Dale Lutz

"Working with MFC has been an absolute dream,” says Dale Lutz of Langley, British Columbia, co-founder of a company making software that moves maps around. "I’ve enjoyed every interaction … I’m a little high maintenance in that I do things that sometimes aren’t in the most obvious way. I’ve had some strange stocks, but MFC has always come through and found a way to execute the trade and get the donations done in the best way possible.”

Dale is an accountant at heart. When the capital gains inclusion rate was reduced to zero for donated securities, Dale realized that for him, donating publicly traded securities was the most tax-effective way to make a charitable donation.

He made a number of stock donations to different charities but quickly realized that it was an immense ordeal. "Then,” he says, "one of the places I was intending to donate to said that they had MFC handle all of their stock donations. I contacted the Foundation right away, and it was so wonderful and so easy and simple that since then I’ve used them for all my stock donations."

"I also really like working with MFC when it comes time to do disbursements. It’s like having a whole accounting department where you just phone and say, ‘Here are a couple of places where I’d like to send a donation,’ and bang, it’s done. That just simplifies things immensely.”

Here’s how the process works: when you have stocks to donate, contact MFC and ask for the applicable forms. You complete the forms according to the instructions provided and then return the forms to MFC. When the stocks arrive in MFC’s brokerage account, they are sold and you are notified of the results. At the end of the process, you have a donation receipt for the value of the donated stock and cash in an MFC gifting account that you can distribute to charity. MFC can distribute funds to any registered charity in Canada according to your wishes.

"The other thing I really appreciate,” continues Dale, "is that you can make an anonymous donation through MFC, because sometimes what holds people back from donating is that they don’t want anybody to know. One of the questions that the Foundation always asks is, Do you want us to inform the charity who the donor is? so I always have the ability to say, Yes or No to that. It’s like having your own private foundation without any of the overhead or work or red tape associated with that."

"I work with a lot of suppliers and financial people in both my professional and personal lives. I can say that the calibre and competence of the people on the other side of the phone at the Foundation are top-notch. When I have some crazy penny stock and I need to get that dealt with, I have such confidence that it will be done and done well. That’s happened over and over again for me in the last three years.”