The Advantages of a Charitable Remainder Unitrust
A Charitable Remainder Unitrust (CRUT) is put in place to provide an income to a non-charitable beneficiary and at the same time move the rest of the interest to a qualified charity.
The donor would permanently transfer securities or property to a trustee. The trustee, in return, would reimburse the donor (or other income beneficiary) income from the property for life.
A CRUT also guarantees that if the donor dies before their spouse they could receive income from the donated property of life. The donor would be compensated based on a fixed percentage of the fair market value of the assets placed in the trust. The assets would be revalued annually.
Further Contributions
The CRUT differs from the Charitable Remainder Annuity Trust (CRAT) because it may continue to collect assets in later years and the stream paid out must be a minimum of 5% of the yearly reappraised value of the corpus.
Consequently the CRUT, depending on the reappraised value of the corpus and accumulated income, can allocate greater or lesser amounts of income while the CRAT pays a set sum of income that never fluctuates in amount.
Appreciation
Each year the size of the payment to the non-charitable beneficiary can increase if the rate of the corpus and income continues to appreciate. Because of this, the CRUT is a valuable tool to fight inflation. If, over a period of time, the value of the assets continues to depreciate, the CRUT may in the end pay less income to the non-charitable beneficiary than was originally planned.
If a grantor requests to guarantee a yearly increase in the value of the income payment to the non-charitable beneficiary, the grantor should finance the corpus of such a trust with assets that pay a guaranteed rate of return.