Gratitude in Hard Times

Woman journals

Closing the Distance: Gratitude, Joy, and Generosity during COVID-19 Gratitude in Hard Times (Part One in Series) The global pandemic has affected everything about our daily lives: the economy, work and school routines, leisure activities, and even toilet paper supplies. It’s easy to give in to fear and sadness when we’re inundated with daily news…

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Generosity Lives On (Part Two)

Mike and Carol and Kids

In Part One of this blog series, we looked at the advantages of giving to charity in your will. Part Two explores how one couple’s carefully planned legacy of giving is teaching a new generation to be generous. Throughout their 53 years together, Mike and Carol Dempsey* nurtured strong family ties with their children and…

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Generosity Lives On (Part One)

Mike and Carol

Warren Buffet once said, “If you’re in the luckiest 1% of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99%.” Hearing this from a billionaire philanthropist may prompt comparisons that make it difficult to think of ourselves as the ‘luckiest’, but an annual net income of $41,800 CAD is…

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Minimizing Taxes, Maximizing Generosity

Two men meet over coffee

Ralph lost his wife to cancer. When he stopped into our office with a cheque to top up his Gifting Fund™, he was still working through the tangle of emotions and practical tasks such life events bring. I invited him into my office to have a coffee and catch up. As Ralph and I chatted,…

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A Generous Community

Generous Community

I have been lucky to be a part of several generous communities throughout my life, and they each practiced generosity in their own way. I’m not sure if it’s because of or despite their varying motivations and expressions, but the modelling I experienced in each taught me something new about the importance of giving. Reciprocal…

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Generosity in Tax Season? (Part Two)

Selling publicly traded securities

Link to Part One Like most Canadian taxpayers, Joanne and John Nelson* knew that charitable receipts generated tax credits that helped offset their income tax payable. That wasn’t why they donated to their favourite charities, but they appreciated the benefit, as it often allowed them to be a little more generous with their donations. The…

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Generosity in Tax Season? (Part One)

Couple reviews generosity plan

It is once again tax-filing season. Time to check the mail each day for those stray T4’s and T5’s and gather up a year’s worth of receipts for medical and education expenses and charitable donations. For the highly organized among us the start of tax season triggers little more than walking a few steps to…

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For This Business, Generosity is the Bottom Line

Farm Business

Today’s marketplace may be dominated by large corporations duty-bound to deliver ever-increasing profits, but for 40 years Norm and Joan Smith* ran a prosperous agriculture business with a different definition of success. Generosity outweighed the bottom line, and they prioritized donating to numerous charities from their farm income every year. The Smiths always knew that…

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