The October She Turned Seventy-Three

On a Tuesday morning in October, in a small kitchen on the second floor of a 1920s shingled cottage on a tidal cove in Marblehead, Massachusetts, a seventy-three-year-old woman named Patricia Halloran is making coffee in a battered enamel pot, and re-reading, with her reading glasses pushed up onto the top of her head, a tri-fold letter from Fidelity Investments.

The letter has been sitting on the kitchen table, under a folded copy of The Atlantic and a half-finished Sunday crossword in soft pencil, for four days. It is addressed in a small typeface to Mrs. Patricia W. Halloran, Trustee, Halloran Family Revocable Trust, 14 Marsh Lane, Marblehead, MA 01945. The subject line, in twelve-point bold, reads:

Important — Required Minimum Distribution Notice for Tax Year 2026.

Patricia turned seventy-three on the twenty-eighth of August. The letter is, in the most literal sense, her seventy-third-birthday card from the federal government.

She has not, in four days, opened the manila folder labeled CHARITABLE, on the second shelf of the dining-room sideboard, in which she keeps the seventeen organizations she and her late husband Frank — an architect in Salem, who died in the spring of 2019 — have been giving to since they opened their first joint donor-advised fund in 2007. She has not, in four days, called her financial advisor, Rebecca, who has a small fee-only office on State Street in Boston. She has not, in four days, called the development office of any of the seventeen organizations.

She has, on the other hand, in those four days, made two phone calls. She called her sister-in-law Margaret in Wenham, who turned seventy-five in March, and asked her — in the gentle sideways way the two of them have talked about money since 1978 — Maggie, what did you do about yours, last spring? And she called her son David, who is forty-six and works in tax at a regional accounting firm in Manchester-by-the-Sea, and asked him, on a Sunday evening, Could you tell me again about that thing — the IRA gift thing — that you mentioned at Easter?

What Patricia is doing, in the slow careful four-day way she has done every important decision of her life, is deciding the shape of her giving for the next twelve years.

The development offices of the seventeen organizations on the second shelf of the dining-room sideboard do not know this is happening.

What the letter is

The letter is, in tax-code terms, Patricia's required-minimum-distribution notice. At seventy-three, the IRS requires her to take a small first slice of her traditional IRA out as taxable income this calendar year. Her IRA balance, at Fidelity, is seven hundred and forty thousand dollars. The required minimum, this year, is twenty-seven thousand nine hundred and twenty-five dollars. She has to take it. She has, between now and December thirty-first, no choice in whether.

She has, however, a great deal of choice in how.

If she takes the twenty-seven thousand as ordinary income, it lands on her 2026 return, raises her federal and Massachusetts brackets a notch, and quietly nudges her Medicare Part B premium up for 2028 under the IRMAA surcharge. If she takes it, instead, as a qualified charitable distribution — the small twenty-year-old provision in the code that lets a donor past seventy and a half route IRA money directly to a 501(c)(3) without it ever touching her income — she avoids the tax, avoids the surcharge, and, if she wants, gives much more, for the same out-of-pocket cost as last year.

Patricia, who has been writing fifteen-hundred-dollar checks to her seventeen organizations every December for nineteen years, is about to discover that she can write eighteen-thousand-dollar checks instead — for less, after tax, than what last year's fifteen-hundred-dollar check cost her.

She will not write eighteen of them. She will pick four.

The four she picks are, in October, on the second shelf of the sideboard.

Whose name is on the shelf

The four she picks will be picked the way Patricia has picked everything in her seventy-three years: by who has been kind to her in a specific way, in a specific season, with a specific letter she remembers.

The seventeen organizations are not equal in her mind. Twelve of them are on the shelf because Frank loved them, and the manila folder is, in part, a small private way of keeping his evenings alive. Three of them are there because they sent her a kind handwritten note in the six months after Frank died. One of them is there because the executive director called her in April of 2023 to tell her, in a voice that sounded like she was crying a little, that the small foyer they had named after Frank's mentor was being kept, in the renovation, as the entrance to the new wing.

One of them — and Patricia would not, if asked, be able to explain why — is there because in the fall of 2021 the development office sent her a one-page letter that said, gently, Mrs. Halloran, we know you have a birthday this summer, and we want to wish you a very happy one. We are thinking of you. There is nothing to do here. Yours, with affection.

That letter is on the second shelf. She has read it, very quietly, eight times.

That is the organization that, when Patricia sits down with her advisor Rebecca on a Thursday in late October — five days from now, in the small office on State Street — and Rebecca opens the Charitable Planning tab in the planning software and says, I think we should make this year's giving a QCD year — will be the first name to come out of Patricia's mouth.

The check, in 2026, will not be fifteen hundred dollars. The check, in 2026, will be twenty-two thousand. And the check will be that size, in some quietly indexed way, every year for the rest of Patricia's life.

The math nobody is running

The math nobody is running, in October of 2026, in any of the seventeen development offices, is the birthday math.

The birthday math is small and devastating. The 1953 cohort — every American who turned seventy-three this calendar year — is, this October, opening that same tri-fold letter from Fidelity, Schwab, Vanguard, or TIAA. Several million of them. The first-RMD year is the first calendar year in which the conversation with the advisor goes from should we increase your giving to we have to take a distribution anyway, so let's route it.

It is, statistically, the single largest annual lift in a donor's lifetime giving. Bigger than the year of the liquidity event. Bigger than the year of the inheritance. Bigger, in many cases, than the bequest itself.

It happens once. It happens in October, November, and the first week of December. It is decided, almost entirely, by which organization the donor names first when her advisor opens the Charitable Planning tab and says — who do you want to start with?

The organization she names first is not, in nine cases out of ten, the organization that has sent the most mail. It is the organization that has, in a way she would not quite be able to describe, paid attention to her, in a small specific way, in a quiet season of her life.

The development office that knows Patricia's birthday — and knows that her birthday is the seventy-third one — is the office that gets the call.

A small honest note about Rōmy

Rōmy does not write the letter that lands on Patricia's shelf in 2021. The director of development writes that letter. The handwritten signature, the small kindness of the happy birthday with no ask under it, the choice to drop it in the mail in the week before the twenty-eighth of August because that is Patricia's birthday — none of that comes out of a tool.

What a tool can do is surface the cohort.

The list of donors in a given file who will turn seventy in a calendar year is, in almost every shop, a list nobody has ever run. The birthdates are, in most CRMs, half-empty. The seventy-and-a-half QCD-eligibility year, the seventy-third RMD year, the small turnable corners in the giving life of a donor that the IRS prints on a calendar — they are, inside the development office, almost entirely invisible.

What we want Rōmy to do, on a quiet Tuesday in late February, is hand the director of development the list. These eleven donors turn seventy-three this year. Here is the August one. Here is the October one. Here is the small thing the advisor is going to say to each of them, in a quiet office on a Thursday in late October. Here is the name to put in the Dear line of the letter you are going to send in the first week of August.

The letter is yours. The kindness is yours. The small specific presence in a donor's seventy-third year is, in the end, the work of the person at the desk — not the work of the tool.

The tool, on a Tuesday in February, hands you the names.

A small assignment, with love ♡

This week, before the leaves turn, run one query against your file.

Every donor who will turn seventy in the next eighteen months. Every donor who will turn seventy-three this calendar year or next. The list, in most shops, is somewhere between fourteen and two hundred names. If your CRM does not have the birthdates, that is the second assignment, for next week.

For each name on the list, do the small unfashionable thing. Write — by hand, on the heavy stock, in the blue ink — a one-paragraph birthday note. Send it in the week before the birthday. Do not put an envelope inside the envelope. Do not put a return card. Do not put a soft ask in the third paragraph. Make it, in every line of it, a note from a person to a person.

Some of those notes will land on a sideboard in Marblehead, on a shelf in Wenham, on a kitchen counter in Hingham, next to a tri-fold letter from Fidelity that has been sitting there for four days.

The donor will not write back. She will not, in fact, mention the note to anyone — not her advisor, not her sister-in-law, not her son in Manchester. She will read it, very quietly, in the slow late-morning light through the curtain, and she will set it on the second shelf with the others.

In late October, in an office on State Street, when the advisor opens the Charitable Planning tab and asks — who do you want to start with? — the answer is already on the shelf.

You are either the name on the shelf, or you are not.

The shelf is the will. ♡