Our Dear Co-Director Featured in New Book

Co-Director Mike Gast has a great quote in the new book Generation Earn by Kimberly Palmer. Check out the excerpt below!
If you’re lucky enough to know that you’ll have some money coming your way from parents or grandparents, consider talking to them about it in advance. Many families decide to pass money on to their kids and grandkids while they’re still living, not only to avoid estate taxes, but also so they can talk about how they want the money spent and give some of it away together. It might sound like as much of a challenge as deciding whether to vacation in Rome or Turks & Caicos, but navigating these kinds of intergenerational wealth transfers can be tricky, and it is a situation faced by a significant chunk of the population. The Government Accountability Office estimates that, on average, the wealthiest 10 percent of baby boomers own $3.2 million worth of assets—much of which they intend to eventually pass on to their kids.*
The group Resource Generation helps young people of wealth figure out how to wield it responsibly. Twenty-nine-year-old Michael Gast turned to the group to help him decide how to handle money he received as a gift from his grandmother. He had $40,000 left in the trust after paying for college and knew he wanted to give part of it away to social justice causes. “I wanted to align my relationship with that money to the values in the rest of my life—the values of economic justice and sharing resources—and I was really struggling with how to do that,” he says. At a workshop hosted by Resource Generation, he learned how to create a giving plan that prioritized his values. A former educator, he now works fulltime for Resource Generation as a family philanthropy coordinator in Seattle. [Update: Make that RG Co-Director!]
Later, after Michael’s grandmother passed away, he inherited an additional $50,000 and gives away 10 percent a year to charities. [Update: Mike has now given away 50% of that inheritance.] He’s now talking with his brother, sister, cousins, parents, and other family members about coordinating their gifts through matching donations to further leverage the power of that inheritance. “I’m really inspired to continue developing these conversations with my family on how we could move these resources and make plans and share them with each other,” he says.
*Government Accountability Office, “Baby Boom Generation,” (GAO-06-718, July 2006), 8.
For more info on the book, visit www.generationearn.com.