Charitable Donations Valuation Guide: Fill & Download for Free

The charitable organization or its people is not responsible to determine the FMV of donated goods.The taxpayer is giving a ‘receipt’ who then fills out that receipt about the donated items. The donated goods FMV determination is the taxpayer’s responsibility.Some charitable organizations have some sort of Valuation Guide to assist people to estimate what their donation was worth and use that as their tax deduction.If the donated item is in a particular class of donation (i.e. vehicle, art, building, securities, etc…), it will need some sort of proper valuation, like an appraisal or receipt, before it can be submitted on a return.

Do thrift stores like Goodwill or St. Vincent have any authorities to appraise donations?No, and they don’t really need to. (Everything that follows is US-specific.)First, valuation of any noncash asset is legally the responsibility of the donor. Goodwill does publish a guide listing the typical selling prices for items that they take, but it’s up to the donor to sign off on the valuation of what they donated if they claim a tax deduction for charitable donation.Furthermore, if a donor is claiming more than $5,000 as a deduction for noncash donations (which requires an appraiser to sign off on the donor’s Form 8283 which is filed with their tax return), the recipient and any other party to the donation are ineligible to do the appraisal.

A CEO’s path to billionaire is to start your own company or join near the beginning, avoid too many distressed funding rounds, corporate acquisitions, bailouts, and other dilutive events, hold onto as much personal stock as possible, and guide the company to a multi-billion dollar valuation as judged by the market. At that point you will be a billionaire on paper — the stock will be worth billions. A liquidity event such as an IPO or being acquired by Microsoft is just icing on the cake. Your billions will be in actual cash, tradable stock, and other liquid assets if you wish, so you can use it for things like investments, houses, charitable donations, starting new companies, luxuries, and so on.That assumes the company is a typical growth-oriented corporation in a relatively corruption free modern democracy. If you relax any of these assumptions there are other ways: cash-generating companies can earn billions in profits that they distribute to the owners; hedge funds and other investment companies can earn billions through investments and distribute the carried interest to their managers; corrupt companies could earn billions through kickbacks, bribes, fraud schemes, and extortion; in undemocratic or non-capitalist countries the dictators, military chiefs, village bosses, and kings can amass great fortunes through owning resources.Also, some CEOs, by virtue of their connections, get access to investment opportunities and dealmaking opportunities in the very best new companies, and that can bring them wealth far beyond the company they started. Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp has an investment portfolio worthy of envy, and came to many opportunities as a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia. A couple of my company’s earliest investors, Scott and Cyan Banister, got their chops running companies, and reportedly made hundreds of millions of dollars by investing in Uber.