WCI #345: Charitable Giving and Donor Advised Funds
14 Dec 2023 · 74 min
Jim Dahle interviews Adam Nash, CEO of Daffy, about donor advised funds and charitable giving strategies for high-income earners. They discuss tax benefits, setting giving goals, and how to increase generosity through structured giving.
This is the white coat investor podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on wall street we've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since twenty eleven.
This is white coat investor podcast number three hundred forty five charitable giving and donor advised funds if you're like most.
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Welcome back to the podcast we are recording this just two weeks before it runs it's just after thanksgiving right now and it's great to be back with you at this holiday kind of year one of the things that my mind turns to every holiday season is charitable giving not only because it's around the holidays and you're thinking of others and there's tradition of giving gifts at christmas time but also just because it's the end of the year and it's time to sum up a little bit how.
You'Ve done this year and maybe ways.
In which you've been blessed or ways in which you've been lucky and be.
Able to take that and pay it forward to other people so we're going.
To be talking in this episode all about charitable giving which is something that's really important to me something we do.
Each year as a family and it's.
One of those things i just feel like those who have been given a lot have a responsibility to kind of pay it forward that we're really stewards of these resources that we have for the limited time that we have on this sphere it's not really ours we're just caretaking it for the next few.
Decades whether you think you're caretaking it.
For god or caretaking it for your.
Family or caretaking it for the planet.
If you view yourself as a steward.
You'Ll feel a little bit more purpose in your life as you think about.
Your finances we have a great interview today before we get him on i want to share with you a couple of things the first is our quote of the day this one comes from maya angelou who said i have found that among its other benefits giving liberates.
The soul of the giver i think that's very appropriate for today okay i.
Also need to tell you that you need to use your cme money before the end of the year comes and it goes away okay so the idea here is that we have a lot of great uses for your cme money it might be coming to the wcicon conference you can still get a virtual ticket in fact you can still come in person if you like i don't know that you're going to get a.
Swag bag at this point we'll do.
The best we can but no guarantees of on getting any sort of swag.
Bag we can usually get you something but you're not gonna get the full.
Swag bag but it's still well worth coming this is a destination vacation at an orlando resort paid for with your cme money or in which you can write it off if you're self employed and you're getting to come and have an awesome wellness experience and get some awesome financial and wellness content i'd love to see you there personally i really enjoy this conference each year you can check that out at wcievents dot com in addition to the conferen we have courses that are also eligible for cme probably the main one is called financial wellness and burnout prevention for medical professionals you get fire your financial advisor which helps you write your own financial plan and you also get about eight hours of burnout prevention content like all of our online courses there is no risk to you to buy this there is a one week no questions asked money back guarantee that absolutely does work and the truth is only about one percent two percent of people take us up on it because people enjoy these courses.
They'Re really helpful they're a great value.
We also have our cfe twenty twenty three online course there's fifty seven hours of material in it right it's a fantastic value twenty two hours of cme credit i mean that's awesome so you can use your cme money for that.
As well and take that at your own leisure at your own home if.
You have an apple device you can even listen to them like podcasts on your commute it's just a great use for your cme dollars so check that out okay our guest today is adam.
Nash and if you don't know who.
He is you're about to find out right now his position is ceo of daffy a donor advised fund but he's.
Done a lot of pretty other cool.
Stuff in his career let's get him on the line here our guest today on the white coat investor is adam nash adam welcome to the podcast glad.
To be here thanks for having me.
So for those who aren't aware adam is the ceo of dathy which is a donor advised fund company he's been the ceo of wealthfront he's been on the board for acorns lots of experience in this space but before we get into your career tell us a little bit about you growing up and what it taught you about money sure i.
Didn'T grow up i think knowing a lot about money my parents are both doctors in different fields i probably got my first exposure to money in college it's funny i'd worked a couple jobs my first job was minimum wage i think minimum wage in california at that time was four dollars twenty five cents an hour so i remember feeling like i worked the morning and then i bought lunch and then felt like i'd emptied out had to work again but in college when i started majoring in computer science i got my first software internship at hewlett packard and it actually paid more than any internship i'd had before i remember getting the offer and they offered me like two thousand two hundred dollars i was like wow that's a little less than i made last summer but that's a great offer but then they said a month and i was just like head exploded and i worked that whole summer made more than six thousand dollars and i got back to school and of course being the computer nerd i immediately spent my money on like a fancy new computer i think it was a quadra eight hundred which by the way was an amazing computer at the time but by thanksgiving i checked my bank account and most of the money was gone i was just horrified that i'd gone through what seemed to me like so much money in such a short amount of time and so i started really trying to learn about personal finance et cetera unfortunately my grandmother who had been a teacher through her career had recently retired and she was really into it so i had this woman teaching me who loved me and teaching me about you know certificates of deposit and mutual funds and all these basic things but fortunately i was still in school so i could take coursework i ended up going to grad school even business school and so but i really give that credit for my passion for personal finance my senior project in college i tried to do a better quicken just to show the era et cetera but i had other influences you know my grandfather was probably the first successful person in business in my family and i learned some from him even though he lived on the east coast so i had a few of these influences you can always connect the dots of your life but let's just say i've been into personal finance for a very long time and that probably has a reason why when fintech became big in the in the industry i was excited to jump in and see if we couldn't build better products and services for people with better technology.
Before we talk about that i want to hear a little bit about your parents you know this is a podcast for doctors both of your parents were doctors were they good with money or not particularly good were they the classic doctor stereotype of being bad with money or what kind of influence did they have on you as far as your thoughts about money i just want to.
Be super clear i live about a mile from my parents still and my father's retired he was an ob gyn my mother's still practicing she's a psychologist but i'm not going to i can't give away too much around the money thing because i'll hear about it like within seconds so i have to be careful there but no actually you know i think i was fortunate my parents when it comes to money never felt like we had so much money that things were frivolous i remember a lot of debates and discussions what we could get at the grocery store what we couldn't get at the grocery store you know what was expensive not expensive so a lot of that ambient education as a child growing up i'm actually a big believer as a parent i have four children myself of actually being very transparent about money and financial decisions even with children at a relatively young age i think parents make this inadvertent mistake hiding money from their children when the world makes it obvious that money is important they see it out there and so when children know that something's important but you don't talk about it with them it creates a very strange dynamic and it can send the wrong messages unintended messages about money which frankly is an important part of living a kind of a healthy financial life but no i was fortunate i didn't want for anything we had food on the table i went to good schools but yeah i mean my parents a lot of what i learned about my parents from money was because my father was of the generation where you had a lot of doctors still doing private practice right he came out i think his undergrad was in the sixties he was a very successful career as an obgyn in the bay area and did a lot of good work there i remember as a child running into we would go to events and it would always turn out that someone was a patient and happy and had invited him you know restaurant openings and that sort of thing so i remember feeling that that was a big deal but i think it comes down to the fact that it was still an era where doctors had a deep personal relationship with a lot of their patients had them for a long time and my mother of course is still practicing and she's clinical faculty at stanford so very accomplished in practice and in research and mainly what i learned from her was less about money and more about just about work and the value that people see in it and you know growing up in silicon valley with parents who are doctors it might sound strange but i didn't have a lot of exposure to the technology industry i didn't have a lot of exposure to tech until i went to college but of course you know being a psychologist you get this exposure to people some very very successful and yet they have their demons there's you know it turns out no one has it easy everyone has issues and family members and relationships et cetera and so probably what i learned most from my mother is that there are things beyond money that actually matter you can have very wealthy people who look successful everyone else who are not happy and that probably has affected my balance in my life and my career which has been a.
Pretty impressive career i mean you alluded a little bit to your education and going to good schools i mean undergrad at stanford mba at harvard you've been a ceo of at least a couple of companies on boards you know important administrative positions in other companies what's been your favorite part of your career so.
Far you know actually what i'm doing right now is really what i love i mean it turns out you know it always takes time i think to figure out what you love i'm a big believer in careers and finding this combination of at least three things you know what you love to do what you're good at and then of course what the world values and the magic is trying to find that intersection of all three of those things and i think i was fortunate i thought when i came out of high school i was going to college i thought i was going to do molecular biology and it was at stanford that i discovered engineering had not really considered that discovered computer science and more importantly discovered this field where actually software in my view is not only an interesting technology by itself but it's a fundamental piece of infrastructure it's a platform it's a capability to actually make products and services across the spectrum better and so it took me some time i started as an engineer i love solving problems how can we make this run faster cheaper et cetera but then quickly discovered design and said well what's the point of making these things run in thirty milliseconds if it takes the user thirty minutes to figure out how to use it and so my first master's degree was in human computer interaction really focusing on how humans use technology but then of course i got onto the world and i joined apple computer and then left there to do my first startup went public in ninety nine but then as you're in business you quickly learn like what's the point of building these perfect products if you don't build a sustainable business around them you get to build the one point zero you never get to build the two point zero or the three point zero and by the way the one os are never great they call them minimally viable products for a reason so actually i feel fortunate i ended up in my career but yeah i mean my career is not so unusual for silicon valley especially given the era that i was going through but yeah i really was fortunate to work with some amazing people i mean now you look with twenty twenty hindsight when i joined apple everyone thought that company was going to go bankrupt my roommate literally bet me five thousand dollars that in five years apple would be bankrupt turned out that didn't pan out for.
Him at least too bad he didn't bet you five thousand dollars in apple stock at the time huh yeah no.
Kidding right i've actually looked at that original option grant i think it was a few hundred shares and how much that'd be worth now after it split something like fifty six to one or whatever it is but no fundamentally i you know and i got to go through these different eras i've done startups i've been in venture capital it was wonderful in web one point zero to be at ebay and help build products and services for the web for the first time obviously i thought we could do it better with web two point zero and that was a lot of my passion at linkedin and i got to run the core product through the ipo in twenty eleven and then you know fintech started happening actually it wasn't even a word at the time but there were more and more founders trying to build great financial services and products and software and so i ended up joining a company where i had been an early client but they ended up hiring me as a ceo so i was at wealthfront for four years and so and now i'm doing daffy but for me what i really love is really using the latest and greatest in technology all these new capabilities right technology exists to take things that were expensive and hard to do and make them inexpensive and just broadly available and so now at dafi i'm doing that with charitable giving which is fantastic but yeah this is what i love it's building.
New products that's a great segue i mean today's topic is charity in general but more specifically donor advised funds or dafs and even more specifically dafi we're going to have some questions toward the end specifically about your company and its product but before we get there let's talk about charity in general and why do you think it's important to give.
To charity well you know it's interesting you know one of the parts of the process that i love about designing and building new products is you have to talk to people you have to i have my own opinions right and you have to go out so before we wrote a line of code for daffy went out and talked to dozens of people across the country different walks of life about how they think about giving how they think about charity and one thing that struck me there was just how many people have someone in their life a parent a teacher a relative a priest a rabbi someone who taught them that part of living a good life is going beyond yourself it's not all for you it's not all selfish there are people less fortunate than yourself and part of being a good person is helping others when they need it especially if you have the means and so um it was very interesting how consistent that was even though it comes from different traditions and different backgrounds not everyone is religious but it was amazingly consistent i mean for me personally it is part of my upbringing right i i was brought up that way i was i was brought up believing that actually giving is part of leading a healthy life but you know as you get deeper into an industry and into a sector and you understand why people do it i've come to appreciate how important a role charity plays in our system right you know we we do that we we buy goods and services for ourselves right of course we pay taxes and we vote for for leaders who and policies that that help people or try to help people in some cases but there are just so many gaps so many holes so many problems that might be too small for the government to lean into or so much disagreement that you're not going to get a formal policy in place and this ecosystem i mean in the us there's over one point seven one point eight million registered charities in the us alone i mean most of these organizations have spotted a need in communities or around causes where they think they can make a difference and it's a combination of people have the resources to support that mission and people willing to spend their days their hours their time actually helping in some way or some form and so to me it's not just about charity in general it's that entire ecosystem that idea of people giving up money or time that could be used selfishly and applying it to something that they believe in i think it turns out to be a very important part of the system not just financially for people not just in how they live their life but really about how we work together as a society so yeah probably pretty obvious but i think charity is very very important i was looking.
At a charity this last week it focuses on making mosquito and distributing mosquito.
Bed nets you know to prevent malaria.
And the estimate was that it took about one thousand two hundred dollars to save a life using these bed nets and i think about my work in the emergency department i can't save anybody's life for less than one thousand two hundred dollars you know i mean this is incredibly cost effective for saving lives and so i just look at a lot of charities and just see my money can go so much further in actually doing good in the world than.
Anything else i'm doing and that certainly.
Motivates me to give let's talk a little bit about the giver i think there's some significant benefits for the giver.
When they give to other people whether.
Those are registered charities or not what benefits do you see givers get from.
Giving i think there's a wide range and it depends who you are as a giver i mean i'm a parent right and so when my wife and i decide to support an organization support a charity whether that's through volunteer work or i'm on the board or by donating money i'd like to think it sends a signal to our children about what we value actions speak louder than words and so as a parent i often think about that and not just about myself but the family i'm raising and building together with my wife but i think personally i mean i think there's a reason why a lot of ethical and religious traditions build charity and giving into their fundamental structure i do think it's very hard the world is a tough place getting out of your own problems your own issues your own fears your own ambitions is a hard thing and i think charity has this wonderful way of pulling you out of that sometimes just for a moment sometimes broader but as i've become involved with more organizations i there's also personal benefits you connect with the people who support that organization not just donors right when you volunteer when you work the people who work there the people you work with the people who just care about things that you care about right and so there's just so many benefits you know whether they're social whether they're personal et cetera but that's how i think of it and this is some of the benefits that i've personally received from giving over the years yeah one of.
The things i love the most about giving is the message it sends to your psyche when you give money away it sends a message to your psyche that you have enough because we've constantly got this message coming from the world that you need more something terrible can happen inflation can go crazy you know and you got to have more but giving money away is basically telling your id no you've got enough you don't need more and i think there's some value to that as well as far as boosting your own happiness you know as i've talked to people i find that very few have any sort of giving goals you know they've got these savings goals they've got you know investing goals and all these things but they just kind of give willy nilly why do you think that is why aren't people more consistent when it comes to.
Giving oh i love this question i love this issue i mean i'm not sure if you know this but you know when when daffy was was born when it was new i wrote this post about the generosity gap because i come from the the personal finance world to some extent i mean obviously my background at wealthfront and acorns i mean i teach a class at stanford personal finance for engineers the seventh year and so i tend to think of giving and came at it from a behavioral finance standpoint and so the research is very clear by the way right if you set a goal for something you automate something financially you're more likely to hit it and it turns out there's even research that suggests this is true for giving there's a research paper from two thousand six that suggests if people set a goal for their giving they end up giving thirty two percent more and so the question i asked is what would that mean in the us individuals giving in the us is almost half a trillion a year and over three hundred billion of that is from individuals but can you imagine if we all gave thirty two percent more because we set a goal that'd be an extra hundred billion a year i mean that's more than a trillion dollars over a decade and so that's actually what we designed into the product at daffy was one of the first questions we ask you is how much do you want to give to charity every year how do you set a goal we know that people would not be successful or as successful saving for retirement if they didn't set some sort of goal right any financial goal college savings et cetera i think it's a groundbreaking and fundamental shift for more people to embrace the fact that giving is also a financial goal right if you think about it giving as two hard problems on the one hand you have to figure out how much can you afford to give and then the second problem is who do you give it to and so when we started dafu we saw a lot of people focused on that second problem but very few focused on that first and this is a place where i thought the product could help that you could build a better product i know this is not what donor advised funds do or they don't normally do as a product right most firms treat that as just an account right a tax advantage account and that's great but we said no we can help people be more generous i mean in fact that's our mission to help people be more generous more often and so we think that setting a goal is fantastic it's fantastic for you personally i've now talked to dozens and dozens of people about this when you set a goal and you put money aside for giving proactively then when a charity comes along a cause something you believe in you're not solving that first problem the money's already there you've already said this is forgiven this is our for charity and you can really focus on that second problem which is who do you want to give that money to and we hear this from our members at dafi right it's phenomenal to be able to pull out this app on your phone open it up when you're inspired to give and the money's already there and the question is just giving just do it and we try to make that as easy as possible but yes i think everyone should have a giving goal of some sort it can be simple people have different frameworks for it in our product we've built a number of different calculators some people want to do it as a percentage of income some people like there's absolute amounts some people just like beating their goal from last year right you know it's just like what did i give last year maybe i can give a little bit more this year whatever your system is we think it's amazingly important for everyone to think about how much they want.
To give so i'm curious i imagine you've jumped into this data pretty deeply what does the data show when are people more likely to give more or less or not at all is it connected to times of year or economic situation or what influences people to give.
More or less well i wish the data was actually better in this regard it's not studied as deeply as you think it should be or i think it should be but we have seen in the data some insights first of all there is definitely a time of year impact we celebrate giving tuesday you have black friday cyber monday and then you have giving tuesday but it does show the research shows that between basically the end of november and then december thirty first about thirty percent of donations are made it's an amazingly large amount so there clearly is a time of year that people lean into it yeah.
No surprise to me all my givings end of november beginning of december so.
That'S well it's a weird combination because you got three things working for you a lot of nonprofits like schools actually are really get going in the fall so there's a certain time of year there of course you have the holidays which inspire people and then it turns out in the us at least the tax system really is between january first and december thirty first and so there's an added pressure there and so i think that's part of it but if you really want to get down to what inspires people to give the most compelling data i've seen shows that over eighty five percent of donations end up being made because someone else asked you or inspired you to give i mean we we actually designed this into some of the daffy product that's why we describe it not just as an app as a service but also as a community one of the things i think we don't do enough with our friends and our colleagues and neighbors is actually talk about the causes and organizations that we support i mean so many people want to support things believe in things but they haven't spent the time or they don't trust their own judgment about well who should i give this to how do i find them and we all know these experts in our networks who know a lot or care a lot about different causes et cetera and so one of the things we hope and we designed a dafi we ask every donor at dafi when you make a donation we give you the option to leave a public note why do you support this organization and wow let me tell you that content it's some of the best that i've ever seen on the internet i've been doing this a long time right you know and it's it's it's human it's heartfelt you know people supporting an organization saying that they had a loved one who passed away from this disease and that's why they support this organization they're fighting for a cure or there's a there's a community center that's been a part of their family experience for generations and they support it every year and so i think if you the biggest takeaway i'd say is is if you really want to get the heart of why a lot of people give it is a social dynamic when we see other people giving it inspires us to give when we see people so moved to help others it reminds us that that's part of our lives too and so if you want big numbers on inspiring people to give that's the biggest one i've seen eighty five percent i think another.
Factor that comes in toward year end gearing is people know how they've done.
For the year and they can kind.
Of get a sense of i've had.
A good year i can afford to give more it's easier to total that.
All up in december than it is march for instance do you get a sense that when the economy is down that people give less because they have less or that they give more because they see more need around them so.
I think both things happen and it's very interesting i will tell you this is a little bit being a founder and designing new products is always humbling in a number of ways and one of the ways it's humbling is you talk to all these people about how they think about the problem you discover you don't have one clear answer and when i talk to dozens of people about giving in the very very beginning one of the disappointments was i found out that there is no one consistent model how people think of this there are people who almost traditionally think of it as a percentage of income whether it's high or low a certain percentage should go to charity there are others who see it as kind of an absolute amount i should give at least this much to charity every year right i support these three organizations these are the right amounts to give them so i give that amount every year but then there is another group that thinks like you do or at least that you're implying a little bit of this well there are good years and not so good years right and when you have good fortune you should share that good fortune with others and so i definitely think that when the economy is down that impacts people in a number of different ways this is a budget issue for a number of people some people do give more this year we're running campaigns at dafi around food insecurity and food banks across the country because actually the food banks are seeing donations down this year even though the need is higher i mean honestly this is one of the reasons i think the donor advised fund is such an underappreciated product i mean the great benefit about putting money aside is that it's actually there for you when you need it to give and we see this pattern in our members the when you put money aside in an account and even if you do that in the good years that means you have the money to give in the not so good years and so it's been very interesting on daffy is we definitely see contributions to the funds vary with the stock market with the economy all these different things but what's been wonderful to see is that for the members who have these funds donations don't vary that way and in fact what you alluded to they seem to give more when the need is higher because they have the money put aside and that's something that we all know i mean this is why you put money aside for retirement or for your kids college savings or for other goals that are important to you saving up for a house or to start a business i think giving is the same thing you know i've.
Described this concept of putting money aside which you use very positive to terminology to describe it i've called that move at times the jerk move because you're getting your tax break for putting it in the donor advised fund but no charity's actually getting any money to help the charitable cause do you see a negative with people just putting money in donor advised funds and not distributing it.
Well i can understand the concern i don't think the data actually supports that people do this to be clear at least they don't do it on average right most of our members at dafi for example have relatively small accounts right they support three to five charities a year they put aside hundreds of dollars to support them and they mostly put the money in every year that they give but i think it's a valid concern it's one of the reasons we spend a lot of time encouraging people to give it's actually one of the reasons we have the business model that we do not charging a percentage of assets but no in general i think that listen i don't want to be i don't want to get an argument or push back and forth that sort of thing but i will tell you i mean the research is very very clear i think the bigger danger than people putting money aside and then not giving it is just the basic fact that if you don't put money aside the research shows you're going to give less right it's just like any other financial goal if your goal our goal at daffy our mission is to help people be more generous more often we're always thinking how we can help people be more generous and the research is really incontrovertible so getting people to make that first decision i'm putting this money aside and now it cannot be used for any other reason than go to charity it doesn't matter your favorite team gets in the super bowl can't use it for that new restaurant opens up can't use it for that you know like by putting money aside for charity i think that step is underappreciated for how much it guarantees that that money will flow to those organizations and by the way most organizations you talk to and i've been on the board of a couple will tell you that they're not looking for a one time donation right what they're looking for they have an operating budget they need to run that organization that cause isn't going away they need help every year and so when i see people put money aside like you said in a good year you have a good year right maybe you give a few hundred dollars a few thousand dollars to charity every year fantastic if a donor advised fund lets you put aside two three four five years worth of money up front have it invested tax free and so now you set up a recurring donation and you're supporting that organization every year i mean i will tell you getting those recurring donations is one of the top priorities for most nonprofits that i talk to and i don't see how you do that reliably if you don't put money aside for it i mean how many people would save for retirement effectively if that four hundred one k deposit didn't automatically come out of their paycheck so i think in this case the benefits outweigh the cost but i understand the concern and i think it's good that people ask these questions it forces a lot of institutions which frankly from their business model have a lot of on the table for basically warehousing assets i think it's good to keep the pressure on them and remind them that their goal is to get that money to operating charities and not just to collect a percentage of assets under management every year for doing nothing so i.
Meet with my kids my wife and i we meet with our kids together every first part of december and select the charities we're going to give to for the year and we spend a lot of time teaching about the importance of giving and that sort of a.
Thing at that meeting both the spiritual.
Roots and the personal benefits of it as well as the good that these charities do i'm curious how you teach your kids to be givers well i.
Mean i fortunately i mean my kids we you know my wife and i care about this you know we we've sent our we've chosen to send our children to some wonderful schools that actually build giving and charity into part of their curriculum i mean actually i talked about this when i started daffy one of the inspirations was you know my children one of the traditions at my kids school was that all the kids on fridays would bring in spare change they'd grab it out of change buckets and dishes put in a little piggy bank every friday and then once a quarter the whole class would vote on which local organization to give that money to it's such a simple thing and the aha moment was like why do we teach our kids to put money aside for charity but we don't do it as adults right like why like as a parent you always are worried looking for hypocrisy am i teaching one thing but doing another so it's very important to my wife and i but i mean this was part of the inspiration of why we built dafi for families i realize that no other donor advised fund does this this isn't something you find at fidelity or schwab or vanguard but you know every service and technology has a family plan now netflix has one you know apple has one i mean the number of requests i have teenagers now like the number of requests i get from amazon are not small from my teenagers and so we designed it in all four of my children are actually on my planet daffy every time we make a donation they get an alert on their devices about who we gave to and it starts those dinnertime conversations and by the way if they have an organization they want to propose giving to they can make a request and then my wife and i get that request and we can talk about it we can accept the request and they can see the impact of their actions by the way their siblings can see it too right the whole family we actually designed the family plan to not just support nuclear families you can add up to twenty four people we see people adding grandparents parents siblings nieces nephews cousins and that's because like i said in the beginning i think that giving is more important than just the financial task it's a chance to teach a way of living right a way of thinking that is really powerful so at least that's the approach that my wife and i take and of course now that daffy has a family plan we we use that pretty.
Actively what are your thoughts about non charitable giving you know friends family random individuals that aren't you know registered charities.
Listen i think it comes from the same place or at least one of the core places which is getting outside your own selfish needs right you know and helping others and i see that all the time i mean i grew up in silicon valley a lot of immigrants in silicon valley a lot of people who are the ones in their family who made it big right they came to the us joined a great company maybe it's a google maybe it's an apple whatever they send money home is that charity it's not a five hundred one c three but that's obviously obviously a powerful thing to do you see people help others food time a blanket they volunteer it doesn't have to be for formal organizations i think all of these come from the same place i do think that there is value in organizations being formed and building something sustainable that can help people year after year right so the one off acts of kindness i think are wonderful i don't think they're a replacement for having a system in place to help people on an ongoing basis but i think all of these methods of giving have a place and one of the reasons in the daffy product that we emphasize people over just dollars or donations is because we actually think that at its heart that's what people really get motivated by is people and that's not limited to any tax code regulation that's that that's not limited to any one specific type of charity i think that's more of a general thing of people wanting to know what they can do to have impact on causes or issues that.
They care about would you feel comfortable sharing what some of your own personal favorite charities to donate to or sure.
Although i don't think they'd be super surprising obviously this year i have a blend there are organizations that i support every year and i have supported with my wife for decades obviously kids schools and that sort of thing supporting education is a big thing for me i was on the board of the paloto jewish community center i think building centers for the community to come together if the whole palo alto community is it's a really valuable thing to do and every time i visit and see just hundreds of people or thousands of people gathered there who otherwise wouldn't be connected senior citizens living in housing kids going to preschool busy adults working in a workout i'm really inspired by community right now i'm running a campaign around food insecurity so supporting feeding america i actually have the campaign up on daffy dot org comma but like i said this year twenty twenty three has been a rough year for a lot of people it's been a good year for a lot of people but we all know that there's a lot of variance there and even in silicon valley which is a very wealthy area in most regards there's more people than ever who don't know where their next healthy meal is coming from and so i'm actually running a matching campaign right now where i'm matching the first ten thousand dollars donated to feeding america through the platform it's one of the ways i use my donor advised fund to help inspire others.
To give all right well let's get i think we've inspired a lot of people that maybe weren't givers before to give and hopefully people who already give to maybe give a little bit more today let's get into some nuts and bolts here first of all we've been referring to these donor advised funds without ever actually defining them almost all of my giving is now via donor advised fund but can you explain briefly to the audience what is a donor advised.
Fund yeah i mean the easiest way to understand a donor advised fund is just to think of it as as being part of this family of tax advantaged accounts for different purposes right we most of us know what a four hundred one k is or an ira is an individual retirement account and it's a tax advantage account for retirement a five hundred twenty nine plan is a tax advantaged account for saving for college a donor advised fund has actually these accounts have been around for decades more than seventy years in the united states and are available in most countries but the basic idea is it's a tax advantaged account for charity right you can take money or you can even donate stock or other assets you put it in this account you get that immediate tax benefit you get that charitable deduction and then that money is invested tax free and then anytime you actually want to give that money to an operating charity the donor advised fund sends the money over and it's useful in a whole wide range for a whole wide range of features and capabilities but for most people i think it's just easy as saying like hey if giving to charity is something you do regularly it's good to put money aside in an account for that and in the us a donor advised fund has a lot of tax advantages it's the right type of account to use for that purpose.
Yeah i think one of the best tax plays out there for those who give is to simply take your appreciated shares your stocks your mutual funds these shares with the lowest basis and use those for your charitable giving instead of cash you can transfer them into the donor advised fund and it instantly liquidates it and invests that however you determine or then distributes it to charities but neither the donor advised fund nor you nor the charity pays any capital gains on it so it's a huge tax benefit there you also if you're itemizing get a charitable deduction for it so big benefit there actually up to dollar five hundred now i think you can get even without itemizing yeah that's correct.
I'M glad you brought that up because most people don't realize that i mean the truth is i've been very aggressive about this and i just read a great piece from felix salmon on the same topic about how if you're writing checks to charity if you're giving money to charities in cash you really are missing out on a phenomenal tax benefit because most of us whether you invest in individual stocks index funds etf's i mean even crypto if you have held an investment for more than a year and you have a gain there you actually also have a liability whenever you sell that you will end up paying taxes on that gain and donating those shares instead is a phenomenal benefit because not only do you get that charitable deduction for the market value of the investment but you never pay the capital gains and the beauty of it is even if you want to keep that investment let's say you have apple stock and you're very bullish on where apple's going to go in the future i mean i don't know where apple's going to go but let's say you are some people don't want to donate that stock because they say well i think it's going to go higher still but the truth is if you were going to give cash to the charity anyway you can donate the apple stock and then just use the cash to buy back the apple stock and reset your.
Cost basis higher yeah there's not even a thirty day wait period there's no wash sale yeah it's not even like tax loss harvesting where you have to wait thirty days you can do it.
Right away exactly i mean literally i spend so much of my time at wealthfront on teaching people about what tax loss harvesting was and then direct indexing et cetera but you don't have to worry about that here and the problem is it's very hard to donate stock or other investments to most charities without a donor advised fund and that's because out of the one point eight million or however many charities there are in the us only a few thousand are set up to take it and by the way you may not want to give all that stock to one charity right and the donor advised fund actually just solves that problem right you contribute the stock to the donor advised fund they can handle it of course you give to daffy we handle it just fine it's invested and then we get cash to the nonprofits for them and so it's easier for the nonprofit it's easier for you and best of all you can do it anytime you want right if it's december right and you're worried about your tax bill for the year and by the way i know you said you have a a lot of doctors in the audience right if you are part of a small business et cetera you know there's always that motion right of making sure you don't have excess profits in the business et cetera but you probably support nonprofits right you can open up a donor advised fund put that money aside get that tax benefit and then have the money to give to all the organizations you support possibly for years i mean it's really an amazing amazing benefit you know.
Two of my favorite benefits of a.
Donor advised fund one is that now.
You only have one receipt for the year just the one from the donor advised fund you don't have to keep track of all these receipts of all the charities you give to the other one is that it has eliminated charity porn from my mailbox and what i mean by charity porn are these glossy brochures that doctors without borders sends to you once you donate to them it looks like it costs ten dollars to produce this thing you know i don't want them i don't want them i want my money going toward what the charity's doing i don't want them to spend my money marketing to me to get more dollars and i love that i can give anonymously and so they don't know who i am and so they don't send me charity porn and it's dramatically reduced how much of that shows up in my mailbox you know.
I should have talked to you before we built the initial version of daffy because it's been one of my big surprises i told you being a founder is humbling in some ways the two features you just mentioned i hear about from everyone about why they love daffy one is they don't have to do whatever search is some people print out charity receipts they have a folder on their desk other people do these gmail searches at the end of the year panic to try and find the receipts taking that off the table and just knowing that anytime you want you can open up the app get a pdf or even we give a spreadsheet if you want of all your charitable contributions for the year people love this like that problem just goes away and then of course the second one you mentioned which is control over communications right is it anonymous or do you want to make the donation but not give them your email address or not give them your physical like these are the things that people want control over i mean i feel for the nonprofits nonprofits really do have a hard problem they do have to reach out to people to raise the money they raise i'm hoping that with platforms like daffy that problem will go away over time but you're right those two features are really crowd pleasers for when people get a donor advised fund for the first time they go wow this is so much better to actually have a system for my giving it's one of the reasons we're convinced at dafi that once people try it they'll stick with it right most people who open donor advised funds they don't just keep them for years they keep them for decades all right well.
Let'S move into kind of the rapid fire portion since time's getting short but i've got a number of kind of specific topics that i've gathered from the audience specifically about dafi so let's go through a few of these and see if we can get answers to people's.
Questions all right i mostly threw my coffee i can do it yeah yeah.
Exactly one of the things people really like about daffy is the app but the app's only for apple products when will there be an app for android.
Users oh as soon as we can do it honestly there's no part of our philosophy i mean i think like a lot of startups a lot of small organizations you just can't do everything so you have to start somewhere and it does turn out we we thought one of the big differentiators for daffy was having a native app which is when we launched we were the first fully functional donor advised fund in the app store i mean by the way that tells you something about technology in this industry that in twenty twenty one we're the first you know app you can do this and then quickly we realized that actually a lot of people seem to want to do their giving from the web either mobile or desktop actually a surprising amount of desktop activity a lot of people doing it in the evenings on the weekends et cetera and so we put a lot into our web product and so i'm a little embarrassed and upset that we don't have a native android app yet i promise you we will eventually but i also tell you that as a new product and service we keep learning i mean we've rolled out so many innovative features in the first two years and there is a problem in software development that the more platforms you try to support the harder it is to do any one new thing or change the product because you kind of have to change it everywhere and so i will apologize to everyone we do try to make our mobile web experience excellent on android and tested for that but i realize that that's no excuse and that's not going to make android users any happier but we will do it i.
Promise all right next topic is the search function for the charities when you actually look up charities on dafi people say it's not as slick as on fidelity or vanguard do you expect that to be improved anytime soon yes this.
One you have to understand hits me right here you have to understand a lot of my original patent work if you go look at ebay when i was more on the product side was in search i was very proud of the search engine we built at linkedin this idea of people searching was not really a concept before linkedin and i'm really proud of what we were able to do there over time and actually my co founder was one of my favorite engineers on that team who i worked with so we we actually care about search to a terrible degree in some ways i feel like that's probably working against us we've tried to do more clever things in the search engine so for example you just type an ein in right a tax id number comes up we try to use location we even have nearby a number of other things but it turns out to be a tough problem to do the right way but we are constantly improving and working on it and we want it to be great i'm not sure i would describe the other search engines as even search engines or great but that's no excuse we spend a lot of time on this we will keep spending a lot of time on this.
All right let's talk about fees the pricing of dafi is pretty darn cheap particularly for those with a large donor advised fund at one hundred thousand dollars in the account vanguard would charge six hundred dollars a year with their zero point six percent aum fee but dafi would charge no more than dollar two hundred forty a year and possibly as little as dollar thirty six a year how can you afford to stay in business that way are you making it up somewhere else with higher investment fees or lower interest paid on the cash in the account and what is really the cash option at daffy anyway yeah.
Well there's a lot of questions in there and it's funny every technology company i've worked at every startup linkedin i can't tell you how many people are like how are you ever going to make money i mean linkedin made over fifteen billion last year i think they're doing fine wealthfront the same thing so i appreciate the concern there's really two answers to it one is i will actually tell you part of this is about the technology the truth is it's not fundamentally that expensive to run a donor advised fund anymore especially if you're using technology intelligently and so we're actually very comfortable with our pricing and the value we provide this is not some sort of loss leader et cetera like most businesses it does require some amount of scale right we're building dafi to be a place where not just thousands or tens of thousands of people can put money aside for charity but hundreds of thousands or millions acorns which i was on the board of for over six years they now have millions of people using that app and service to help them with their financial lives and people pay a regular membership fee a regular subscription fee every month to fund that business and so that was some of the inspiration for daffy but long term we actually do see other revenue opportunities other ways to make money for this business and so we're very proud of the fact that we tried to launch with clear transparent pricing from day one i cannot tell you how many people i've talked to i mean you just gave the vanguard pricing by the way vanguard has a twenty five thousand dollars minimum on the account which often doesn't also get mentioned but across the industry most people don't know what they're paying for a donor advised fund i've talked to people who are paying thousands of dollars a year in fees for their donor advised fund and they'll say things oh i think it's free because i have my business with this bank or with this brokerage and i'm looking at like it's not free you just can't find it on the statement where you're paying those fees you know anyway so i i think that we were very proud of our pricing and kind of the transparency it's very interesting you know pricing is never perfect and you always get people who are asking out different things but our actual focus was to build a platform that was sustainable for for everyone like i said most of our members are the type of people who put aside thousands of dollars for charity not tens of thousands hundreds of thousands our smallest accounts our minimum contribution i think is ten dollars right and we have accounts under one hundred dollars we make daffy free if it's under one hundred dollars but we also have accounts that are now in the millions and even some that are in the eight figures and everything in between so we try to support everyone's level of giving if we can so the.
Last question there was the cash option when you just choose the cash what is that invested in oh that's a.
Great question actually that's about to be updated i'm not sure where this may be updated already by the time this goes live right now our cashing out is very interesting when we launched dafi we launched with a set of portfolios range of low cost globally diversified portfolios of vanguard funds we have esg portfolios from blackrock and we even have crypto portfolios for people who believe in that technology but what we discovered is there's actually quite a few people who actually don't want their money at risk right they're putting money aside for charity they're going to give that money to charity this year they don't want any volatility at all and so our cash option was originally really designed for them the cash is just in a wells fargo account it's not an interest bearing account it's just held and that's fine for some people we are going to be updating that and upgrading that with an option that has a money market fund that pays a more market rate of interest because we have gotten a lot of requests for that and so we'll be rolling that out we also have conservative portfolios and inflation protected bonds et cetera for people whose big concern is protecting from inflation but we're always looking to add more investment options one of the great things we did at daffy is we built this flexible back end right it's a brand new platform and so we have a lot of flexibility on what investment options we can offer to our members we just base it on what requests we get from our members and we have to prioritize that versus other features that we're building yeah.
This is a selfish question for me to ask because i'm one of those people that just leaves it in cash because i mostly clean out the daf every year but i put a lot of money in there and it sits in cash for months you know and so it's a big deal if i'm sitting in a you know vanguard federal money market account making five percent versus wells fargo at at zero percent i'm more than making up my fees just by having a better cash option do you know what money market fund you're.
Planning to use i don't have that offhand with me i wasn't i didn't realize we were going to get this question so i don't want to get the detail wrong no worries but it's a money market fund that's yielding between i think i think it's not quite five percent but it's in the high fours but yes i think we get this request quite a bit and so we're going to be adding that option we're also going to be adding some more conservative portfolios that have different types of bond portfolios etcetera to give people a range of flexibility like i said it's very interesting to me most of our members actually like the diversified investments in the portfolios right our most popular portfolios tend to be the diversified global portfolios of vanguard index funds right they're low cost is properly diversified i don't need to sell that basic idea and they like the idea of their money growing over time especially people who put more than one year's worth of giving aside they like that idea that their money is still growing because they see that money as eventually going to charity but like you we get a lot of members who they don't want to put that money at risk but they also want some return on that money or at least they want a fair market return and so i'm pretty sure by the time we air this that actually those will be live but if not before the end of the year we'll have those new conservative portfolios available.
Some people have griped about the fact that for the two mid tier plans one's limited to just twenty five thousand dollars or fifty thousand dollars in transferred security value as a lifetime limit rather than an annual limit do you have any plans to change that the short.
Answer is yes and this is once again as a founder humbling pricing is a difficult subject for any business for any platform and for us it was actually a pillar we see one of the fundamental problems with the donor advised fund industry is the fact that their business model is based on a percentage of assets i mean if you put one hundred thousand dollars in a fidelity charitable account and then you give ten thousand dollars away it's true fidelity's revenue just dropped ten percent right and you even asked earlier about warehousing assets et cetera i think all these organizations are filled with good people but these incentives matter especially as organizations scale i mean i tell founders all the time that they need to think carefully about their business model because in the long term that drives the prioritization of the business so for us having flat transparent pricing is very very important but it's never perfect and by the way we're really young i think the reason some of those things are lifetime is let's be honest i'm wearing the birthday shirt daffy is just celebrated second birthday and so when when you're only a year or two old lifetime doesn't feel like that long and so i think we we we we kind of took a shortcut there of kind of trying to make it simple i will say that in general for the different plans you describe them as mid tier plans but we really see the benefits of the service as not just being a low cost service it was never our goal just to build the lowest cost donor advised fund we want to build a platform that's actually better for giving i mean one of those tiers you're talking about is the family plan right what's the value of the family plan well it's perfect because you can add your not only you can add your spouse to it you can add your children like i said siblings other family members et cetera and then of course at the highest tier the ability to add your financial advisor if you have one et cetera there's a number of features there but i hear the concern we're actually thinking about pricing for twenty twenty four et cetera and so i can say i'll say from now that don't expect that the lifetime issue is one that'll be there for very long we're just trying to figure out the right way to price the thing while still sending the right message around this idea that we have clear transparent flat rate pricing without diving into where the industry kind of already is which is pricing based on a percentage of assets well i.
Love what you're doing with daffy but as you mentioned it just celebrated its second birthday it's not exactly the household name that vanguard or fidelity or charles.
Schwab might be what do you see.
As the risks of that to those.
Using the donor advised fund well hopefully.
The risks are minimal i mean part of you know whenever you're making decisions with money it's fundamentally a trust decision and i take that very seriously and i know that there's a lot of people who may look at and say hey give them a few more years we'll see how this plays out they may have tried a service before that doesn't come out but this is one of the reasons why we try to build trust by sharing with people who the people are involved in this business how it runs how it makes money i mean the truth is with a donor advised fund we have it in our member agreement et cetera but it's very very easy to move your money to another donor advised fund actually we benefit from this quite a bit right if you have money at fidelity at schwab at vanguard we appear in their list of grants and by the way you don't have to move over the whole account if you just want to try us out you can move a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars or whatever you want to daffy just to try it and so it's not an all or nothing decision for most people i mean i think that in general we try to use we've done everything we can to try and build that trust our custodians right we're not holding the money right you know we have cash at wells fargo we use firms like apex clearing for securities we use coinbase obviously for the crypto and so we try to use trusted institutions where we can our financials are also publicly audited third party audits and our taxes are filed publicly we just completed our nine hundred ninety i mean i've never been a part of a startup that does a third party audit this young right or actually makes their taxes public etcetera so we do everything we can to share with our members what we're doing with the money and how we're running the business but i think it's good that people think about this and take it seriously and i know that my team takes it seriously.
Now at dafi you have to select one of the thirteen pre built portfolios are there any plans to change that to allow people to roll their own.
Portfolio well the short answer is there are regulations around donor advised funds you have to remember that fundamentally from a regulatory standpoint when you contribute assets to a donor advised fund the reason you get that charitable deduction is you actually are donating those assets to the nonprofit dafi dot org comma dafi charitable fund is a registered five hundred one it's a nonprofit organization and so in the end the government basically asks that donor advised funds take responsibility for all the assets being invested properly right so we can't just let numbers pick and choose stocks or whatever they're going to invest in cetera it has to be part of a cohesive investment strategy for the whole organization that being said we're very excited about offering more investment options and giving people more flexibility it'll just be within constraints right you know in terms of what types of portfolios you can build actually one of my surprises in building dae you have to understand my background i love the investment piece there are so many things that we could do on the investment side surprisingly it hasn't been one of the top requests from our members we have a small number who are excited to do it we're excited to build more options for them but for most people what they care about is can they find the charities that they're doing they care about features like the family plan we have our new campaign feature where people can run campaigns for organizations that they care about so we've invested in those based on what our members request but i guess in the end i'll say no we're never going to let people pick and choose stocks individually but giving you more flexibility to define your portfolio where you want your charitable money invested or at least what you're recommending to us absolutely we're going to do a lot more of that in the coming years.
One of the more interesting things about daffy is that it came of age in the crypto era and i'm curious about the decision to put crypto on the platform and any risks you see to non crypto investors as a result of that decision i don't see any.
Significant risks to non crypto investors right once again from our point of view remember our mission is to help people be more generous more often and it turns out that there are a lot of people who actually believe in crypto and believe in the future of those investments or they previously have invested and now want to donate that to charity we have received millions of dollars in crypto contributions in fact one of our very first donations on the platform was after we launched a member in new york wanted to give a bitcoin to their congregation a religious congregation and of course the synagogue didn't take crypto didn't know what to do with bitcoin and he read our press and he said oh i get it i give the bitcoin to daffy and then daffy will get the money to the congregation right and so we see a lot of that on both ends we see a lot of people contributing crypto but then investing it in kind of traditional portfolios we also do see some people who say listen i don't have a lot of money but i'm going to invest this money in my charity account i'm going to put it in crypto because i believe that's going to go that's going to be high and that'll give me more money to give from our perspective we really have a bias towards letting doing anything that helps people be more generous and so if by supporting crypto we get more people putting money into donor advised funds so that money goes to charity if we get more people contributing crypto we see that as a net win for charity overall and for giving which is why we do it but but remember those portfolios are all separate right you know if you're invested in the vanguard portfolio you don't have an overlap in any way or at least not directly with any of the crypto portfolio so we don't see any significant risks there like you i.
Like getting into the weeds on the investing portion as well and i went through your portfolios kind of in detail i thought it was interesting that in your conservative portfolios the only bonds there are tips and in the standard portfolios the only bonds there are nominal bonds i was curious what the decision thought process was behind that decision yeah well.
As usual it's two different decisions and like i said i'm hoping by the time this airs we have more more fixed income options for people so hopefully this is a short term short term issue but each one was responding to member requests so when we designed the original portfolios we did use diversified bond portfolios low cost index funds across and in the standard portfolios we used vanguard funds for people who wanted to invest in esg etf's we we did that there but we stuck to basically globally diversified portfolios of fixed income just like we did for equities right but what happened is as interest rates went up and as an inflation became a big concern we were getting more and more members saying hey i want a portfolio that's protected from inflation and so we added the inflation protected bonds just as a quick way to make sure that people said listen if your big concern is protection from inflation the government makes a security for that right they have inflation protected bonds and that's why we added them but i'll be the first to admit there are more great fixed income options that we could add to the platform and i'm hoping by the time people listen to this we have them live for everyone but that's the background on that decision well you've been.
Very generous with your time today and i appreciate that but i wanted to give you a chance if there's anything we haven't talked about yet that you think our audience ought to know i wanted to give you a chance to.
Tell them yeah well i think the shortage i'd say around daf it's about daffy but it's around charity and giving in general i think that giving is more than just one thing i think thinking about a donor advised fund purely as a financial account is not giving due credit to how important giving is and charity is to most families most people and at the same time just giving and reaching into your pocket whenever someone asks is not a structured or rewarding way to live a more generous life and so what we're trying to do at dafi is really solve both of those problems we're trying to design a platform in giving i mean there's all these great products out right on the health side there's all these meters and measures to help you do the right thing every day you can measure your sleep you can measure what you're eating you can measure your workouts i love fitness so i love these apps and services in fintech we have all these great apps and services to help people spend better save better invest better dafi is trying to help people give better and so if you haven't tried it i would highly encourage you if you are the type of person who gives to charity you give to your kids school you support a religious institution a church a synagogue if there's a national or global cause you support i would encourage everyone whatever platform you're using is to set a goal for your giving right put money aside for charity in a donor advised fund and be more generous be more consistent about your giving and of course if you want to try dafi i think that's fantastic i think we're a low cost service i think we have options that no one else has like the family plan i mean even our new feature campaigns any organization your kids school your church or synagogue they're doing a fundraiser you can do a matching campaign anytime for them over your donor advised fund and all the match comes from your donor advised fund really groundbreaking and so i just encourage anyone listening to give it a try go to the app store download daffy or it's as simple as going to daffy dot org and if you get an invite for us happy to provide one to your listeners will even give you twenty five dollars to give to the charity of your choice once you fund the account awesome if.
You send that over we'll certainly include.
That in the link in the show.
Notes daffy dot org is where you can learn more about daffy adam thank you so much for what you're doing with your life founding daffy is awesome you should be very proud of what.
You'Re doing listen it's early days but it's been one of the most rewarding areas to work in in my entire career so it's been a delight awesome.
Well thank you for coming on the white coat investor podcast and i hope you have a great day thanks all right hope you enjoyed that interview dafi is one of these companies that they're not a sponsor by the way we get paid nothing by daffy vanguard charitable doesn't sponsor us fidelity's daf whatever it is doesn't sponsor us schwab's daf doesn't sponsor us we don't have a daf sponsor if someone wants to sponsor us i guess you'll hear more about them but i don't think there's a lot.
Of money in this space it's a.
Little bit like the hsa space there's.
Just not a lot of money there.
And so we don't see a lot.
Of sponsoring going on the only hsa sponsor we've ever had is lively who's a great choice wish i could talk.
Fidelity into sponsoring us with their hsa but they don't so anyway no real conflicts of interest here with this episode i know there was a lot about daffy and of course he's the ceo of daffy it's his job to promote.
The company and you heard a lot about daffy i think they're pretty great.
Donor advised fund mine is at vanguard charitable right now it does have some downsides right the minimum grants like five hundred bucks and there's a minimum amount.
You can put in there at the beginning you got to put twenty five.
Thousand in it to start so that.
Just doesn't work for a lot of the audience that they're marketing daffy to.
I mean you can start daffy for free if you put less than dollar.
One hundred in there but i'm like why am i going to bother opening.
A financial account for dollar one hundred but the cool thing about daffy is no aum fees even vanguard charges an aum fee in their vanguard charitable daf it's zero point six percent is what it starts at i don't know i think that's like the first half million or something zero point six you know a lot of us are do it yourself investors and we wouldn't ever want to pay zero point six percent now it's true that the tax savings there probably offsets some of that fee and if you don't leave the money in there very long you're not paying zero.
Point six six on it very long i tend to liquidate my daf pretty.
Quickly after i put the money in.
There each year so i don't pay that very much but it's pretty cool.
These guys just charge a flat fee so you could have ten million dollars in your donor advised fund and still.
What would you be paying dollar two.
Hundred forty at dafi pretty awesome and the expense ratios aren't bad either now i pressed them a little bit on the cash question because right now their cash isn't paying anything so if i put one hundred thousand dollars of vanguard it's in the vanguard federal money market fund it's paying me five thousand dollars a year or paying the donor advised.
Fund five thousand dollars a year and.
Sure there's a dollar six hundred fee.
Each year for having that money in there but come on you're making more.
Than that with the cash so i'm glad to see they're adding a money.
Market fund in there for those of.
Us who use these things like i.
Do that'll help make it continue to be what's probably the cheapest donor advised fund out there so pretty cool company i'm pretty proud of him for what he's doing it's really a great thing to be doing i kind of grill people with some of the questions i give them but this is really something to salute to have started a company like that it's pretty awesome if you're.
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