VUFWAlum wrote:pafan wrote:VUFWAlum wrote:An endowment consists of money or income producing property given to an organization, such as a hospital or university, for a specific or restricted purpose such as research or scholarships. Generally, the endowed asset is required to be kept intact and only the income generated by it is consumed.
Sorta. I don't think there is a legal requirement that an endowment never spend its principal, rather it is a policy of certain institutions holding such endowments. For example, most of the Ivy League schools say they do not spend their principal. Their endowments are so enormous that the annual interest is sometimes measured in billions.
But LUC's Trustees decreed that the school could spend up to 5% of the cash value of the endowment annually, as long as the donors of that cash did not forbid such spending, without putting a restriction on the returns for the year.
Certainly I believe that there are exceptions as written into the legalities of an endowment such as was passed by the LUC Trustees in 2013. That is why I used the word "Generally" and not "Always". The purpose of my post was to show that just "dipping" into an endowment is not an easy thing to do and I think your example shows that the principle of an endowment in many cases is protected (as the LUC endowment was until 2013) and will be scrutinized even as it still is by the responsible financial entities of LUC in the 2013 change to the potential use of the LUC endowment.
Some funds in the endowment may be legally bound to be untouched (at least for a certain period of time), if that was part of the agreement to accept funds deposited into the endowment.
Bradley dipped in to its endowment for about $100M to jump start some of its campus expansion projects last decade. But it was mostly from interest which it quickly gained back. At that time it took the endowment slightly below $150M (down from $250M), but it now stands over $300M.
