Donate Your Car To Charity

Individuals aren’t the only ones who can harvest the potentially great benefits of taking a valuable tax cut after participating in a charity car donation program.  Businesses that run a legitimate fleet operation can get rid of surplus, older and high mileage vehicles and be in a good position to reap the largest possible “fair value” deduction that is allowed under current charity car donation rules.  Of course, since businesses file business returns, there are special rules that accompany such a charitable contribution.

For starters, a business that runs (and presumably maintains a fleet) is in a position to donate time and Read the rest of this entry »

There are many dealings that encourage the IRS to act and primary among them is people taking advantage of charity deductions for tax purposes.  In the case of durable goods or non-cash donations to charity, reports issued in late 2003 found that over half a billion dollars was falling through the IRS’s proverbial tax fingertips.  In an endeavor to stem this revenue bleeding, new rules took effect in 2005, largely due to just a single scathing report from the US General Accounting Office (GAO) in late 2003.

Of course, this report was the first of its kind to actually center exclusively on automobile and vehicle donations to charity in relation to tax deductions.  And what it found stunned the IRS and the Senate Finance Committee that it was delivered to.  Indeed, a quick response was garnered from the IRS to publicly concur with the recommendations of the report that called for rule updates and greater oversight of vehicle donations to charity. Read the rest of this entry »

When the US General Accounting Office (GAO) issued its landmark report on charitable vehicle donation to the Senate Committee on Finance in November of 2003, over 4,000 distinct charity and non-profit organizations (NPOs) were accepting vehicular donations.  Though most of these used third-party, for-profit facilitating agents at the time, changes in tax laws for the 2005 tax season ushered in a new self-sufficiency among a smaller class of NPOs, often more closely geared towards benefiting from charitable vehicle donations.

Consider the very large field that benefited in varying degrees from the glory days of charitable vehicle donation, before government regulation stepped in and made it harder for people to take unreasonable deductions that varied greatly from the actual amount that charitable organizations actually received.  Though a large part of this had to do with some vaugery in how the law was written, it was also a consequence of a large segment of often less-than-scrupulous third-party agents who acted, supposedly, on behalf of the Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to 2005, the ultimate use of a charitable organization’s car donation program had very little to do with how much you could expect to receive as a tax deduction.  In fact, many for-profit organizations used the lure of deep (and often totally out of line) deductions to lure donors into supporting a charitable organization.

Car donation proved very lucrative as a type of revenue for many third-party agencies that facilitated vehicular donations for various charitable organizations.  Car donation today still represents a good deal for both the  charity or non-profit organization (NPO), by dealing directly with charities that have an actual use for what you’re offering in the form of actual transportation.

On the other hand, many charitable organizations for car donation that specialize in such gifts, have traditionally used wholesale sales yards and demolition services to get rid of cars as quickly as possible.  This is especially true of automobiles that require some work to get them in top running (and selling) condition.  In this case, you are only able to claim the sale amount, no matter how Read the rest of this entry »

There are many reasons why needy families in your community can benefit from charitable donations of your old automobile.  Much of this is rooted in the free market economy that dominates in the United States, sometimes despite the best interests of low-income workers that make up the bottom of the labor pyramid that drives consumer spending and business revenues.  Add a hot real estate market that has led a renewed flight of entry level jobs from densely populated urban centers that are well-served by public transit, and you have a crisis situation for many such workers that can only be solved by charitable vehicle donations.

It’s not just people on welfare that are in desperate need of charitable donations in the form of food aid and autos.  There are millions of gainfully employed persons in the US who are unable to meet even their  most basic needs.  Welfare reform in the 1990s led to a vast increase in the number of needy people.

Recent moves by the Bush administration to reclassify poverty are not Read the rest of this entry »