If I’m in the checkout at a business, say McDonald’s or Walmart or Kroger or whatever, and they ask if I’d like to round up to donate to some charity, I usually say yes. But should I be doing this? I heard somewhere that I shouldn’t because they can claim that as a donation from them which contributes to them paying less taxes or something, I’m not sure if that’s 100% how it works but I figure that it benefits them somehow or why else would they do that?
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Do you like being asked at every transaction to add more money?
If no, then don’t incentivize that behavior. Don’t reward them for behavior you don’t want to see everywhere.
The thing about the corporation paying less taxes is a myth. The extra contribution you make counts as revenue in their books, and that revenue is then offset as a donation, making no overall difference to their tax benefits.
That said, it does help them in other ways, mostly around marketing. They can then say they’ve made a massive amount of charitable contributions, when really it was their customers that did so.
As others have said, by making that donation at the checkout, you haven’t really made an informed decision about whether the charity is one you would donate to otherwise, so if that’s important to you you should stop doing so.
The way I look at it, if you are going to make a conscious decision to donate to charities you support, there’s no real reason to round up at the checkout. But if you aren’t really going to be donating otherwise and you’re not struggling financially, you may as well make that small contribution at the checkout.
They don’t get to count it as revenue or use it to offset anything. If you’re making a donation through them, it’s going to be listed on your receipt and YOU get to claim it on your taxes.
Don’t do it.
Some credit cards/bank services will round up your purchases for you and save whatever extra in a savings account. See if you can do that for a 1 year and see how much money you’ve been giving away.
I wouldn’t trust corporations.
Say you want to donate 10 dollars. How do you know they wont lie and pocket 5 dollars and only give the charity 5 dollars.
Just donate directly if you really want to donate. And research the charity before donating.
There are a number of ineffective charities. I wouldn’t donate without vetting.
Edit: Okay so the scam could roughly be like this. Legitimate company funnels donations to a charity run by CEO’s spouse. Charity funnels 90% of funds to “overhead”, 10% goes to specially selected recipients.
How are we defining “worth it?”
Yes, the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes. If it’s a business you like, maybe that’s a good thing, if it’s not then that may be a bad thing. Does the money that goes to charity outweigh whatever harm may come from that company paying less in taxes? I don’t know if there’s any good way to objectively say that.
You don’t really get much say in which charity that money goes to, it’s just going to whatever charity that company has chosen to partner with. Some charities can be kind of sketchy, not all of them are on the up-and-up. If it’s a cause you care about, you may be better off just donating directly yourself to a charity you trust.
Now your individual contributions doing this are really a drop in the bucket, let’s say you go to a store and donate at checkout 3 times a week, and since you’re rounding up to the nearest dollar, you’re donating a max of $1 × 3x a week × 52 weeks a year = a maximum donation of $156 dollars a year donated by rounding, probably going to several different charities, and realistically you’re probably donating about half of that unless you have some real OCD about your purchases being even dollar amounts, so probably about $78/year divided up among however many different charities the various places you shop at are involved with.
Now of course you’re not the only person making those donations at any given store, each store is probably making hundreds or thousands of dollars in donations between all of their customers rounding up their checks.
Unless you’re really struggling, you’re probably not going to miss the maybe $100 or so that get siphoned off from you making these donations spread out over a whole year.
Can you Deduct those donations from your own taxes? I’m genuinely not sure, my gut says no, but let’s say you can. Do you think that $100 or so + whatever other deductable expenses you have in a year are going to beat the standard deduction? If it does, then sure, feel free to save those receipts and try to add it all up, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth to me, but maybe it’s worth it for your purposes, there’s a lot of different tax situations I won’t pretend to know for certain.
Are those charitable donations going to improve your life? That’s hard to say, I don’t know your life.
the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes.
Going to stop you right there and say, No the business does not take your contribution and offset their own tax liability with it.
The whole partnership with charity is purely a feel good transaction.
I rarely recognize the charities they sponsor, and I don’t exactly trust McDonalds and Walmart to have the same values as me when they select charities. So no, I don’t ever round up. I try to do my due diligence in researching, and I donate on my own.
Donations are more aligned with my beliefs when I can choose the charity.
And my country gives smol tax breaks for donations to charities. So I can get some cash back at tax time. I don’t get those at the check out.
Most charities from cooperations are pretty much them getting your money and “donating” and then making it a tax right off benefiting them and only do it because it makes people think there “good” and want to help when it’s just a scam for them to manipulate people and get more money.
Donate directly never through corporations. Always
That is absolutely false.
Corporations can only donate on your behalf, so they get no tax benefits whatsoever. They cannot claim the money you donated as income nor can they donate it under their own name. The only thing they can do is use it for PR and tell the public “they helped raise $x for this cause”.
That said, if you donate a non trivial amount to charity, you should do it directly with the charity so you can get a tax receipt and write it off on your personal taxes.
You might fact check that.
[citation needed]
That’s not how it works. If you’re making a donation through them, it’s going to be listed on your receipt. You can use that receipt to declare the donation on your taxes.
If it’s more than some threshold usually, like $2
That’s pretty much how it works. I don’t know if it’s really a should/shouldn’t conversation per se. Money is still getting donated to the needy, it’s just also kind of undercutting what the company should be doing in terms of taxes and stuff. And some people just can’t get themselves to make the time to donate directly.
That said, 100%, if you can get yourself to make the time to donate directly to a cause, that is absolutely undeniably better than letting the company do the roundup thing and you should totally do that instead.
Nope, choose a charity or something else to donate to yourself.
Unless they ask if you want to round down, don’t accept the offer.
My wife and I used to always do those round up things and make donations at the register. One day we decided to pick a couple charities in which we believed and make a couple donations a year to them on our own. I also started to volunteer at a food bank.
