Donor Advised Fund? Watch the Fees!

Donor Advised Funds are a wonderful tool, but like any financial product, they need to be monitored.  They are super convenient when you have a block of money you want to put aside for charitable purposes but haven't yet designated.  For a minimal annual fee, it's a way to set up your own mini-foundation.  The tax deduction is taken when the money is put in the DAF; to donate the money, you simply find your preferred organization in their data base and click through a few menus.  Voila!  They are well-suited for intergenerational giving.
Fidelity and Vanguard offer them, as do many others.  Some non-profits offer them as well.


Three things to watch out for, that I learned the hard way:

1. There is a minimum annual fee of $100.  I disbursed most of my fund to some wonderful projects, leaving just $450 or so.  This is the minimum administrative fee - unfortunately they've just deducted it, and now there's $350.  So #1 rule is don't leave small amounts in your account!

2. The value of the fund goes down if the market tanks.  This also had not occurred to me - that the value of the money I lovingly put aside would decrease just sitting there waiting to be donated. Of course if the market goes up (remember when that was typical?) the fund's value increases.

3. Since you can't take these funds back, and they're not part of your net worth spread sheet records, it's easy to simply lose track of them.  Then they just sit around invested but accomplishing nothing of value in the world.  (I'm not sure what happens to forgotten funds? Anyone out there know that?)

Fax from the Net for Free

It's never come up before - I never needed to send myself a fax.  However, this morning my fax reception disappeared.  Turned out I had pressed a button that made it go away, but no amount of reading the manual explained anything that basic and simple.  Once I figured it out I wanted to test the fax.  In the past, I would have asked someone to fax me some random sheet as a favor but instead I looked up "send yourself a fax" and dozens of sites came up.  I used GotFreeFax and it worked perfectly.  Presumably you can fax a document that's on your computer, though I didn't experiment.  I see people standing around at Staples to fax things.  Maybe they could just do it this way.
Can't tell you what a kick I get out of finding all these new ways to use internet tech.

Philly Electric Bikes - How Cool Are They?

Check out this story from my friends Meenal and Afshin! Talk about a hedge against gas prices going up.
Starting this September, the rent for Philly Electric Wheels, the only store in Philadelphia dedicated to electric bicycles, will be pegged to the price of light crude oil. 
Store owner Afshin Kaighobady says sales increase when the cost of gasoline rises.  For the store’s second year, he re-negotiated terms with his landlady based on their shared assumption that that trend will continue and we can all do our part to lower the carbon footprint.
It costs about penny a mile to ride an electric bicycle, he says, and you can go up to 20 mph and as far as 25 or more miles on a single full charge from an ordinary wall socket. Plus, it’s fun, an antidote to rising gasoline prices if there ever was one.
“My other car is an electric bicycle” is the favorite slogan in the store, called “Phew!” by its fans.
The corner store is located in the Green on Greene building, at the corner of Carpenter Lane and Greene Street, just west of Lincoln Drive. The monthly rent on the 550 sq. ft. storefront will be  pegged to $80/barrel, starting in September.  (In 2008, the average price was $91 per barrel with a high of $126.  The average for 2009 was $53/barrel.  It is currently $80 per barrel, the baseline for rent in the store.)

Whatever percent that rises (or falls), so goes the rent.  If recent past is precedent, that rent would range from $625 to $1575.  “But past isn’t precedent, building owner Pam Rogow says. “The cost of crude will continue to rise.”

Phew has gone crude!

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Philly Electric Wheels | www.phillyew.com
550 Carpenter Lane, Philadelphia PA 19119
corner of Carpenter Lane & Greene Street, two blocks west of Lincoln Drive
215 821 9266