Donor Stories

Ron and Karen McIntosh served with Wycliffe in South America for almost twenty years—Ron as a pilot, and Karen as support staff in the clinic, print shop, and group house, as well as “keeping the home fires burning,” as she puts it. Although they resigned from Wycliffe in the early 1980s, they continue to support Bible translation. A few years ago, they discovered a way to bolster that support while at the same time solving a real-estate related capital gains problem.

After twenty-three years of managing fourteen rental properties, Ron and Karen were ready to leave the labor-intensive job of hands-on management behind them. “But if we sold the properties outright, capital gains tax would swallow up the entire value of the properties,” Ron explains. “So that got us searching for ways to try to retain that value.”

When the couple learned about the benefits of a charitable remainder unitrust, they knew it was a good fit.
In 2005 they met with an attorney, who thoroughly researched the concept and agreed that it would meet their objectives quickly.

“The process really was painless, and it set things in motion,” Ron says. “As soon as we made the contribution of the properties into the trust, I went to work selling them. That left cash inside the trust, to be invested in the funds we chose.”

Ron and Karen are pleased with the autonomy the trust allows them, saying the unitrust provides four main benefits.

“We can choose to have a quarterly payment as income, we can control how the internal funds of the trust are invested, we can change the beneficiaries, and we can receive tax benefit from any contributions made to the trust,” they explain.

Considering Ron and Karen’s long history with Wycliffe, it’s no surprise that some of the charitable funds from the trust will go to Wycliffe missionaries. In addition to their own years of service with Wycliffe, Ron is the son of Wycliffe missionaries who served in Mexico and Central America. Ron even remembers taking trips to the Mexican embassy with his father and Uncle Cam, Wycliffe’s founder and visionary.

In fact, Ron’s belief in the importance of Scripture in every language started when, as a young boy, he watched his parents work with a language community in Mexico. “My dad and mother were Bible translators in Mexico,” he says, “and the seeds planted by their work led to the development of many churches throughout the Huichol community.”

In the end, the charitable remainder unitrust has done much more than take some rental properties off their hands. For Karen, it comes down to peace of mind. “It’s set up so that the funds from the trust will be used to continue supporting the missionaries we’re currently supporting,” she explains. “It’s a great comfort to know that it’s all settled—that not even an executor of the will is going to have to be involved in it.”