Giving Compass' Take:

• Bernie Marcus plans to leave 90 percent of his fortune to the Marcus Foundation when he dies and has made clear that he would not like the foundation to live in perpetuity. 

• What are the reasons for ensuring there are restrictions on foundations? What are the challenges? 

• Understand more about the choice to spend down. 

I think it’s sound philanthropic practice for a donor who sets up a foundation to make sure that the foundation he creates sunsets within his lifetime or within a short period of a donor’s death. I wrote How Great Philanthropists Failed And How You Can Protect Your Legacy in part because I wanted to warn future donors about the problems that happened when such great donors as Henry Ford, J. Howard Pew, John D. MacArthur, and Andrew Carnegie either left no restrictions on how the foundations they created would award grants or, in the case of Pew, a donor left detailed instructions which his successors ignored.

In the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Matt Kempner reports that Bernie Marcus, 90, plans to leave 90 percent of his fortune to the Marcus Foundation when he dies, although he did not give an estimate as to how much money that would be. Kempner notes that Bloomberg says Marcus, who co-founded Home Depot in 1979, is worth $4.53 billion, while Forbes says Marcus is the 109th-richest person in the U.S. with wealth of $5.8 billion. Kempner says that given that Marcus says he has already given away $2 billion, and adding 90 percent of his current wealth would make a total of around $6 billion.

But far more important than the amount of money being given away are the views of the man making the gifts. Marcus is a forceful and persuasive champion of donor intent and a foe of perpetual foundations.

“I want to live to be 100 because I want to be in a position to give it away to those things that I really believe in,” Marcus said in a July 2019 interview. “I’ve got all the houses I need. I live very well. My kids are taken care of. Everything I live for now is finding the right things to put my money into and that can give me a rate of return in emotion and doing good things for this world.”

Read the full article about foundations living in perpetuity by Martin Morse Wooster at Philanthropy Daily.