Bloggers for Charity Guest Post: Walking to End Women’s Cancer

It's the Bloggers for Charity guest post day! Blog readers will recall, and will certainly notice if they read other Canadian financial blogs, that today is the day for the publication of the guest posts for bidders with the winning donation to a charity of their choice. Kudos again to blogger Mark Goodfield of the Blunt Bean Counter for coming up with the idea and getting it organised. The winning bidder here came up with $200 and here is her post.

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Why do I walk in the Walk to End Women’s Cancer?

By Jamie Woodyatt

The Weekend to End Women’s Cancers (http://to12.endcancer.ca/site/PageServer?pagename=to12_homepage) walk, this year taking place September 8-9, 2012, came to Toronto 10 years ago with a goal to raise funds for research and treatments for women facing Breast Cancer. The funds are distributed locally so that it benefits the women where the “walks” take place. In Toronto the funds go to Princess Margaret Hospital. Participating in the event is a true commitment; each walker must generate a minimum of $2,000 in donations for the privilege of walking 60km over 2 days. The bonds formed during the ‘walk’ between walkers, volunteers, survivors, team mates, crew, is amazing as thousands of people join together for their individual reasons for a common goal TO WIN THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN’S CANCERS – NOW!!!.

Some of my inspiration… My aunt is very socially aware and has many causes that she raises funds for and she has walked in the 60km Princess Margaret 8 times. She also took on the 60 km walk in each Canadian city that holds a 60km walk in 2009 (that would be 7 cities). That means that she has walked over 800 km to raise funds and awareness. She also sponsors and participates in the Make a Wish ( http://www.makeawish.ca/)golf tournament each summer. She throws a Christmas bash each year for her friends, family and work associates where guests bring gifts/donations to Nelly’s (http://www.nellies.org/) a charity that offers shelter to women and children leaving violence. She walks for her Mom who lost her battle with breast cancer before I was born and she walks as a survivor as she battled breast cancer herself. She is definitely an inspiration and a role-model which pushes me to be a better person.

In 2010 both my Grandfather and my Mom were diagnosed with cancer. I felt blind-sided I needed to do something, so I joined my Aunt's team and walked for the first time in September 2010. It was incredible; the people you meet and the families who contribute. The support is unbelievable; I HAD to walk again the following year.

My Aunt no longer does the walk herself so she has “passed the torch” so to speak. So In 2011 I started both days walking alone; I met fantastic people along the way and made new friends on both days. On 'day one' I met a walker who had lost his younger sister to cancer the year before; she was only 7 years old. On ‘day two’ I met a woman my age that hadn’t lost anyone to cancer but believed in the cause. I was inspired by her most of all, her intentions were entirely self-less and it was her 3rd year to make the commitment!! Since I had walked the previous year too I know from experience its no ‘walk in the park’… although we do walk through some of the most beautiful parks in Toronto!

I would like to give a special Thank You to the people that continually support the walkers; Their families, those that make donations, the volunteers, the crews, the bikers that stop traffic and keep us safe, the people that honk and boost morale, the people that hand out beer and champagne (definitely helps!), the older lady that made home-made pizza and treats (delicious, I wish you were my grandma!), the guys that set up the mist tents outside their houses (AMAZING! Nothing is more refreshing during a hot walk than a mist BLAST), All the little girls who hand out pink lemonade (SO CUTE!) And the list goes on…. You guys make the walk fun and add so much to the roller coaster of emotion we feel!

I walk so there WILL be a cure in my lifetime. I can’t imagine a world without my Aunt or my Mom. With my family’s history I am at risk too. I am a single Mother and the love of my life is Nathan my wonderful rough and tumble 3 year old that I would do anything for. I not only walk for my survivors but for the next generation too.

I am proud to say I will be walking another 60K this year. With over 120 million dollars raised, The Princess Margaret Weekend to End Women Cancers is making a difference, and is a cause I am proud to be a part of. Aside from my son’s birth, it is the most exhilarating experience of my life and will continue to walk for years to come!

If you wish to help me this year I have attached my link - http://www.endcancer.ca/site/TR/Events/Toronto2012?px=3408993&pg=personal&fr_id=1463. I hope that everyone that reads this realizes that giving your time and effort to a greater good is a heady experience and I recommend it highly; nothing makes you feel better than helping.

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To which I, your regular blogger here, would add this. This guest post could not be more appropriate for my blog. It's perhaps fate, or maybe just a reflection of the prevalence of breast cancer (talk to anyone you know, it is pretty sure that a close friend or family member has had the disease), that this post concerns the disease that stole away my first wife eleven and a half years ago. Support this cause, support Jamie. The link above to donate works great, as I can say from having used it myself. Good luck, Jamie!!

Bloggers for Charity Results

The results are in for the Bloggers for Charity contest organized by The Blunt Bean Counter. Other blogs have received some fantastic bids, especially Canadian Capitalist and WhereDoesAllMyMoneyGo. Here at CanadianFinancialDIY a bidder who wishes to remain anonymous is donating $100 to a favorite charity. The person's guest post, which is to be about the charity, will be appearing the same day as all the bloggers' guest posts, January 17th.

Well done to Bean Counter Mark Goodfield for putting together this very successful initiative.

Bloggers for Charity

Blunt Bean Counter has set off an interesting challenge to raise money for charity. He has challenged bloggers to auction off the opportunity for a winning bidder to write a guest post on their blog. Here goes, count me in.

Here are the rules:

1. I am auctioning off the opportunity to write a guest post here on CanadianFinancialDIY.

2. Bid in confidence to my email account - click on the "Email me" link in the right-hand column.

3. The auction will close on December 16, 2011. I will notify the winning bidder by email ( I will use your email for nothing else than this contest).

4. The winning bidder will be required to send me a copy of a donation receipt, dated between December 17th and December 31st (personal information can be blacked-out) to confirm the donation has been made e.g. using a scanned copy by email will do. Pick any registered charity (no, Greece or Italy are not yet charities) you want. It's easy to donate online, as I wrote about here. This donation will be tax deductible to the winning bidder when the donation is made to a registered charity.

5. For unanimity amongst bloggers, January 17, 2012 be the date all the Blogger for a Day posts are posted.

6. The winner can write a post on any topic (subject to censorship for stuff that is illegal, violent, profane, defamatory, links to naughty or nasty websites etc ... no, smartalec, that doesn't mean you cannot write about the financial industry), although in the spirit of the contest, it would be great if the winning bidder wrote about a charity or charitable experience, e.g. the best and the worst donation you ever made, but that is not a requirement. The guest post cannot be a marketing piece. However, at the bottom of their post, the guest blogger can provide their name, name of their company and a brief description of their company and its products. Alternatively, the guest blogger can remain anonymous.

7. This is an extra rule so that there are seven in all, a much luckier number than six.

Haiti Earthquake Relief Charities

Haitians need help in the most dire way. Along with governments, private charities are springing into action. The quickest and easiest way for the average person to help is to give money to those charities. Many charities are accepting donations that will be specifically directed to Haiti.

CanadianCapitalist has posted one list today with links to a few charities. He also references this bigger list on the CBC website, which unusually for the CBC, actually includes direct links to the charities' websites to make donations. The CanadaHelps.org charity portal conveniently provides an extensive list of charities that are accepting Haiti-specific donations and a capability to make a donation on-line to any one of them (it does deduct a 3% fee from donations through its portal - which I think is reasonable as I discussed here).

Charities will differ, often substantially, in their effectiveness and efficiency in transforming our dollars to into help for victims. Some charities will help Haitians a lot more than others even when their mission sounds great. The best available source for hard information to assess this factor I've found so far is the Canada Revenue Agency Giving to Charity page which includes mandatory accounting returns from every registered charity in Canada. Find the Charity Information Return (the T3010) using the Search for a Charity tool.

Merry Christmas and Remember to Share Your Wealth: here's how

Christmas is a time of giving, not just to friends and family, but also to strangers who can use our help. Helping strangers can be direct one to one or through the many fine charities out there.

As with most things today, there is a way to give online. In Canada, a charity portal has emerged - CanadaHelps.org. Itself a charity, it funnels funds to charities, electronically, when the charity has registered with CanadaHelps, or manually by cheque in the mail when it isn't. CanadaHelps takes its list of charities from those registered with the Canada Revenue Agency so at least one can be assured that the charity is real and eligible to produce a tax receipt, which CanadaHelps does instantaneously for all charities.

That doesn't mean every charity is equally worthy. That depends on one's preferences and, in my view, on the efficiency and effectiveness with which it carries out its stated goal. Some supposed charities chew up all their donations in overhead and administration. You still need to check them out before giving.

Which brings me to CanadaHelps itself. As a charity, is it worthwhile, effective and efficient or does it subtract rather than add value in helping the ultimate intended beneficiaries? CanadaHelps contacted me the other day touting their website and hoping I would do this post. I asked for and promptly received their audited financial statements. A positive sign, though I wish they would just post them on the website as well for everyone to see. The total expenses of CanadaHelps amounted to 4.8% of donations in the year ended June 2009, up from 4.2% in 2008. It seems mainly due to professional consulting fees rising faster than donations. Tha financial statements do not explain why that happened. One would hope that the online model would allow scale economies and donations to rise faster than costs.

The 3% fee that CanadaHelps charges compares reasonably with alternatives that a charity might have, like PayPal, which charges 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction to receive money. Most of the 3% (about 2.1% per the financial statement) gets absorbed directly by bank fees to make payments. VigetAdvance talks of other charity websites which charge 4.5-4.75% to accept donations. Of course, there is the old letter ($0.54 stamp + envelope) and personal cheque method.

Given that CanadaHelps also allows one to donate shares and thereby avoid paying capital gains on those donated shares, it looks like a good service, convenient for both individuals and charities alike. Whichever of Canada's 160,000 or so charities you choose, have a Merry Christmas all.

RRSPs and the Government's Secret Tax Weapon

Jonathan Chevreau posted today on a BMO Retirement Institute survey finding that boomers expect to receive huge amounts of inheritance money to pay for their retirement.

A quick skim of the Passing it on study reminded me that in the case of inheritances "what you see is not what you will get". The example box on page four of the report shows how an estate worth $350,000 at death can be chopped in no time down to $223,500. That's even before lawyer and executor fees, or probate fees (taxes) get taken out. The reason is that instead of inheritance taxes Canada has a nifty little tax rule called deemed disposition, whereby upon death a person is considered to have sold all property at fair market value and to have cashed in all registered plans like RRSPs, RRIFs, LIRAs, LRIFs etc. There is an exception that a spouse can transfer the registered plans into his or her name without tax being triggered, but eventually the spouse too will die. Sooner or later there will tax to pay and since everything enters the person's income all in the same year, for almost everyone that will mean falling into a much higher, if not the highest, tax bracket.

Think about it, how many people die penniless, their registered plans depleted to nothing? You and I may withdraw RRSP money during retirement at lower marginal tax rates than while we were working but it is pretty sure that come death, our estate will be paying top rates. The government will end not only recouping its tax deductions but may well end up with more tax! That's the secret weapon. If you are dead, you may not care about paying unfairly high taxes on your estate and it is certainly difficult to complain at that point, or to vote against the government.

I've tried getting stats out of Stats Can and the Canada Revenue Agency about the extent of the issue - e.g. what is the average size of registered plans at death - but none seem to be readily available. (An indicator that this issue is real is suggested by Stats Can's table Private Pension Assets of Family Units, which shows that elderly families in 2005 had a median of $186,000 in private pension assets. Another table shows that the net worth of families 65 and older was a median $303,000, of which maybe half might be a tax-exempt principal residence, but the rest would mostly be in some form of taxable savings.) Better it not be too well known, I guess. People might get upset. The problem may get worse over the years as the decline of defined benefit plans means RRSP-type savings become more and more important.

This issue is one reason I am using my TFSA first since that account is "tax pre-paid" for contributions and any gains are tax free, even at death. It is also a reason to take money out of the RRSP when my tax rates are low.

Finally it is a good reason to donate money to charity since the tax credit effectively would mean no tax to pay even at the top marginal rate on the donated amount. Maybe that's why significant numbers of seniors are planning to donate parts of their estate to charity, not to bequeath it all to family.

Listen to World's Richest #1 and #2 Talk About Giving It Away

First you make a huge pile of money, then you give it away. A few years ago, Warren Buffett announced the largest donation to charity ever - most of his Berkshire Hathaway stock. Watch this video of an hour long TV interview with Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, to whose charitable foundation he gave the bulk of the donation. Maybe I'm fooled but there seems to be little ego in any of these folks' attitude to their charity.

It is apparently as challenging to give it away productively as it was to amass the wealth in the first place. Both Gates and Buffett expressed the interesting attitude that their children should not inherit such incredible wealth - that it would be bad for the kids themselves and that the money should go back to society from whence it came. Buffett's quip about how much to leave to kids: " enough so they can do anything but not nothing."

Two men and a woman using their money to better the world, good on them.

An Intriguing Free Book to Download plus a UK Mortgage Primer

Check out the Mortgages Exposed web page for access to a free download of the book In My Opinion by Michael Kelly, a successful retired entrepreneur. I've just skimmed through a few pages so don't have a firm opinion of it, but first impression is good: it looks quite readable and hey, it's free and it's the complete 110 page tome, not just excerpts. The style looks breezy and light-hearted, advice on what the grandfather has learned and wants to pass on to his grandchildren. The topics he covers includes some financial and budgeting advice, along with relationship advice (from a guy, no less!), education, children, running a business, being an entrepreneur, gambling and even death.

Here's a sample quote I can relate to: "You need not give self-created wealth away. Spend it first. But if you must give it away, do it when you are still alive and can directly observe and enjoy the happiness it might hopefully bring."

Another part of the website has an excellent series on mortgages as done in the UK, actually another short book that can be downloaded with working spreadsheets. The explanation starts from scratch, assuming little or no investment knowledge, and works through the various types of mortgages and related topics - fixed rate, variable rate, interest only, lifetime/revers/shared appreciation, buy-to-let, gearing, buy or rent - in short all the common situations with tips and tools for comparing and deciding between alternatives. There are a series of downloadable spreadsheets to work your own calculations, perfect for DIY types. There is a little bit of theory and lots of practical guidance. The perspective of someone who spent 30 years in the business shows through, who made his money, retired and is now giving back his knowledge to anyone who wants it. Overall, a gem of a resource.

Making Money or Giving It Away - Challenges are the Same!

One of the pleasures of making money is being in a position to give some of it away to charity. After all, as they say here is Scotland, shrouds don't have pockets. And I'd rather give it away myself than have the government do it for me. Once a DIY, always a DIY. However, given the effort and difficulties required to make the money in the first place, one doesn't want to simply squander it on bad or ineffective charities, of which I would guess there is the same range of fraudulent/incompetent to outstanding as there is in the investment industry.

It turns out that giving money away to good purpose is as difficult as, and requires many of the same competencies as, doing investment evaluation. Indeed, those who are good at making money seem to be pretty competent at giving it away when they are so inclined (Bill Gates of Microsoft comes to mind). In Canada in 2004, the Canada Revenue Agency is said to have estimated that there were more than 82,000 charities! One can even donate online - in Canada there is CanadaHelps.org. Assessment is a chore. For instance, the principle that overhead expenses should be minimized so that the maximum amount goes to the actual charity work is not so cut and dried as this article discusses. There is both over and under-investment in administration. Ideal ratios vary by type of charity work. There are performance metrics to compile and examine. And some charities pretend that their fundraising activities are separate from their program activities so that they can look good and state that all of the public's donations go to program work - sounds parallel to corporate tricks like off-balance sheet debt, n'est-ce pas? Not surprisingly, there are even advisor type charity ratings services like this, and this.

So, what's a person to do? What I've come to is what could be termed a following an informal mixture of Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch, i.e. select those charities one knows well, ignore diversification and choose a limited number.

One charity that passes muster for me is Child Haven International run by a couple who lived the talk of their work and adopted 21 children as this account details. I had occasion to attend a fund-raising dinner of Child Haven a few years ago and was highly amused by the difference in the way they came across when they spoke and the way the Ottawa TV station CJOH reported the event. The TV report was all about Fred and Bonnie Cappuccino as such wonderful people, which they truly are, but their modest and self-effacing remarks were all about the children and the work. They showed lots and lots of photos of smiling children, visible results of the work. Their solicitation materials are done very inexpensively, unlike the slick stuff produced by big-time marketers (a sign to me that a charity is spending too much on that administration/ overhead line item). It's a pleasure to give Child Haven money.