How to Keep Proper Records for Donations

Video Transcript

"My name is Julie Asti, I'm a Dertified Financial Planner with Asti Financial Management, and I'm here to talk about, how to keep proper records for your charitable donations. The IRS in the last few years has change the law and the record keeping requirements for a charitable donations, so it's important to pay attention to these. Previously for donations under 250 dollars in cash, you didn't have to keep any documentation or any records, the law has since changed, and the IRS is now asking you to keep actual documentation at any cash donations under 250 dollars. What they require as proper documentation would be a canceled check, a bank or an investment statement that would show the money going out of your account. So for example, if you belong to a church, and you're making contributions in the offering plate, your going to want to keep track of those, and you're going to want most likely pay those by check, so that you have documentation of those contributions to your charity or to your church. If you happen to be working at a larger institution or a larger company that allows you to do charitable giving via your payroll, your payroll deduction, you would want to make sure that you keep a copy of the pay stub in which the charitable donation was made, so that can serve as your record for the future. If you are making a charitable donation, a cash donation, and it's going to be worth more than 250 dollars, the IRS is going to require that you get a letter from the institution that you gave the money to, documenting that contribution. So any kind of charitable organization, money to your church, the American Cancer Society, any place that you would decide to give a cash donation, more than 250 dollars, you would need to get a letter from the institution documenting and recognizing that you had made that amount of the contribution, and documenting the date of that contribution. But for any household items that you're going to be donating, they are going to require that you've done some kind of research on what the approximate market value of those items would be, and they don't give any actual sources that you can note, but they do recommend taking photographs of the item and they do recommend doing searches on-line, and magazines, Craigslist or e-Bay, to find out what the approximate fair market value would be on the open market for alike item of that age, and keep a record, print it out, and put it in your file. They are going to now require that you get a qualified appraisal as documentation, and keep that in your records for any one item that's going to be worth more than 500 dollars. Those are all the different types of documentations the IRS is going to be requiring you to keep of documentation for any of your charitable giving. My name is Julie Asti, I'm a certified financial planner with Asti Financial Management, and you could learn more about my services or my company at, www.astifinancial.com."