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www.facebook.com/comfdn
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Community Foundation of Grant County is confirmed in
compliance with the National Standards for U.S. Community Foundations
by the Council on Foundations.
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Note:
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Tax Quotes are courtesy of Jeffery L. Yablon, Washington, D.C.
© Copyright 1999-2009 Crescendo Interactive, Inc.
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