Charity Donations: Free Deduction Calculator

Tax season is approaching rapidly in the U.S., and we wanted to share a website that our American CPA (whom we highly recommend; we finally found a great one!) told us about. It's a nifty and free tool to help you figure out how much your charity donations are worth. To claim 2010 deductions, can use this tool for donations you made last year for which you have a receipt from the charity, but for which you not yet calculated the value. Then attach a print-out from the software to the dated receipt you received from the charity to make sure you have all the proper documentation to prove your donations. Although this tool is developed by Intuit, maker of the fee-based Turbotax, the deduction tool, aptly named It's Deductible, is free. All you need is a free account -- and yes, they do want your e-mail address (but won't send you unsolicited stuff). It also keeps track of all your donations throughout the year.

We've found this tool to be highly intuitive and quite useful, and it turns out that the donations we made in 2010 (furniture, scanner, clothes, sporting goods, etc.) actually had a higher monetary value than we thought -- a pleasant surprise indeed. Get started and let us know what you think.


2 comments:

Tess Whitty on January 13, 2011 at 6:42 AM said...

Thank you for the tip. We usually end up declaring the value to be less than $500 so that we do not have to itemize it, but this tool might actually help.

Judy Jenner and Dagmar Jenner on January 13, 2011 at 3:38 PM said...

@Tess: happy to help. Were quite amazing that the items were valued much higher than we'd estimated.

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The entrepreneurial linguists and translating twins blog about the business of translation from Las Vegas and Vienna.

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