Stan and Colleen Nicholson
|
Stan and Colleen Nicholson |
|
 |
Leveraging a Charitable Remainder Gift With a $5,000 gift to the Seeley Lake Community Fund, the Montana Community Foundation has created a Charitable Gift Trust for Stanley and Colleen Nicholson. In addition to the considerable "tax savings" from the Montana tax credit, the Federal charitable deduction, and stretching out the capital gains tax on the appreciated asset used to establish the trust, Stan and Colleen will receive annual annuity payments equal to 7% of their gift and the Seeley Lake Community Foundation will receive the remainder when they are gone. |
|
Because the gift probably will not be available to the Seeley Lake Community Foundation for many years, and because the Nicholsons want their gift to have an immediate impact on their community, they have pledged the annuity payments to their community foundation to use for current projects. Beginning in 2001, their local foundation will receive $350 from the Nicholsons to help fund a small grants program for Seeley Lake. Stan, who has served on the Five Valleys Committee of the MCF since 1992 and who is the Secretary of the recently created Seeley Lake Community Foundation, is especially enthusiastic about the leverage that gifts can have for small rural communities like Seeley Lake. Their local foundation is assisting local charitable organizations obtain grants from the Montana Community Foundation and other sources and it is providing ways for families with long and strong personal attachments to the area to recognize the value of being able to live and recreate in Seeley Lake. The first grant from the MCF in the amount of $1,200 was awarded to the Seeley Lake Historical Museum in June. Several additional proposals are being drafted. Beyond attraction grants from state and private foundations and beyond the small grants that the Seeley Lake Foundation will provide, the Foundation provides a vehicle to harness the growing emotional attachments to this beautiful and wonderful place. Edna Olson, Stan's mother, visited her brother Art at Placid Lake in the summer of 1926, the year she married Nick. Twenty years later they bought a lake lot which is where they, with the help of three sons, built a retirement home in 1962. Stan, Colleen, and their four children spent two or three weeks each summer backpacking and frolicking with brothers and cousins from Nick's Place before they built their home on the Double Arrow Ranch in the summer of 1988. "Think about it, the kernel of a summer visit 75 years ago has flowered into 18 families who now visit and enjoy the Seeley Lake area." Stan and Colleen's gift to Seeley Lake, in memory of Edna and Nick, is an example of how hundreds of families might support the charitable needs of our community and recognize the wonderful days they spent in Seeley Lake. |
|