charitable giving & taxes
I have been doing this for 3 years now. I buy the CD program because it is easier to track everything for me now since we have so much stuff (and I do a lot of extra stuff for my church), but I did it by hand in the beginning so it can be done that way too.
Plain and simple, I hate taxes. They are a nightmare for me every year and they scare me to death. So I'd always put down $100 for charitable contributions on my taxes before that no matter what I had donated. I knew it was more, but I never kept track or knew what value to give everything and didn't want to get audited, so I just stuck with the $100. Then my friend said that he saved $1000 a year on taxes through charitable contributions. I thought he was telling me a joke.
So I went to a friend who was a tax accountant and asked and he said that it could be done. It was just a matter of keeping track of everything. The first year I was able to deduct $500 which was $400 more than I ever would have thought about trying to deduct. But here's the great part. I now deduct about $1500 this way each year and 90% of the donations aren't mine.
We started taking things to a nearby Goodwill store and it turned into a regular monthly event that the kids liked. The kids told their friends about it and before I knew it, people in the neighborhood were giving me stuff to take down to the Goodwill store since they knew I was planning the trip. So I get all this stuff and since I am the one giving it to the Goodwill store, I can deduct it on my taxes. It's like free money to me with the only effort being a 15 minute car ride each month.
This is one of the easiest ways to get back money on your taxes. I just make a list of everything that I'm donating before I go to the store and then make sure I get a receipt from the Goodwill store after dropping everything off. That's all you really have to do.
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