Church pledges

The answer it, wait for it, "probably" and "it depends".

Charities may have legal recourse and a valid lawsuit if they pursue these things. Most often, they don't because the amount it too small and the publicity from suing donors is really really bad.

The Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund explicitly states that you cannot use gift fund "grant recommendations" to pay off pledges to charities. From their Helpful Hints page

Don't recommend a grant to support an enforceable pledge because it creates a legally binding obligation or commitment that the Gift Fund can't support.

Here's another interesting recent article which touches on this:

What constitutes an "enforceable pledge" is not clear, but it seems that unless following through on this is going to cause hardship to the estate, it should be paid, particularly if the pledge is documented.

That sounds like one right out of law school, contracts I. I think you'd need to determine whether a pledge makes the church a creditor, which probably hinges on local contract law. Without researching it or knowing the state in question, my WAG would be that a properly documented, bona-fide pledge is enforceable, following general principles regarding contracts after death. But that's begging the question, because what is a bona-fide pledge and what documentation (if any) would be required under the local statute of frauds? The nature of the pledge could be relevant as well (e.g. "I'll give $1,000" vs. "I'll give $100/month" - the latter implicitly doesn't mean "until the Apocalypse").

Assumedly if they are a creditor of the estate they'd need to be dealt with as one, notification & all that.

Not legal advice, "I really have no idea", etc.

-Tad

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I remember a university suing the estate of a donor for a pledge, probably several years back.

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Legally, the answer is, of course, "it depends". Ethically, I think the answer is usually "yes".

Tad's correct in that contract law is the go-to authority on this situation. In practice, the cases are almost always highly fact- specific because the donor/donee "contract" has historically been an extremely loose one. It is not uncommon to make a pledge via index card or even verbal confirmation. In those cases, it's easy to argue that the terms of the contract were misunderstood, or that there was no "meeting of the minds". It also doesn't help charities in that ambiguous or omitted statements are commonly interpreted in favor of the donor.

Nowadays, many (most) organizations that deal in substantially large donations actually use full-blown, legally sound contracts, and lawsuits have been pursued. Of course this is bad for PR, but the logic is that they (the charity) weren't going to get any more money from the donor anyway and it is unlikely that potential future donors will sympathize with the "indian giver". Keep in mind it's also bad PR for the donor (read:embarrassing). I recall the WSJ had an article on this a while back. If memory serves, the majority of donors that reneged on large sums were also caught-up in some other legal trouble (e.g. Scrushy, Enron, Tyco, et al.) thus the charity was able to avoid bad PR completely.

Ethically, unless I had reason to believe the charity is lying, I would pay up.

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