Talk about charity with HNW clients
Clients who were advised by a financial planner were no more likely to include a charitable bequest in their will than those who used a will-kit or wrote their own, a Perpetual-led study showed.
But the study into charitable requests in Australia, co-founded by The Trust Company (part of Perpetual), also suggested that financial advisers needed to know how to raise the issue and they needed to ask the right questions.
The research also quoted a UK study, which found that when advisers told clients leaving a gift to charity was an option, the percentage of clients who did so jumped from five to 11 per cent.
When they cited examples of what other clients did and asked if there were charities they were passionate about, those including a charitable bequest jumped to 15 per cent.
Perpetual's national manager of philanthropy and not profit services, Caitriona Fay, said financial advisers should know how to determine clients' charitable intentions, as Australia was about to see the biggest ever intergenerational transfer of wealth over the next two decades.
According to ‘Include a Charity', a joint initiative of over 100 Australian charities encouraging people to include a charitable gift in their will, 87 per cent support a charity during their lifetime but only 29 per cent would be willing to leave a gift in their will, while only 7.5 per cent end up doing so.
AUTHOR
Malavika Santhebennur
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