How You Can Help
Mary Naylor: Sharing the Rewards of Stocks
September 2006Mary Naylor is retired now, but she has found a second calling in her investment strategies and “giving” activities. She’s getting a lot of satisfaction from annual stock gifts that fund her endowment for cancer research while also planning for her own future and that of the charities she believes in. As she said with a little smile, “M. D. Anderson is in my will, of course, but if I give stocks now, someone has a chance to say ‘Thank you’, and I enjoy hearing them say it.”
Picking stocks and deciding when to give them to charity is a skill she picked up at her father’s knee as a young girl. She saw how much fun he had playing the stock market, although, she noted, it never made him a millionaire. “He’d be laughing today to see my investment style, ” she says.
Mary’s approach today is to have fun with her investments while being careful and clear-headed about her stock gift strategy. From her portfolio she identifies the stock that has risen substantially, but that doesn’t pay significant dividends. She explains, “If I sell a stock that has risen, I pay the broker’s commission and capital gains taxes. Whereas if I give it to M. D. Anderson, the full amount goes to cancer research.”
The Cancer Research Endowment she created was the outgrowth of observing the cancer experiences endured by family members and friends. Convinced that cancer research was the key, 10 years ago she brought it up with her lawyer while going over her will and decided to talk to someone about ways to make her gifts meaningful to M. D. Anderson. That led to the establishment of the endowment, which she has funded annually in honor of her mother and father.
How to Give Stocks Wills-Bequests