Are Seniors more charitable? NewTithing Group releases first ever IRS-based report on charitable giving by age

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Affluent income tax filers under age sixty-five are only half as generous as their more modestly situated peers, according to a new report by NewTithing Group, a philanthropic research organization and developer of donor education tools. The report found no such generosity gap amongst seniors of different wealth levels.

If affluent young and middle-aged filers had donated as high a proportion of their investment asset wealth to charity in 2003 as did their less affluent peers, concludes the report, total individual charitable donations would have been over $25 billion higher that year, an increase of at least 17%.

NewTithing Group's five-part report, The Demographics of Charitable Giving, represents the first ever IRS-based analysis of giving by assets, age, number of dependents, tax filer status, and gender. Derived from over a quarter of a million individual tax returns, the report was based on unpublished tabulations from the Individual Statistics of Income File for tax-year 2003, the latest year for which data is available.

According to NewTithing Group, measuring charitable donations as a proportion of investment assets provides a meaningful gauge of generosity amongst the upper middle class and the affluent, whose investment assets generally exceed their income.

The Group has used its new research to issue suggested annual giving benchmarks by age. The benchmarks appear in the appendix of the Group's just released donor education booklet, "Beyond Taxes: Secrets to Fulfilling Philanthropy." Donors can also examine more customized giving scenarios through the newly released version of the Group's on-line resource, PrudentPal Charitable Giving Planner. While a basic version of PrudentPal is freely accessible at NewTithing Group's web site (http://www.newtithing.org/), the complete version is accessible via the sites of licensing organizations including: The Community Foundation of New Jersey (http://www.cfnj.org/), KQED Public Radio (http://www.kqed.org/signalsociety), Social Venture Partners Seattle (http://www.svpseattle.org/), Stanford University (http://pgnet22.stanford.edu/get/layout/Calculators), and United Way of the Bay Area (http://www.uwba.org/leadership).

NewTithing Group is the leading developer of educational resources that help donors identify their maximum comfortably affordable current-year donation level. The Group's mission is to educate the public to budget for charity so that philanthropy becomes more proactive, effective and fulfilling. Founded and chaired by philanthropist and retired money manager Claude Rosenberg in 1998, NewTithing Group is a non-profit, non-partisan, private operating foundation and 501(c)3.