New App Makes Charitable Contributions Less Taxing
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Tax time approaches, and with it, comes the time to figure deductions. It's one thing to add up the checks you wrote to your favorite charity. But the process gets tougher when you want to figure out the worth of the clothes you dropped at the local thrift store or the equipment you gave to a local organization. Most people just fill out the form and come up with a number that sounds about right, but there's always the worry of what can happen in case of an audit. And you might be actually undervaluing your donation.
The CD Donation App, for Apple mobile devices in conjunction with the CharityDeductions.com website, is a welcome tool for deducing donations. The app is free, though to use the site, you need to subscribe for $25 per year (or $20 per year if you buy two or more years up front). There's even a free trial for donations up to a total of $250.
The service uses pricing data from eBay to determine the going value of your donated items. It doesn't import the numbers automatically to your tax software, but it does save a lot of time on calculations.
The site offers a handy walk-through of categories for donated items. It isn't geared to donations of more than $5,000 in total, but most people won't have anywhere near that much. Another nice feature is that if you do get audited, CharityDeductions.com will make the data available to the IRS. You needn't go searching through all those piles of receipts to prove you were honest.
