Guzzo the Contrarian

What good is creating wealth if you can’t do something positive with it?

So a couple of years ago, I took a portion of my savings and created a personal donor advised fund through the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, and named it The Guzzo Gift Fund.

Although I prefer investing with The Vanguard Group, I didn’t have a large enough initial contribution ($25,000.00) to warrant creating a donor advised fund with the Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program.

However, I found that Fidelity Investments offers a more costly, but much more reasonably lower initial contribution ($5,000.00) that I could afford, so I chose their program.

So far, I have nothing but praise for this charitable concept.

I believe that charitable gift funds are a great idea for us middle-class folks who can’t afford our own personal foundation, but would like to invest and control our donations, and to be able to leave a legacy.

Any charitable contributions to the fund are irreversible, but are tax-deductible. These contributions can then be invested as you see fit, through the mutual funds offered by each program. You can then disburse donations to charities of your choice, provided that they are pre-approved by the plan first. Most reputable charities are already approved.

I don’t have any children, so the Guzzo Gift Fund will be my personal legacy. Hopefully, any un-disbursed and invested contributions grow over the years and the fund eventually becomes self-sustaining. Even though I’ll be gone, my contributions will live on.

Becoming self-sustaining is a tall order for The Guzzo Gift Fund, but it provides me a motivational and altruistic challenge.

To get to my original point, I’ve had The Guzzo Gift Fund 100% invested in a money-market fund since it’s creation, awaiting a market downturn. Now that we’ve reached that point, today I moved the full amount of my total contributions into Fidelity’s Spartan Total Market Index Fund (FSTMX) for future growth.

The way things are being perceived the markets may be headed lower, but like I previously wrote when I moved my retirement funds back into the markets, consistently timing a bottom is almost impossible, and a market reversal is likely to arrive more sooner than later.