Should I remove my donated clothing? Charitable Contribution Wrksht wants Cost or Adjusted Basis in the Donated Property..What should I do.

[filingisnofun]

I donate every year but have never had to answer questions from the Charitable Contribution Detail Worksheet. My $ entries are from Turbotax suggested value.

[JamesG1]

You may donate clothing and household items.  However, the donation is reported on IRS form 8283 Noncash Charitable Contributions.  The process has not changed for many years.  See this TurboTax Help.

The form allows the taxpayer to report the date of donation, how acquired, the donor's cost basis, the item's fair market value and method used for valuation.  You may select Help me value my donations to determine the valuation.

[user17743772431]

This answer does not help at all. I have a donation of about 100 plus items that were purchased over many years. The values now are worth $5 to $25 apiece according to IRS Thrift shop evaluations. The total valuation of this 100 or more items on one day to Salvation Army was between $2000 and $3000. Why does turbo tax want the price paid for each item, and the date purchased? Does Turbo Tax want me to lie to these unanswerable questions? For the price paid shouldn't it have a choice called "Various" and for the date purchased shouldn't it also have a choice called "Various"?

[AmyC]

The IRS requires extra information once your charity donations exceeds $500 for the year. Form 8283 must be filled in. The form asks how acquired, date, and your basis- what you paid.

You want to group similar items -household items, toys, etc.

For example: clothing items, value at local thrift shop $450, date purchased - various makes the most sense, pick a date a year earlier than the donation, cost basis - just a reasonable guess of what you paid. You can't deduct more than you paid.

Once you hit the $5,000 mark, a formal written appraisal from a professional appraiser is required.

[filingisnofun]

No, this does not answer my question.  

[Spike87]

Previously for all other tax years and using ItsDuductible, the Date Acquired and Cost-Adjusted Basis fields for items donated like clothing, etc. were all blank.  This year the form is making it mandatory and you cannot e-file through the desktop software.  I already tried and paid the fee but now stuck in a loop until those fields are entered.  This appears to be a bug on the form since previous years these were allowed to be blank.

[MonikaK1]

You still have the option to group the donated items for Form 8283. 

Note that in the heading of Section A, the form states that you can list "an item (or a group of similar items) for which you claimed a deduction of $5,000 or less". It is not necessary to list each individual item on the form or in TurboTax. There is a box to check in the interview to indicate that you acquired the items over multiple dates. You are expected to have maintained records to support the totals reported on Form 8283.  The IRS rules have not changed. See the IRS Instructions for Form 8283 for more information.

If you donated, for example, several bags of clothing on a particular date, you can list "clothing" on Form 8283 and one total for all of the items. If you donated an assortment of household items, you can list "household items" with one total.

See also this TurboTax help article for information about the new fair market valuation (FMV) tool that helps you price your charitable donations if you’re itemizing your deductions.

@Spike87 

@filingisnofun 

[Spike87]

I forgot to mention that I imported my donation via TXF file which does not complete the full process of the form creation and field values.  I went back through using Step-by-Step to fix the issues.  Thank you.

[Spike87]

Spoke too soon, form is still flagging:

With these fields entered:

[Spike87]

[MarilynG1]

You may want to delete that donation and enter manually.  In Charitable Contributions, if you selected 'Items and Stock', the next screen is 'Tell us About Your Donated Items or Stock'.  That's all you need to enter for clothing/household items.  Remember, you can combine donations to one organization. 

@Spike87 

[tuftgirlk]

I am in the same situation. Back when itsdeductible was available never had to do "price of property" , date bought of multiple items, or something called cost basis. I used deductible duck this year and imported the multiple goodwill items into TT - some came greater than 500 (approx. 800 & 900 respectively) and when running the TT final analysis those 3 boxes kept coming up. This does not make sense for 100s of items donated. who keeps purchase receipts for cloths and minor household goods for many years?

[tuftgirlk]

when you say you went back - do you mean to deductible duck?

[tuftgirlk]

yep. hoping i can just write a note at the bottom (where donated price is listed) so i can skip. i dont want to get an extension for what seems a bug and minor issue

[tuftgirlk]

i tried that a week ago and it still asked original purchase price etc. so i went back to deductible duck and entered the 70 plus items