Andy is a software engineer donating to long term future and EA meta causes, and investing to give later.
Andy_Schultz
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Upcoming workshops on future of AI [link]
I have a couple questions about donating stock to charity in the U.S. Particularly I’m wondering about the case where someone has cash available to make a donation, but they want to instead donate an equivalent amount of appreciated stock and invest the cash in the same stock. This would decrease the cost basis of their stock, reducing the amount of tax owed when selling shares of the stock in the future.
When is the best time to invest the cash: as you receive the money, right before you donate, or after any restricted period after you donate (some funds impose a waiting period to buy back the stock if you have recently sold shares)?
If the stock only has a small long-term capital gain, is there any advantage to donating cash this year and waiting to donate stock until the gain has increased?
Also see this summary page on giving now vs. later: http://www.effective-altruism.com/ea/4e/giving_now_vs_later_a_summary/
This was actually taken into account in the article I linked to. Using their definition of a moderate-risk portfolio, looking at historical data it is unlikely that the account would drop below $20,000.
Increasing risk tolerance by growing your investments
Stephen Hawking will be answering questions about AI on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3eret9/science_ama_series_i_am_stephen_hawking
Thanks so much for writing this guide! I was able to use many of your suggestions to run a successful fundraiser, raising $2,680 for SCI. I really liked the overall idea of using this as an opportunity to connect with people. It was great reconnecting with people I hadn’t talked to in a while.
Thanks for making this! I would like if the stories in the RSS feed included the name of the website where the content came from.
Would it be worthwhile for aspiring effective altruists to download BOINC or World Community Grid to run on their computers? These are distributed computing programs that try to tackle problems that take a lot of computing power to solve. The software runs in the background on your computer and works on part of a project of your choice.
If so, would it be possible to estimate the best project to participate in? Here are the lists of projects available for BOINC and World Community Grid. At first glance, the project Malariacontrol.net looks most closely related to any promising cause that has been identified in the EA community, as one of their objectives is to “optimize deployment of established interventions and integrated strategies” for malaria (full description).
Here is Jeff’s post about John Wesley: http://www.jefftk.com/p/history-of-earning-to-give-iii-john-wesley
If you have any questions about the Methodist church, feel free to ask—I am a United Methodist.
What would be good advice for people who say they would only be happy with a career in the arts?
I know Citi Forward and Citi Thank You cards earn donatable points, but the Citi Forward card is no longer being issued. For people looking for a new credit card, it looks like cash back cards like Citi Double Cash would beat Citi Thank You. Maybe the EA action could be to look for a cash back or reward card that will give you the most money to donate to charity, depending on your spending habits. For example, a cash back card offering 5% back on certain categories might beat the Citi Double Cash’s consistent 2% back if you tended to spend money in those categories.
For those of you that earn credit card points, you might want to check if your points can be used to donate money to charity. For my credit card, I’m able to donate more money per point than if I redeemed the points for cash. I believe these donations are tax deductible in the U.S. (I think they would go on line 17 in Schedule A).
Do you think it is better to decide each year where to donate, or to give organizations multi-year commitments of what you expect to donate?
That’s interesting to hear about their beliefs for #2. By contrast, the leaders at my church specifially say that everyone is our neighbor.
As of December 1, 2014, GiveWell has reinstated AMF as a top charity. GiveWell believes that AMF now has room for more funding. See http://blog.givewell.org/2014/12/01/our-updated-top-charities/
If you donate the stock directly to a charity without selling it first, you don’t pay taxes on long-term gains. In your example, if you donate $100 of stocks and reinvest the $100 in cash, then you don’t pay taxes on the $25 capital gain. When you sell the $125 in two years, you pay taxes on a long-term capital gain of $25, compared to the gain of $50 if you donated the $100 in cash instead.
Here’s an article that describes this in more detail: http://www.fivecentnickel.com/2010/04/30/reset-your-investment-cost-basis-with-charitable-donations/ It also mentions the wash sale rule, which might be the law that you were thinking of. That rule only applies if you sell assets at a loss, so it wouldn’t come into play here.
You’re right that you could end up paying more in taxes if you sold the stocks less than a year after reinvesting. Another caveat is that you can only deduct donations of stock up to 30% of adjusted gross income, unlike 50% for cash donations.