Are Seniors more charitable?
NewTithing Group releases
first ever IRS-based report on charitable giving by age
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 19 /PRNewswire/
-- Affluent income tax filers under age sixty-five are only
half as generous as their more modestly situated peers,
according to a new report by NewTithing Group, a
philanthropic research organization and developer of donor
education tools. The report found no such generosity gap
amongst seniors of different wealth levels.
If affluent young and
middle-aged filers had donated as high a proportion of their
investment asset wealth to charity in 2003 as did their less
affluent peers, concludes the report, total individual
charitable donations would have been over $25 billion higher
that year, an increase of at least 17%.
NewTithing Group's
five-part report, The Demographics of Charitable Giving,
represents the first ever IRS-based analysis of giving by
assets, age, number of dependents, tax filer status, and
gender. Derived from over a quarter of a million individual
tax returns, the report was based on unpublished tabulations
from the Individual Statistics of Income File for tax-year
2003, the latest year for which data is available.
According to NewTithing
Group, measuring charitable donations as a proportion of
investment assets provides a meaningful gauge of generosity
amongst the upper middle class and the affluent, whose
investment assets generally exceed their income.
The Group has used its new
research to issue suggested annual giving benchmarks by age.
The benchmarks appear in the appendix of the Group's just
released donor education booklet, "Beyond Taxes: Secrets to
Fulfilling Philanthropy." Donors can also examine more
customized giving scenarios through the newly released
version of the Group's on-line resource, PrudentPal
Charitable Giving Planner. While a basic version of
PrudentPal is freely accessible at NewTithing Group's web
site (http://www.newtithing.org/),
the complete version is accessible via the sites of
licensing organizations including: The Community Foundation
of New Jersey (http://www.cfnj.org/),
KQED Public Radio (http://www.kqed.org/signalsociety),
Social Venture Partners Seattle (http://www.svpseattle.org/),
Stanford University (http://pgnet22.stanford.edu/get/layout/Calculators),
and United Way of the Bay Area (http://www.uwba.org/leadership).
NewTithing Group is the
leading developer of educational resources that help donors
identify their maximum comfortably affordable current-year
donation level. The Group's mission is to educate the public
to budget for charity so that philanthropy becomes more
proactive, effective and fulfilling. Founded and chaired by
philanthropist and retired money manager Claude Rosenberg in
1998, NewTithing Group is a non-profit, non-partisan,
private operating foundation and 501(c)3.