To whom can you donate?

The list of organizations is long, but they share a common principle – non-profit organizations. These can be:

  • a community trust fund established exclusively for charitable, religious, educational, scientific or literary purposes, or for the prevention of cruelty to children or animals;
  • churches, synagogues and other religious organizations;
  • war veterans organization;
  • non-profit volunteer fire company;
  • volunteer organizations;
  • cemeteries, crypts, etc.

What can you donate?

You can give to charity, followed by a deduction from the tax, almost everything, most importantly, that these things were in good or very good condition, ie, a broken vacuum cleaner won`t be accepted.

You can donate:

  • money;
  • clothes and other personal items;
  • furniture, appliances and other household items;
  • real estate: houses, land;
  • cars, boats, motorcycles;
  • jewelry, precious metals and stones;
  • shares, securities;
  • patents;
  • to organize some very necessary activities requiring investments;
  • collections, pieces of art, etc.

Those who do not want to search for such organizations can simply bring to the store «Good Will» or similar stores their belongings.

How to determine the value of donated goods?

The law has a fairly detailed description of how to determine the value of things, check out the information here irs.gov.pdf. The whole essence of the definition of the cost comes down to the fact that it can not be higher than the market prices of similar goods.

For example, the clothes will be worth many times less than it was originally bought. By the way, the maximum allotted clothing, which are allowed to deduct from the tax – it’s $ 500. For a larger amount it has to be some kind of a special case.

To evaluate the real estate, and other unique products you usually need to involve experts.

For all categories of products there is teir maximum (always have reservations and special cases), which can be deducted from taxes.