How to Determine Fair Market Value of a Charitable Donation

Video Transcript

"My name is Julie Asti. I'm a Certified Financial Planner with Asti Financial Management, and today I'm going to talk about how to determine the fair market value of items that you may be giving to charity. The IRS has changed its rules in the last few years, requiring much more documentation for any amounts, excuse me, for any items that you're going to be donating to charity. There are a couple of ways to determine the fair market value. For household items, electronics, furnishings, baby good, things like that that you would be donating to a Goodwill or a Salvation Army, you can determine the fair market value of those by looking at various sites online and just trying to find out what - what an item of the approximate age and condition would be selling for. Some sources that they would allow you to use would be eBay, would be Craigslist, would be if you could find it in a magazine or online. They also do recommend for those types of items, that you document the quality of the piece by taking a photograph and keeping that in your file. So for any of those types of furnishings, just try and find a source online that would have documented with a price that you can print out and put in your file with the photograph, that would be adequate documentation to provide fair market value. For clothing they will allow you to use the value that would be assigned by a consignment shop, so you can use that as documentation of the fair market value. If you have any one item, any item for example a chair, a table, a couch, some large piece of furniture or electronics, that's going to have a single value for just one item of over five-hundred dollars, the IRS does require that you get a qualified appraisal documented and keep that in your file, if you're going to take a deduction of five-hundred dollars or more on a single item. So those would be the records that you would want to keep and that would be the way that you would establish fair market value on items you would be giving to charity. My name is Julie Asti, I'm a Certified Financial Planner with Asti Financial Management, and you can learn more about my services or my company at www.astifinancial.com."