Giving Compass' Take:

• In this Medium post, The Center for Election Science's Executive Director Aaron Hamlin discusses account beneficiaries, planned trusts, wills and other forms of planned giving everyone should know.

• More than 90 percent of people don’t include a charitable beneficiary or do any planned giving. How can we reverse this trend?

• Here's a look at how we can unlock philanthropy’s missing trillions.

Many consider planned giving a luxury reserved for a rich few. They’re wrong.

Get that out of your head right now.

Planned giving is something any of us can do. And those stories about a social worker or janitor leaving over $100K or over a million dollars to charity. Those are real. It’s obviously important that wealthy individuals set up planned giving, but it’s also important for those who are in lower and middle economic classes to set up planned giving, too. For instance, in The Givers, author David Callahan makes the case that concentrated donations from a select few could misprioritize the cause areas that benefit the rest of us.

The impact of planned giving is enormous. It lets a merely rich person give a gift that only the super rich could afford. A middle-class person can give an upper-class gift. And a person with little could give a gift a middle-class person would typically give. Planned giving takes your giving up a notch.

As a non-millionaire in my 30’s, I can speak to this fact personally. I’ll be giving much more through planned giving than I could ever give traditionally. My age doesn’t stop me from starting now either.

There’s also the notion that planned giving is just too complicated. While that can be the case for some aspects of planned giving, planned giving is often quite easy. My gift to you is showing you the easy and navigating you through the initial parts of the more complicated.

Read the full article about planned giving for everyone by Aaron Hamlin at Medium.