Today is the K103 Radiothon for Make-A-Wish. We’ll be on the air at 1:30 as part of the kick off for A Million Clicks for Make-A-Wish. Make-A-Million for Make-A-Wish started out as a drive to raise 1,000,000 pennies for the Foundation. That’s $10,000 and the average wish cost is up over $7,000. This is the first year of A Million Clicks for Make-A-Wish and we are one of the ifive sponsors. Now it is up to you to help hit the goal of 1 million clicks on the special Make-A-Wish logo on the K103 website in the next month. When the goal is met, we will write our $5,000.00 check to Make-A-Wish along with the four other sponsors for a total of $25,000. It’s us, not Prudential Northwest Properties as a whole, that are the sponsors.Portland Real Estate Blog
12 Comments on “Make A Million For Make-A-Wish”
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Are there tax advantages of donating to charities? If so I may do it.
It is a question for your accountant and your situation but yes, I believe there is a tax advantage to donating to a registered non-profit organization, which Make-A-Wish is.
tax novice-
Think in terms of standard deduction versus itemization. If you take the standard deduction, then there is no tax benefit. Even if there is a tax benefit, for the majority of Americans it doesn’t amount to much. For example if you are on a 15% margin, then a $100 donation net of tax benefit will only cost about $85. On the other hand, if you are up at the 40% margin, then a $100 donation will only cost $60 after the tax benefit is considered.
Bottom line: Unless you pay significant sums of taxes (think in both gross and percentage terms), any tax benefit is probably not even be worth the cost of record keeping.
I wonder how much donations would drop off it wasn’t a tax deduction?!?!:O( Just like congress getting rid of the “interest paid on mortgage” deduction that is still be contemplated though put on the back shelf until this bubble bursting event settles. Could you imagine…no more deduction for the thousands of $ in interest paid on the loan?!?! Gee, what would that do to housing demand/prices and in return sales $ and commissions?!?!
Just some thoughts.
bearlee-
It might be interesting to compute the economic impact of the home mortgage deduction. First note that it would not change the deductibility of interest related to rental property. Next, some people would just revert back to the standard deduction, so the net difference really isn’t much, depending on principal balances and interest rates. Clearly it would have little, if any, impact on those who have a very small loan balance (approximately $100,000 and below) with a low interest rate.
In my opinion the ‘proper’ way to view the deduction is looking at the net cost of capital. In some cases the net cost of capital would increase, and I am sure there are some high taxpayers that would be seriously impacted, but I am not sure that the lower end would feel much pain, as their loan balances and tax rates are very low, relatively speaking.
On the other hand, think of the person who has a $750,000 loan. Such person is likely pays a high tax rate (again, relatively speaking, as there are some who claim that the top tax rate in the US is too low, but others claim it is too high). The impact of eliminating the deductibility of the interest on a large loan would have a large tax impact for such person.
When the main objective becomes tax reduction, there is almost always other problems.
Oh, I agree that the deduction affects few though many home buyers bank on it the first years of their mostly interest payments. And the owners of McMansions are a whole other story.
But if it has such little impact why was the National Association of Home Builders and National Association of Realtors up in arms when the tax proposals started hitting DC?
I did a quick google search and came up w/ a good article by the free market economist Fred Foldvary
http://www.freeliberal.com/archives/001560
.html
It’s a quick read.
The reason people are “up in arms” is because it is sold as one of the good reasons to take on debt and buy a home. I knew a guy who purchased a $65,000 (Midwest). His interest rate was 8%, and so during the first year his interest was approximately $5,000. When he found out that while was true that he *could* itemize and take the interest deduction, doing so would actually *increase* his tax bill, so he was quite upset. The standard deduction was greater than itemization, so he decided to give up the mortgage interest deduction in favor of the better standard deduction.
In my opinion he was a sucker and believed the sales hype over a good mathematician.
Why do people ignore sound reasoning? Do you feel sorry for him?
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Charity for charity’s sake. Yes, the tax deduction aspect is nice but in the end, it’s for the kids.
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Moved to follow Bearlee’s guest post.
thnx