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Richard C. Peck Consulting, LLC & The Philanthropy Guy, LLC


Providing consulting and educational services to nonprofits, donors, and professional advisors related to impactful charitable giving

CONTACT RICK

Charitable Giving Newsletter

1/9/25 (New Year Edition)


In This Issue:


It's Electric: Boogie Woogie Woogie!


Tips for Nonprofits, Donors, and Professional Advisors

It's Electric:

Boogie Woogie Woogie!

It's 2025. We're busy. We're on the move. Living our lives. Dancing and having fun.


But life---it has a time limit for all of us. 


And death...it's something we don’t really like to think about (especially when we are having fun)! 


But you know who thinks about death a lot? Estate planning professionals! They work with individuals and families to create the right set of instructions based on the intellectual and emotional desires of their clients---to be carried out, of course, when these clients don’t have the voice to do it anymore. Estate planning professionals have an incredible weight to bear in that way. Getting the details exactly right is vitally important---especially when someone is leaving a lifetime of assets to friends, family, and trusted charitable institutions. 


Then, of course, it's getting those darned documents notarized! Some attorneys these days are using specific language and affidavits to help their clients sign wills and their entire estate plans remotely---so they can avoid the hassles (and sometimes health risks) of in-person signings. And, interestingly, trust and estate litigators have indicated that it is exceedingly rare for a will to be inadmissible in court because of a procedural element in how it was signed, thanks to the “harmless error” doctrine accepted by most courts around the US. 


Enter a remote online notarization solution, proposed several years back by Patricia De Fonte, a San Francisco estate planner who serves tech-savvy families in Silicon Valley, to a group called The Best Notary. Named "Remote Online Notarization," or "RON," this system helps people finalize their estate plans and skip the in-person signings. The process provides a secure, verified .PDF with a digital audit trail & verifiable electronic signatures---as well as a video recording of the notarization that is stored indefinitely to demonstrate that the document was signed by an alert and willing signer.


Three sets of notarized documents are provided--resulting in a complete estate plan package. What's not to like? And then you can get back to your boogie (and your "woogie woogie").


The Best Notary reviews every word across every page before the client signs. Read about the multi-talented Eli Angote, CEO and Founder of The Best Notary, below:

Eli Angote: Founder and CEO of The Best Notary

Eli is the CEO and founder of The Best Notary, a company that empowers women-led estate planning firms to serve more (and diverse) families, in-person and remotely, while building a notarization and witness on-demand platform, AI-powered, and offered as “freemium”---in other words, a free basic product or service while charging for additional products or services---to expand access to legacy planning for families, and help bridge the global wealth divide. Born and raised in Kenya, Eli has a background in Computer Science and is a certified paralegal. Fluent in five languages, Eli plays the piano and is an avid drone pilot. He's also a marathoner, enjoys hot yoga, and has lived nomadically all over California in the last three years. Learn even more about Eli and The Best Notary here: Concierge Estate Planning Signings Statewide At Home or By RON

A Tip for Nonprofits: Want to create a podcast to tell the world about your mission, vision, values, and proposed solutions---but lack the bandwidth to do it? NotebookLM has a feature where you give it the proper info---and it creates a pretty realistic dialogue! Visit here to learn more: How To Use Google NotebookLM's Podcast Feature (And Why You Might Want To)

A Tip for Donors: Charityvest is a multi-faceted resource: 1) You can mobilize your community with a tax-deductible Community Fund to easily pool charitable capital and make grants to public charities, 2) tap into vetted philanthropic partners to craft a giving strategy, and 3) set up a donor-advised fund to help deploy grants to make the giving strategy a reality. Learn more here: Charityvest | How does a giving account work? Why use one?

A Tip for Professional Advisors: What's the difference between a Nonprofit Corporation and a Public Benefit Corporation? While Public Benefit Corporations---like King Arthur Flour---and Nonprofits---like the Sierra Club---share a commitment to social or environmental goals, they have many different structures and purposes! Enough differences so that I am not going to list them all here...you will have to go the extra mile and click on this link below to learn more: Public Benefit Corporations vs. Non-Profits | Harvard Business Services, Inc.

“That's what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing."

~Simone de Beauvoir

Richard C. Peck Consulting, LLC and The Philanthropy Guy, LLC

About Rick

205 Park View Drive

Belmont, NC 28012

+1 (603) 387-3897

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