The coronavirus pandemic is driving a major increase in the number of Americans who create wills and the number who leave a bequest, according to a new report from FreeWill, a company that provides free online estate-planning tools.
In March, the company saw a 400 percent increase in the number of wills with bequests compared with the same month in 2019 and close to a 200 percent increase compared with February 2020.
In May and June, as Covid-19 infections appeared to be subsiding in some regions, wills and bequests began to drop back to previous levels. Then as infections re-emerged aggressively throughout the United States, the numbers went back up. In August, the company tracked a 300 percent increase in wills with bequests over the same time last year.
At the outset of the pandemic, many organizations were nervous about their planned-giving communications, wary that they would appear insensitive. However, fundraisers who continued providing information about legacy giving found significant success securing new bequest commitments. Though it may take years for charities to see these gifts come to fruition, this success is notable as some charities see other ways of giving decline due to record unemployment and donor concern about the recession.
Bequests From Women on the Rise
The report is based on FreeWill’s analysis of estate plans and bequest commitments made through its platform from June 2019 to June 2020. In that time, 81,649 people completed wills or documented their estate-planning wishes to be taken to a lawyer. Of those wills, 10,358 included charitable bequests.
The average size of a bequest donors promised after their deaths was $60,828. Just over 13 percent of wills with bequests included donations to more than one group, averaging 1.3 bequests per will. As a result, the average total committed through bequests in wills averaged $82,232.
Other findings:
- The higher the value of an individual’s assets, the more likely that person was to give. Of people who created a will and had less than $200,000 in assets, 12 percent still chose to leave part of their estate to charity. More than 26 percent of individuals with more than $10 million in assets chose to leave a bequest.
- In FreeWill’s 2019 report, men were more likely to make charitable bequests. But that changed during the past year. This year’s report found that men who created wills were slightly less likely to leave charitable bequests than women. While women gave almost 60 percent of the bequests made on FreeWill, they represent only 45 percent of the total value of charitable contributions. Still, the total value of their bequests jumped by five percentage points since last year.
- The average age of someone who created a will on the platform was 55. Adults ages 45 to 64 make up about 35 percent of the American adult population, but they represent nearly 50 percent of the total value of all charitable bequests made on the FreeWill platform. Adults over age 44 pledge to give more than 80 percent of all bequest dollars.
