overview

• In these challenging times, many people are looking to support those who have been most impacted by this challenging environment.

• Use stock donations to maximize your financial impact with your favorite charities.

Giving back to society is crucial right now. We have an unprecedented pandemic that has impacted millions of lives, riots on a weekly basis in every corner of the United States, and 1 out of 4 working Americans unemployed. 

How you give, is just as important as where you give. In fact, 92.8% of donations could have been better tax optimized if the donors had given from their brokerage accounts. The majority of Americans do have stock market holdings, yet only $21 billion out of the $292 billion donated by individuals in 2018 was with stock. That’s tens of billions of taxed dollars, that could be sitting back in the hands of good-intentioned philanthropists. Let’s walk through the math and make sure that you use stock giving in your future donations.

Sarah lives in San Francisco and works at Microsoft (MSFT). She makes quite a bit of cash and also earns employee stock every quarter. Her oldest grant was from 4 years ago when MSFT was trading at $50/share. 100 shares were granted at a total value of $5,000. She paid for the income tax in cash. At current prices, MSFT is trading around $180, worth a total of $18,000. The unrealized gain is $13,000, which in California can be as much as $4,950 in taxes when sold. However, this year, she’s giving $15,000 to World Vision, a transparent non-profit that benefits communities in need around the world. If she donates with her MSFT shares, she’ll be able to erase $4,125 in taxes she would have otherwise paid. Stock giving can be up to 37% more efficient.

The easiest way to give with stock is through Cocatalyst. We really mean that, the average time to complete a donation is under five minutes. You can begin a donation by visiting our start donation page. You fill out the stock and number of shares you want to give, and we’ll work with your broker to complete the request. The stock arrives in our charitable 501(c)3 account, which we immediately sell and forward the proceeds to the charity. You can select the charity by entering the organization name, email contact, and state they are headquartered in. We identify the charity within the IRS database (or skip the process if they’re a religious group) and send them the funds.