I know. This sounds obnoxious. But one of my top financial priorities these days is giving away the wealth I’ve accumulated.
What most rich folks do is hoard everything they’ve got until they croak. Then they have it distributed post-mortem by lawyers working with trusts and wills.

From everything I’ve seen and read, this is a terrible idea. The good feelings you imagine your benevolence will engender most often devolves into bitterness, resentment, and altercations among those you leave behind.

I like what Warren Buffett did when he was about my age. He gave a huge chunk of his wealth to Bill Gates’s charitable foundation. Buffett understood that giving away billions was an enormous responsibility. So rather than simply naming some charities in his will, he put the money in the hands of someone he trusted to put it to good use while he (Buffett) was still alive.

K and I have the same general idea: We want to give away most of our money while we are still alive. We are assigning some assets to fund several charities that the family foundation currently manages. (So they will be self-funded in perpetuity.) And we’re putting other assets into the family limited partnership, which will be directed by our sons. But we are also in the process of giving away money to friends and family members. This we are doing with the help of legal counsel.

Not surprisingly, the IRS has restrictions on how much you can give away and to whom. These encumbrances are embodied in the tax code. If you exceed those limits, you (not the recipient of your gift) must pay a tax on it. And, yes, that means you have to pay a tax on money that has already been taxed.

The current limit on yearly gifts is $15,000 per person. So as a couple, K and I can give $30,000 a year to whomever we want without incurring a gift tax.

This is not a problem if you and your spouse want to give, say, $90,000 to your ne’er-do-well brother John. You can do it, tax-free, in 3 years. But if you want to give him enough to keep him in spam sandwiches and reefer for life, you may want to give him $300,000. That will take 10 years.

In our case, $30,000-a-year gifts won’t make a dent in the amount of money we want to disburse. And happily, there is a way to do what we want to do withou tpaying yet another tax on our money.

It’s called the “lifetime gift tax exemption.” Here’s a summary of what I’ve learned about it: READ MORE

I’m retired but I need income. What’s the best part-time retirement job?
I’m sick of the nine-to-five. How can I make good money working from home?

Whenever I’m asked these questions, I do my best to list four or five options. But my favorite – the one I want to recommend to everybody – is copywriting.

Copywriting has always been a lucrative and rewarding profession, especially for independent-minded people. But since the internet revolution changed global commerce, it’s become one of the very best ways to make part-time freelance money.

In addition to far-above-average compensation, copywriting offers many lifestyle advantages:

* working from home or while traveling

* being in charge of your own time

* choosing your clients

* choosing your work

* having an unlimited intellectual challenge

And if you master a niche, you can get rich. Multimillion-dollar rich.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about copywriting is that you don’t have to be a good writer to do it. Many successful copywriters would deny this. They want you to believe that the work they do is art. They want to think of themselves as direct-response Fitzgeralds and Hemingways. But they are not.

That’s because copywriting is fundamentally a selling – not a writing – skill. And anyone that is willing to put in the work can learn how to sell.

As you may know, I have an interest in a business that teaches copywriting (AWAI), so it would be fair to accuse me of bias. But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

However, because of AWAI’s 20-year history of successfully training thousands of people to be copywriters, dozens of smaller programs have popped up. And this has led to speculation that the supply has overstepped the demand, and that the prospects for new people coming aboard are not good.

That may be true… unless, of course, you get really good at copywriting.

This is the position that Master Copywriter Bob Bly took in a recent blog post. He made his point by quoting this from P.T. Barnum’s The Art of Money Getting (Great title!):

No profession, trade, or calling is overcrowded in the upper story. The basement is much crowded, but there is plenty of room upstairs.

Wherever you find the most honest and intelligent merchant, or the best anything, that man is most sought for, and has always enough to do.

Whoever excels all others in his own line, if his habits are good and his integrity undoubted, cannot fail to secure abundant patronage, and the wealth that naturally follows.

“Study and practice, coupled with dedication and effort,” Bob says, “can propel you into the top 10% of copywriters in terms of ability and results – enabling you to enjoy success, good income,and financial security. Do that and you will have all the work you need and you will earn more. And you’ll earn 2 to 10 times more than 90% of the other copywriters out there.”

But there are so many opportunities! So you really don’t have to become one of the best to get all the work you want. And although you probably do need to be an elite copywriter to make $500,000 to more than a million a year, you can make good money – $50 to $200 an hour on a part-time freelance basis – with just mediocre skills.

Consider this: In my day, you’d need a college degree to land a job in the advertising industry. But as a freelance copywriter, nobody’s going to ask you for a CV. They will just want to know what you have done and they’ll want to see samples. And even if the only thing you have is samples that you did as a copywriting student, it’s not difficult to get a test assignment. If you do well with that, you’re on your way.

Eventually, you’ll have more work than you can handle. That’s when you raise your fees – 50 grand, 100 grand… the sky’s the limit!