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Life Income Gifts
Gifts of life income, or planned gifts, as opposed to outright gifts, allow you to retain some aspect, such as the right to receive income, of the asset or assets you use to make a gift. There are many ways to make a planned gift to the University, including bequests, charitable gift annuities, charitable lead trusts, charitable remainder trusts, gifts of real estate, and gifts of retirement plan assets.
Once you transfer assets to the University—whether in the form of cash, securities, or other appreciated property—the University invests the proceeds from the sale of the assets and pays you, or designated beneficiaries, an income for life or for a specified term of years. Your personal financial and charitable objectives will determine the structure of your gift. Perhaps you prefer the certainty of fixed payments for life; perhaps income for a term of years will help you finance your child's college education. The University's gift planning staff will assist you in structuring a planned gift to suit your personal circumstances.
Income-producing planned gifts can enhance your estate by enabling you to increase your income, diversify your holdings, reduce your taxes, and avoid the cost of probate. You can also be relieved of capital gains tax when appreciated property is used to fund gifts of this kind. Other types of planned gifts enable you to make a gift of real estate such as your residence or vacation home and retain the use of it for the rest of your life, or to place assets in a trust that pays income to the University for a term of years and than passes the assets to your children.
For more information on making a planned gift to the University of Chicago, please visit http://giftplanning.uchicago.edu/.
Gretel Braidwood and Ray Tindel:
A Portrait of Lifelong Loyalty
Gretel Braidwood, EX LAB’58, remembers walking to the Oriental Institute each day after school, where she and her brother, Douglas, explored the depths of the museum that her parents, Professor Emeritus Robert J. Braidwood,
PhD’43 and Research Associate Linda Braidwood, AM’46, devoted their careers to as preeminent archeologists. “We would ride to school on the backs of their bicycles during the war,” she recalls, and “we would go ice skating under Stagg Field.” Decades later, Gretel would meet her husband, Ray Tindel, AM’72, PhD’89, in the basement of the Oriental Institute. “The University of Chicago is simply a part of our lives,” says Gretel.
Like her parents, Gretel has dedicated much of her life’s work to the University through her devoted career in fundraising and development. For the past twelve years Gretel served as Executive Secretary of the Women’s Board, which, during her tenure, tripled its annual gifts and drew many new people to the intellectual riches of the University through Women’s Board events. After thirty years of service, Gretel retired this fall.
Ray, too, has spent over thirty years at the Oriental Institute. Having conducted much of his own field work and dissertation research in Iraq and Yemen, Ray is currently Museum Registrar and Senior Curator at the Oriental Institute. There, among other projects, he has overseen the computerization of the registered collections—which now number more than 125,000 objects and counting. On the occasion of Gretel’s retirement and in honor of Gretel’s parents, who passed away last year, Ray and Gretel have established a deferred-payment charitable gift annuity that will benefit the Oriental Institute’s Research Archives, a collection of basic reference works and scholarly journals on the cultures of the Ancient Near East used by scholars from all over the world as well as the faculty, staff, and students of the Oriental Institute. Gretel and Ray’s gift annuity continues a legacy left by Gretel’s parents, who established a gift annuity in 1998 to support an archaeological project they started in Turkey—a project which continues today thanks in large part to their gift.
Gretel and Ray decided to defer the start of their annuity payments for seven years, which will afford them a higher charitable deduction and annuity rate. Gretel explains, “We’re both nearing retirement so there’s a possibility we’ll need income in the future but we don’t need additional income now—deferral made sense. I had odds and ends of stock that were producing almost no income, and by using them to fund the gift annuity, we didn’t have to deal with paying all the capital gains up front.”
Beyond the tax and income benefits that a deferred charitable gift annuity can provide, Ray and Gretel feel strongly that “people who are connected to the University for long periods of time, whether alumni, faculty or staff, should give back.” Typical of their love of and generosity to the University they say, “We hope our gift will encourage others to give, and make them realize they can do this, too.”
