I’m seriously thinking about donating my car to charity and had a few questions.
First, do you know of any reputable charitable groups that accept donated cars?
Also, my car is a 96 Eagle Vision (ha, ha) which has about 150k miles and needs a new exhaust system.
Obviously, it’s time for a new one.
Would it even be of any use to donate it? Is it an insult that it’s such a piece of crapola? I figure what small value it has is better off going to charity than my pocket. Or should I just call Victory Auto Wreckers - although if I do, I’ll unhinge the doors so they fall off when I open them in order to receive my $60! (sorry bad Chicago commercial)
I donated my '88 Escort to Goodwill last year, and they were happy to take it. You’d have to call around; one charity I called didn’t want anything that old.
I recently donated a 1990 Toyota Celica to Children’s Hospital Seattle via donatecarusa.com. The only question they asked was “is the car running?” It wasn’t (transmission had died), but they took it anyway.
I think they’re on the level, though I haven’t yet received word that the car has sold at auction. (Maybe no one wants to put a new transmission in it.) But even if they aren’t on the level, they took the car off my hands with no fuss, which was all I really wanted.
I donated a 1993 Chevy Corsica with a shot brake system and busted radiator to Crohns and Colitis Foundation last year. They said thy’d sell it for parts. Every little bit helps.
I however didn’t get shit for it on my tax return. It wasn’t work enough.
Oddly enough, I have thought of this often as well. There is an ad that runs on the radio quite a bit, asking you to donate your car, boat, or RV. I always wonder if they are on the up and up…in other words, if someone donated a 2004 Lincoln, would they auction it or three months later would I see the CEO of the organization driving it to work?
At any rate, I think I would rather just give my car to someone I think needs it - find some single, working mother who takes the bus, or someone you see waiting at the bus stop every day on your way to work…or go to a hospice, or call social services…I think I would take a little time, go personally to the person, tell them what is good/bad about the car, hand over the pink slip and walk away. This way I know it is going to someone who needs it to go to work, or go to the hospital, or to take their kids to school.
We’ve donated three vehicles ( two that were ours and one that was my FIL’s.)
I always felt really bad for the flat bed truck driver who had to come all the way from near Toledo, up to our house (south of flint-north of Detroit) to pick them up.
Not exactly sure how they make money, but I’m really glad that someone can take them and we get a tax write off and the donation goes to a charity of our choice.
I’ve donated three cars to the Military Order of the Purple Heart ( www.purpleheart.org ), every time it has been easy and painless. Basically they send a tow truck and haul it away no questions asked. Sign over the title & it’s all over. Didn’t have to lift a finger. Let them worry whether the car runs or is worth a damn, they are happy to deal with it and grateful.
Contrast that with trying to find a suck- I mean buyer for your rustbucket and all its 2000 parts.
The only down side is that now they call me once a month asking if I have any clothes etc. to donate but even that is really not a hassle.
Check around and see if any volunteer fire departments in your area will take it.
They’ll use them for training (the Jaws of Life, cutting the doors and roof off) for the firefighters and rescue personnel.
You can usually get a tax deduction (depends on your area, though), and they’ll even come out and pick it up.
I ususally donate my not-worth-repairing vehicles to the American Cancer Society via a local salvage shop. Drive, push, or tow, they’ll strip it down for parts if they can’t sell it outright.
You’d be suprised how much money this raises for the charities in question. Your winter rat may very well be more than the sum of it’s parts.
We donated our '94 aerostar van to the local public radio station. It ran, more or less, but wasn’t going to pass the smog test without repairs that were more than it was worth. They sent someone promptly and were very efficient about the whole thing. Couldn’t have been easier.
Call your local high school and ask if they have an auto shop. My school gets donations all the time, and they use them as trainers. The kids work on them, fix them up, repaint them and then sell them and use the money for field trips and such. Works well. They’ve gotten both of my used trucks.
About 6 or 7 years ago, I tried to donate my '86 Buick Century to charity. I forget the name of the charity, but basically they would find a single mother/person in need and give them the car, provided they match a certain “person” they’d want to give the car to (IE- not a drug dealer, murderer, etc). A few months after dropping the car off, I get a call from the cops saying my car had been abandoned and I needed to find a way to pick it up. After many phone calls to many different people, I figured out that before the registration information could be updated, my car was stolen from the charity’s lot. By the time we found all this out, my car had been confiscated by the police and neither myself nor the charity thought it worth the money to recover it. I have no idea what happened to it after that. I’ve never been so annoyed at/mad at a charity before.
We’ve donated 2 to Volunteers of America. One was running, the other - well, it was not really road-worthy any more. They can part them out if they’re not running, you know. It would have cost us money to haul them to a junkyard; it hardly took more effort than a phone call to donate the cars, so it was worth it to us.
The laws have changed recently. Under the old system, you would be able to deduct the blue book value of the car from your taxes. Anything up to $5,000 could be donated simply based on the value of the car that you gave to whichever charity. Above $5,000 donations need to have an appraisal done by a certified appraiser. If you had a car that a dealership would certify as worth more than $5K then you probably wouldn’t be donating it though.
I donated two cars under the old system. Both gave me $4,999 tax deductions since the blue book values were slightly over $5,000. Both cars would only have been worth a couple hundred as a trade in.
However, the new laws suck. You can only deduct from your taxes what the charity actualy gets for the car at auction. No more simply taking the value.
My prediction is that any charity that had car donations as a large part of it’s business will be in serious trouble. Nobody is going to donate cars if they aren’t getting the paper values. It makes it more worth it to trade them in or sell them for parts to a junkyard.
I donated an 89 Merc Tracer in decent condition to Habitat for Humanity through a third party organization. Completely painless.
And probably a scam. Months later, I got a call from a guy in BFE, Maryland, asking if I’d sell him my car. I said, “Huh?” He says he found my car parked next to a gas station in the middle of nowhere. Some kids broke the windows and messed up the interior. This guy decided to check it out, somehow found a scrap of paper under some seat with my name on it, and called me. Weird, weird, weird.
We’ve donated cars to our local high school as well. Gives the autoshop class something to tinker with. They gladly accepted and provided the documentation to tax purposes. Have also donated one to a local church. Both were painless transactions and did help on our tax returnes.
However, if the car will actually be used by the charity itself, you can still take fair market value for it, since they’ll be using it rather than selling it.
We gave two of our cars to the Kidney Foundation the last year (2004) that the old laws were in place. Somehow I feel responsible for the new, suckier laws - it seems whenever I take advantage of a good tax deal, it gets changed .
You could also check and see if there are any local charities that take cars. I found out after we already committed to the Kidney Foundation that our county works with a local charity to take older cars, fix them up and provide them to poor working people so they have reliable transportation to their jobs. The county decides who is eligible to get them. It’s called Wheels for Work and other counties in other states have this program too.
The dealer from whom I bought a car a few years ago had a handout from a charity re: donating used cars. I donated to them and it worked out great on my taxes. One of the reasons for donating rather than selling was that if I sold it for more than X dollars I would have been subject to my state’s lemon law. So it was a good way to get rid of the car with no hassles, and the book value was still pretty good. All I had to do was make a phone call and they towed away the car and gave me documentation to use for my taxes.
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