Justin

I bought a lot of life insurance when our family was young. Wanted to be sure that Bev and our children would be taken care of should anything unexpected happen to me.

Well, I’m still around, thank goodness. Our children are grown and settled, and Bev and I did little better financially than we ever thought would be possible when we were starting out. Truth is, our family no longer needed all the life insurance coverage I was carrying for them.

That excess insurance was really an asset that was no longer productive for us. We talked about it with our accountant, and she said that we could donate some policies to our favorite charity – MDA. We would receive an income tax deduction approximately equal to the cash surrender value of the policies, which would come in very handy at tax time.

MDA could either cash in the policies and use the funds for current projects, or hold them for the death benefits they will pay when we die.

It was a win-win result: we were able to help MDA out significantly, but we did it by using assets we had almost forgotten about, and in a way that didn’t affect our cash-flow or our family’s security.