Tax question - gifts to charity

T

TheFied

2,500+ Posts
We are doing our taxes. My wife is actually a CPA (but not specializing in tax) so she knows what she is doing (but using Turbo Tax).

This is our 1st year to line itemize due to our 1st full year owning a house... there are a bunch of charitable gifts that we have given. Some cash (Humane Society, Longhorn Foundation although 80%,...) as well as donations of clothing to the Arc of Texas, electronics to Goodwill Austin, baseball tickets to an auction, and books to City of Austin Library.

We have receipts from all our items that we gave and dated... and we came up with values to each. But Turbo Tax is asking us for our "items" gifts how we valued these and cost-basis. Any advice? My wife is looking up some IRS documents but didn't know if anyone knew here.

THanks!
 
I'm going to take a semi-wild guess here and say that for things like the baseball tickets, you would claim face value.

For the books, you can probably also claim face value.

For the stuff that went to Goodwill, ARC, et al, you probably shouldn't (or can't?) claim more than "garage sale" or maybe "thrift shop" values.
 
Is there a cost basis for thrift store value?

I didn't see "face value" on the list for teh baseball tix.
 
I've never been asked a cost basis for charitable donations, and I just did my taxes Sunday.

Home & Business had the It's Deductible value calculator for items built in; otherwise you can try the online version instead.
 
thanks. might try that out.

so for our cash gifts, it went fine. it was for the gifts of "items" that seem to make it more complicated. we'll try this out tonight.
 
that is a change that you will likely see in the online version of Turbo Tax as well. Claim "Cost Basis" on everything that truly has value(that is the face value of the tickets). What they are trying to crack down on is you giving a bag full of clothes to Goodwill that you otherwise would have trashed and claiming that you paid $500 for them (10 years prior). Yes you paid that amount for those close but a fair market value is probably $50 today.

Your clothes and Electronics (assuming they are old) should probably be valued fairly low. Anything greater than (I think) $300 requires a reciept, thus I usually cap myslef at a value right below knowing that I probably am undervaluing my giving. No one is going to be looking at my return anytime soon as I don't plan on running for POTUS.
 
what are the options?

most likely fair market value (fair value)

cost basis literally means what you paid for the item
 
i always use market value, i didn't think u had a choice to do anything other than market value when dealing with items w/o a stated value.
 
So I finished it last night. Rather than doing "you value items" for the gifts of non-cash, I had it be "let us value" using the ItsDeductible software from ebay. Worked out great.

Only problem was I gave 6 UT baseball tickets to a charity as part of an auction and I have a receipt from this group for $60 but I had to choose like "replacement value" b/c sporting tickets is not on the ItsDeductible. Couldn't find tickets at all. I hope this isn't a red flag.....
 
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