Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Rorie M. Sherman, editor in chief, Trusts & Estates, New York

By: By Rorie M. Sherman, editor in chief, Trusts & Estates, New York

Advisors often have trouble convincing the wealthy to make charitable gifts while they're still alive. Indeed, for years, Ann Landers, the famous personal advice columnist, prodded her friend Warren E. Buffett, one of the richest men in the world, to give more to charity. “Buffett's tightness was a sore spot with his friends,” Roger Lowenstein reported in his best-selling biography, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist.

According to Lowenstein, Landers was worried. “What [Warren] does is piling and heaping and heaping and piling. So what is this all about?” she said, adding that she'd tried her “darnedest” to interest the billionaire “in what he could do for the world.” But, Lowenstein wrote, Buffett “would shake” Landers “off with a chuckle.”

T&E Premium Content

To read the rest of this article, please login to our Premium Content section:

Registered Web Site Users
User Name:
Password:
Remember Me