Maggie's Farm

love the story about the Boston matron...(could have been something my grandmother would have said about a girlhood friend ). But the post on frugal WASP giving misses some basic points. We WASPs deliberately backload giving for many good reasons, including:

1) the desire NOT to ruin children. Being rich and not having to work is a curse morally and spiritually even if one temporarily has more ski trips and more people want to go out with one (don't give kids any money beyond the best education and educational trips you can until AFTER they have established themselves as workers, become self sufficient). Being hungry makes them work hard and develops character.

2) any organization you give principal to may take the money and use it for purposes that might appall the original donor. Better to give just interest. Better yet, set up some kind of trust with outside review where it can be discovered if some jackass is giving your money to ugly murals like that Access Health project and that the gift no longer is being spent as the donor intended. It is particularly relevant when people leave money to churches, which tend to be captured by cliques or narcissistic ministers who take the place in directions a generous giver might not have wished to support. When we are alive we can vote with our feet, after death, only a good trustee can make sure that our hard earned money is used wisely.

3) the phrase "spendthrift trust" obviously isn't familiar enough to the parents of some of the rich brats gone wild in the tabloids. I think it's highly relevant to organizations, not just mentally unstable, shiftless or foolish individuals. Most sensible people know that you don't give a hyper 25 year old male 100K (he will get a Ferrari and/or spend it on coke and hot babes). Nor do you give an outright grant to a charismatic community organizer and his hip organization. If you have half a brain. You provide tangible needed items (think Andrew Carnegie apartments for workers) and leave money invested to maintain them.

To make an analogy: If you are rich as Croesus and want to help a homeless mentally ill person in your community, probably best to ANONYMOUSLY set up a perpetual rent payment on a safe apartment they cannot be evicted from rather than outright giving them a home of their own that they will borrow against in a fit of mania, lose and get homeless again. The article didn't mention how cherished a principle anonymous giving is in WASP tradition (and nowadays in evangelical churches). So as not to give for the wrong reasons, for vain dumb show.
4) Lest I sound as if I don't trust people, I'd say simply that people don't usually intend to waste your generous donations. They simply think that they have figured out better uses for it than you intended. Also, I know from personal experience of receiving generous gifts from relatives, that the temptation to spend it (camera gear!) is much greater with windfalls than when one has slogged to earn the money by the hour (NOT on the Boston common but at a computer shuffling paper)