Ep. 40 Richard Peck: Unleashing the Power of Strategic Philanthropy and Charitable Giving

Welcome in. My name is Ron Greenwald and this is the Ron Greenwald podcast. This podcast serves as a lightning rod of information to help you proceed in life. Life is an improv and we want to give you the tools to guide you through, to make informed decisions. What you do with that is up to you. But you don't know what you don't know. The goal is to bring in the best and the brightest people to give you information, understanding, compassion and triumph as you weave your way through life. And I am honored and thrilled to have a very special guest today Richard Peck. Richard Peck has the most fascinating website called the Philanthropy Guy. I just love what he does for a living because I believe, if I have this right, $500 billion with a B dollars are given out to charities and nonprofits every year. And really the tools, the transfer of wealth over the next 20 years. Guess what? I'm a baby boomer and guess what Over the next 20 years is going to happen? The wealth that I accumulated from the greatest generation passed down to the baby boom generation and now is going to pass down to the next generation. So, without any further ado, I want to introduce you to Richard Peck. Richard Peck is a certified financial planner. CAP stands for what Rick Chartered advisor in philanthropy, Philanthropy and CHFC is what stands for what.

Your financial consultant so. Chartered .

Rick, take us on your journey. I really am always fascinated. You didn't grow up going, I'm going to be the philanthropy. I assume you didn't grow up. I'm going to be the philanthropy guy. No, no. So you come out of college from where? And just take us a little bit on that journey with us.

Sure, I came out of college. I went to college for biotechnology. So already you're not going to be able to see a link here, right, biotechnology. I did that for three years. At the end of three years in college I said you know what? I'm not sure this is for me. And then I switched to English right, which is every parent's dream. So I went to-.

And they go. Why am I paying for this? But?

anyway. Actually, my parents were very cool about it, I have to say in retrospect. So I was concentration in writing, which actually has helped me a lot, believe it or not. I've really drawn from that my whole life. I'm really clear about good writing skills. So I left there and then I thought I'd be a teacher, but I didn't really know how to be a teacher. I was in the Boston area and I was like I don't know what the track is, which I'm really glad these days there's a lot of career centers at colleges, because I think people like me would have used that. Anyway, I kind of floundered around a little bit. I moved to Vermont with my soon to be wife and I got a job at Progressive Insurance. Already, you're still not seeing a thread here, right? So Progressive Insurance I was a claims adjuster and so I did that for three years Before Progressive was a big company. It was really interesting actually to go around and look at people who are damaged cars and maybe they're injured, and just kind of settled claims, right? So I said I don't want to do this forever, although it was a really interesting learning experience. What I really want to do, I want to be a stockbroker. I want to be a financial advisor. So then I went and studied and got my Series 7, my Series 63, my Series 65 at the time and my life accident and health and I went to work for American Express Financial Advisors, which is now a Mara Prize.

Is this in Vermont? Is this in Vermont? Well?

in Vermont. Yep, I was in Williston, vermont, which is where the Vermont headquarters were, and I did that for a total of seven years as a financial advisor. So I worked in Vermont and also in New Hampshire. But around 2003, which I was about five years in, at that point my wife was working at Dartmouth College and she said let's see if there's anything here at Dartmouth that would be of interest to you. And I said I'm not sure if there's anything at Dartmouth that would be good for me, because I'm a financial advisor. And what would I do at Dartmouth? And so she said well, just, let's just see. And so we looked at a position called Associate Director of Gift Planning and I said, hmm, that seems interesting because it's what is that kind of thing?

Yeah?

And it was like what you do is you focus on bequest intentions, charitable gift annuities, charitable remainder trusts, like things that were estate planning oriented but also with a philanthropic focus. And it was very soft. All I had to do was go around the country, meet with alums very casually, like you and I are talking right now. We'd have lunch or something, and I'd bring them the good news of Dartmouth and then I would say, hey, thanks for your past contributions, have you ever thought about making a gift in this way or that way? And they'd be like yeah, sure, I'll think about that, or I'll do it, or you know. And then I'd travel to the next town. Did you have?

enough knowledge of all those terms charitable remainder, trusts and all that to go okay, I mean, did you have that you gave? They gave you that knowledge, that's discussed that.

Some of it I came with that knowledge, but you definitely get a lot of it on the job, especially in terms of running software illustrations for charitable gift annuities or software illustrations for charitable remainder trusts. So that was really the heart and soul of what we were doing. We also did things called pooled income funds. So we would just run illustrations for people and say this is what your tax deduction would be, this is what your projected income stream might look like, and so on, and that's a lot of what we did. We didn't do a lot of the ones you were talking about. We would know them, we would be able to talk high level about them, but at the end of the day we were not attorneys and we weren't even financial advisors at Dartmouth and we weren't CPAs. We would like lead them right up to the edge and say let's bring in your CPA, let's bring in your the state planning attorney, let's bring in your financial advisor. So a lot of it was teeing up the ball in ways that these advisors not always some of them are really good at it, but many of them were not familiar with a lot of this stuff. So we would kind of make that bridge, I guess, between what the that Lum wanted to do and what the advisors could help them do. We were right there in the middle, okay, you're going to get in the first base. Yeah, we were like, not the brokers. We weren't the brokers, but we were the conveners. We were the people bringing people together. The art of that is you're trying to educate potential donors or existing donors in a way that doesn't make them feel stupid. You're also trying to do the same thing with their advisors. You're not trying to put them on the spot and say what do you mean? You don't know what a charitable lead anuity trust is. I was a Dartmouth for four years in that role. Then I became director of gift planning at the medical school at Dartmouth and director of gift planning for the hospital that was nearby called Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. Then I grew from that role with a team to major gifts, which were $50,000 or more outright gifts, and then I moved into principal giving, which was a million dollars or more. Then I held on to the plan giving piece the whole while, both for the medical school and the hospital. So there's a lot going on and I had a whole team of people as well. It was a great job. Then, in 2017, I left, not because I didn't enjoy it there, but because then I went toward a job called the Vice President for Development and Full Anthropy Services at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, which was a statewide community foundation, we would work with people who were potential donors, existing donors, professional advisors again educating professional advisors and just trying to center ourselves on what is the donor trying to accomplish. In the past they're clearly interested in education and clearly interested in healthcare. Now it was like they might be interested in the environment, they might be interested in veterans, they might be interested in homelessness, they might be interested in mental health. So they had a variety of interests and that's what we would center ourselves on and say how can I help you make the impact you're looking to make as an individual or as a family, and how can we use the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation to do that? So and then about eight months ago, I went into private practice as an independent philanthropy consultant, taking everything that I think I've learned and trying to apply it to nonprofits, to donors and to professional advisors similar audiences that I was working with before and just try to give them what they need in whatever way, shape or form that might look like.

So, when you decide to make that leap of faith, what is the mission and vision of the charitable guy?

Yeah, my role is really to provide value at the end of the day and to fill in gaps where there are gaps. For example, nonprofits many of them have no fundraising program at all. So they'll come to me and say we need to build a fundraising program from scratch. I can help you do that. Sometimes they have a fundraising program but it's not as robust as it could be. So they say we need a little bit of help, we need to supercharge this a little bit. Or they're going into a campaign. They're trying to raise money in a very formalized way and they need somebody to help them do that. So I bring a suite of services around that. Or I bring in other people that I know to say let me help you with copywriting, or let me help you with database, or let me help you with grant writing. These things I don't do, but I'll bring these people in to round out the team.

So what I like to do is dive into each category a little bit with you Because, again for people that understand what I do, I deal a lot with estate planning attorneys, wealth managers, third-party trust departments, and it's just so frustrating when I see a state administration and somebody's getting a bunch of money from mom and dad and the charitable component was never considered in the estate plan. So the word empowerment is I don't know if it's an overused word, but it's a very important word to get people to understand what they can do with their money. So let's take the donor specific. Let's talk about the donor first, then the financial advisor and then the estate planning attorney, kind of in that order of. That's okay. Your role with the donor how do you get a donor? Or what is your conversation with Mr and Mrs Jones? Or if I could introduce you to Mr and Mrs Jones who've got a state of $10 million, what would you say to them?

Well, I really start with a place of like why are we talking today? What is it that you're hoping to accomplish from our conversation? And just try to solicit that out of them a little bit. They might say things like this we've been giving money our whole lives, but we don't know if we're doing anything impactful. We've been giving to these three or four or five charities and we feel good about it, but we don't know whether or not we're actually making impact. Can you help us understand that? Or they'll say we're thinking about setting up a private foundation, but we're not sure if that's what we should do. Should we set up a private foundation? Should we set up a donor advice fund, or should we just make outright gifts? What vehicle should we use? Another thing people say is I'm thinking about this asset to donate. I don't know how to do it. I went to this nonprofit and they said they don't take real estate, even though I want to give them a million dollars in real estate. I don't know what to do here. Is there some other entity that can take the real estate as a donation and then give them the net proceeds? These are the questions that people ask. So $10 million could be outright giving. That's what I'm talking about right now, but it could also be I want to leave that $10 million to charity when I pass, giving a little bit to my family, giving as little as possible to the government, maybe, and then giving the most I can to the charities I care about. So it's kind of the same conversation, except that the outright giving is about now and future-based giving, like bequests, are about the future. But they really centered themselves on the same type of impetus Like why are you doing this? What are you hoping to get out of it? What are their tax implications? Is it about knowledge about what you're doing and legacy? I mean there's all kinds of facets that, all kinds of roads you can go down with the individual.

So before we started recording you, we were talking about what you're going to be doing on behalf of a business consultant and I thought that was really fascinating because over the last six months I have started to really work or talk to mergers and acquisition attorneys because again, I'm going to come back to the aging baby boomer who's had that business for 40 years, who now wants to sell it and they're going to come into a liquidity of a bunch of money and the business consultant or the mergers and acquisition attorneys, should they need to be talking to you.

That's right. I believe me, Ron. I have done my very best to talk to anyone that has to do with either thinking about transitioning their business. You know, five years prior, just try to get in front of them and say, hey, when you sell which you will eventually sell, what's your life going to look like after that? What kind of impact do you want to make with the money? What do you want to do with your time? You know what's your life look like in that next phase. That is really hard to nail people down because they're going 100 miles an hour in the business that they have. The people that they're working with are busy. It's like it feels like, well, yeah, we'll talk about that when we get there. What the problem is? They get there and they haven't talked about it. So now they're in this rush to say, oh, can I make a gift now, Can I make a $50,000 gift to this? It just feels very un-fleshed out. It just feels very on the fly and probably not well thought out. So then the next phase is like I already sold the business and now I have money and I'm going to be taxed on it. What should I do? So I mean, you take what you can get. In my position, You're in front of people whenever the pain point presents itself, but ideally I'm talking to people long before any of this happens, because it's all ties together. Maybe the planning for that transition and what kind of impact they're going to make philanthropically is going to tie into how are they going to run the business today, what kind of valuation are they shooting for, and so on. It feels like it's all tied together, even though ultimately, the business giving money away or the individual giving money away feels almost like an afterthought Something I'll do later when I make enough money, when I have a big business to sell Almost like they're going to jinx themselves if they talk about philanthropy now. So it's weird.

It's kind of strange actually so in your years I've always fascinated. Again, when I got into the role that I do now and in the real estate world, I was dealing mainly with the greatest generation and a lot of them grew up in the depression and giving away money was very that was, I don't know, a hard thing to do, and now we're more into the baby boomer generation. Have you seen a shift in the way when you were at Dartmouth versus now and the way people are coming to you and their thought process?

I would say the biggest difference is that in the past and there's a lot of studies on this in the past people gave a lot of people gave simply out of pure loyalty, like at Dartmouth. They didn't question Dartmouth. Dartmouth, they talked about bleeding green at Dartmouth. That means that you just love Dartmouth and you would do anything for Dartmouth, and that was so true. They weren't questioning like, let me look at your financials. What kind of impact is this going to make? They'd just be like, hey, this is what I can give you, this is my class gift, this is the best of my ability, this is what I can do. Now I think people are a little bit more like. I do actually want to know what the impact is going to be. I do want to know what is going to happen when I make this gift. In the case of Dartmouth, I don't think they question Dartmouth's financials. They just are just a little bit more curious what is this going to do? And so I don't think they're inappropriate questions. I think it's just more of a generational thing. Maybe it's the baby boomers were people who questioned society, questioned authority. They just want to kick the tires a little bit where the greatest generation, the silent generation were sort of like hey, we fall in with what is traditional, we do what we've always done, because that's what we've done. Where future generations are a little bit more I don't want to say skeptical, but they're just a little bit more inquisitive, we want the details more. Yeah, yeah, they just want I mean not that they want every single detail, but they kind of just want to know is this a good decision for me? Is this a good decision for my family? Do I understand what I'm doing? Do I understand what the impact is going to be? So they ask more questions and they're more detail oriented, and I don't blame them for that. I think that's fine.

So on your website, the philanthropy guy who are you driving that towards or who are you driving that to, to look at.

Three audiences the nonprofits, as I mentioned, who are looking for money, looking to raise more money. The donors, as I described the donors who are making those different decisions. They're looking for help. Those are a little bit harder to find that nonprofits seem to present themselves pretty quickly. The donors sometimes don't even think they'd need a philanthropic advisor because they kind of feel like, well, I've kind of been doing this myself for a while and like what's the problem? But I think once you do it and you start to question, hey, maybe I do need a little bit more guidance and detail, those are the ones that seek that out. Which leads to the third group that I market to, which is the CPAs. Wealth advisors trust in the state's attorneys family offices. They're close to those donors. They're the ones who can make or break a conversation. If they downplay the importance of philanthropy, then you better believe I'm not going to get an appointment with those people. But if they go, you know what, you know who you need to talk to. You need to talk to Rick. He's going to be able to help you out and maybe just start with him, start and have a conversation with him and see where that goes. So you can see they're all symbiotically tied together. Also, the donors and the wealth advisors. They're also on boards. They're on boards for nonprofits, so they're always thinking about the board and saying, hey, the board actually needs to raise money. So it's all symbiotically tied together and that's why I market to those three audiences.

And so we have. We've had this conversation and this is one of the wealth managers of the world. God love them all. Give us a stats. When mom and dad pass away and the money filters down to the next generation, what happens to that money with the wealth manager? So?

the statistic I think you're referring to is when the first generation dies and the second generation inherits the money. 91% of the time, the second generation takes the money and goes to a different financial institution, as if to say I never got any love from my parents advisor, so I'm taking my ball and going somewhere else and playing in a different park. So that's what happens. It's 91% of the time, which I think is an outrageously high number. Only 9% of the time do they actually leave their money with their parents financial advisory firm.

So the wealth manager. What do you? Well, if I asked you to come in and do a talk to a group of wealth managers, is that something that you would be willing to do, or obviously willing to do? Is what would you tell them? What would you speak to them about?

So I actually have 17 plus presentations that I've curated over the past year and a half to those audiences. I talked to them about things like what's the difference between a donor advice fund and a private foundation and a community foundation or outright giving? What is corporate philanthropy? What is family philanthropy? What is the secure act 2.0 and how does it affect philanthropy? What are some complex cases we can talk about? Just to set the stage, what is non-cash asset donation? What does that look like, including real estate or tangible personal property or whatever? So I'm really trying to, as you can see, have a lot of depth and breadth to what I'm offering, but a lot of the advisors, they just need a primer. One of my presentations is here's why inserting charitable giving into your practice is smart, both for your clients and for your practice and, by the way, it can actually earn you more money, even though it's counterintuitive to think that you're helping people give away money, but you're actually getting more money and that's what the statistics will show. So I have all these presentations, that kind of pull out of my hat to say what are you looking for? A wealth advisory audience, what can I teach you? What will resonate with you? And then inevitably, one leads to another, leads to another. They'll be like oh, that was a really good presentation, so what else do you have? Well, I have this. What do you think about that? Yeah, sure, let's talk about that. So it's sort of an ongoing drip, drip, drip, drip, drip education, just to get them acclimated to this field. And sadly, there aren't a lot of people like me who are going to these audiences very specifically and saying I don't have one presentation for you, I have a multitude of presentations for you. What do you want to know? What do you want to learn? I'm here for you. I can connect you with other people. Like, I want you to have the philanthropic conversation, I want you to be comfortable with it, and there's no shortage of resources that I have to offer you.

So in the time left, talk about the estate plan. Again, that three-legged stool. I call at the estate planning attorney, the client and the wealth manager. I always put the CPA over here because I can never get them on the phone, no matter what I do. So I don't really get them involved. But the estate planning attorney, what is their resistance? Because I find resistance in the business.

It's funny, actually, of all the advisors that I worked with at the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, the ones I had to convince the least were the trust in the state's attorneys. And here's why they would say all right, my single client, my client, my client couple with no kids are looking to do their estate planning. We're figuring out how to minimize taxes. There are no heirs, so who are they going to give the money to? They don't have any nieces or nephews that are thinking about charity. Hey, new Hampshire Charitable Foundation, can you help them devise some sort of a request and tension plan of action, some sort of a memorandum? So I didn't feel in general that estate planning attorneys were too hard to convince. I felt like the challenge was I'm not sure that they knew enough about the whole universe of options, and so I felt like I was educating them about things beyond a donor advice fund or beyond some sort of elemental work as it relates to charitable giving. And again, no hard feelings. It was just like that's just not their wheelhouse. So I would say just like, help me, help you, help me, help your clients and make the best decisions for themselves. So that was the easiest audience for the trust in the state's attorneys, but I still felt like they were limited in what they knew and the best of them would say, hey, we know, we're limited in what we know. That's why we're bringing you to the table. That's why we want you to talk to our clients is because we know that we're missing some of this information that we know could be beneficial.

I want you to give me your vision five years from now. Rick, the philanthropy guy as you know, I am just enthralled with it. In the last year I have done a deep dive in my work because, again in the last five years, we've had a tremendous rise in appreciation of real estate commercial, residential, multifamily, everything. So again, that 80 year old baby, soon to be 80 year old baby boomer, who has highly appreciated rental property. What do we do with that? And where do you? Where can I take? Where is the philanthropy guy going?

I actually my grand vision is just to be that valued resource. If people started with me and just said here's the problem I'm bringing to you, I would be able to help them solve it, either myself in my practice, or I'd be able to connect them to the people that they need to connect with. In that way, I feel like I'm providing a service, which is I'm getting your question answered, I'm helping you solve a problem for yourself. Even though that sounds very elemental, what I just said, it's not true. People can't always find the answers to their questions. They struggle to say who's the advisor who's going to help me get to the bottom of this or flesh this out. So in that way, five years from now, 10 years from now, I just want it to be easier for people. Whether you're a donor or you represent a nonprofit or you represent a professional advisory leg of the stool, you know where to go and you know how to find what you need.

If a nonprofit does have a director of plan giving, would that be someone you could support them and get them out and help them teach them what to say and what to do? Instead of getting that $50 check, maybe get that $1 million charitable donation through a gift of real estate.

Yeah, absolutely so. Usually the director of development, sometimes it's a one-person show. They don't even have a plan giving director, they're just out there wearing all the hats annual fund, major gifts, plan gifts and so generally what they'll do is they'll see the need, they'll see the immediacy, they'll go to their CEO or their board and say, hey, we need somebody to help us here. So the CEO and the board and the director of development will talk and then they'll say this is what we need, which includes what you said education around. How do we move from a $50 gift to a $1 million gift simply by advertising that we take on $1 million gifts through the form of real estate or other types of things. So it's an education process.

So I just have to close it up 30 years I have this note 30 years of doing improv. How did that come about? I just have to. I'm fascinated.

So first of all I want to differentiate. A lot of people can confuse improvisational comedy on stage, like ensemble work, with standup comedy. I don't do standup comedy. I have never done standup comedy like Jerry Seinfeld style. I go in and this is how it started. I went to a show improv Boston 1992. I went and I watched this crazy show where they did short form improv, just like what you see on a show called whose line is it anyway? And then they did long form improv in the second half of the show and I walked away and I go oh, I don't know what I just saw here, but I want to do this. I want to get up on stage and do what they're doing. This looks really fun. There's no lines, they're just taking suggestions from the audience and doing these crazy games on the fly. Like how do they do this? This is like magic. And so I took courses with improv Boston. I took a beginner course, intermediate course, I almost took an advanced course, but they didn't have enough people signing up for it, so I ended up going and moving the same time. I moved to Burlington, I taught a course on improv that all the stuff I learned from improv Boston. And then I ended up ultimately forming a troupe that's called kamikaze comedy, and then we did a comedic not stand up, but Can we see that on YouTube?

Is that on YouTube?

Actually, no, it's funny. Somebody was asking me the other day do we have any stuff on YouTube? It's like no, we never really recorded our stuff. It was all live in person, generally not recorded, but it was a load of fun and anyway, I just learned a lot about it. It's fun I actually did some last night in here in Charlotte area but I love it because it really gets your brain working in different ways and it helps you to interact in ways that only improv can teach you the skills of listening and trying to be present and just help people be their best selves. That's really what improv is all about, not about you. It's about the group. It's about what's happening on stage. It's about sort of adding value to the whole scene.

I'm sure you incorporate that into your work, because listening, listening, listening is when you're in front of a donor, it's all about listening and getting him or her to the promised land of triumph so they can see what their money could do and why they're alive. I'm always like let's do this why you can enjoy seeing the fruits of your labor ahead of time. So that's always my thing.

Absolutely.

Rick Peck, the philanthropy guycom. The philanthropy guycom, and it's the philanthropy guy at gmailcom Again, my listening audience. I am urging you to think about this. You just have a highly appreciated assets taxes, the financial cliff coming down in two years in terms of estate planning, estate taxation. Talk to Rick, get the questions that then Rick can provide you. If I'm summarizing this right, rick can provide you the questions to go to your wealth manager with, to go to your estate planning attorney with, so that the conversation is a two-way love affair with those professional advisors rather than them telling you what you should be thinking. Would that be a good summation?

That's a great summary. I exactly I try to give people the language they need, give them the questions they need to ask, or give them the answers that they're looking for, just to make sure that we're doing right by the client. So, yeah, absolutely, it starts with me listening to what the individual or the couple is trying to accomplish.

Rick Peck, thank you for being here today. Good luck with your journey. I'm here to encourage. If you ever need my support in this, I'm all in Because, again, as everybody knows, I have 15 years of stories of angry beneficiaries and I'm going you know what? Just be happy you're getting anything, because I think they should have all given it to charity.

I'm with you.

I'm with you so we're all on the same page and I hope that you're I mean not, I hope I know it's gonna thrive. The demographics, the money that out there and what you can do to help people is gonna be fantastic. So thank you for being here with us today.

Well, thank you for having me, ron, and thank you for being such a cheerleader. I really do appreciate it. Enjoy, thank you.

Thanks for tuning in to the Ron Greenwald show. This is Ron Greenwald. Today's guest was Rick Peck with the Philanthropy Guy. Again, I urge you to listen to Rick's words and share those with other people in your sphere of influence, because the opportunity is now to really make a difference in the society that we live in, and that's the bottom line. Do what we can do now, and thank you for tuning in.