Donations through Fidelity Charitable Giving Fund

[lajackson]

Replying to hdangi, you don’t need a receipt for your donation to the church through Fidelity charitable because your taxable event for a charitable donation happened when you contributed to your donor advised Fidelity Charitable account. You don’t need to itemize who the funds eventually went to and you can’t claim it twice as a donation anyway,

That's not the impression I get when reading 2fo023 Instructions for Schedule A page A-10, "Gifts of $250 or more" as well as "Line 11".

caroleeaw is correct. hdangi does not get a receipt for the donation Fidelity made to the Church. hdangi needs the record of the contribution made to the Fidelity donor advised fund. The date the Fidelity account was funded is the date of the deductible contribution and the record for IRS purposes would be a statement from the financial institution, an electronic fund transfer receipt, a canceled check, or some other record of the funding sent to Fidelity to set up the account.

The amount of the funding sent to Fidelity then is recorded on Schedule A for purposes of the tax deduction. It does not matter when Fidelity sends the money to the Church. The donation was made when the money was sent to Fidelity.

[russellhltn]

Interesting. Clearly this is a whole different situation.

[slxn42]

I could not find any instructions on how to make grants from a fidelity charitable account that are tied to my account as a member. I made a few test donations with 'Use: Tithe' from a Fidelity Charitable account to see how the Church offices handles it. Their offices politely reached out to me and informed me that there's also a 'Use: Create your own' option in fidelity charitable that you can use to add additional information.

So if you're searching on how to make donations to the Church from a fidelity charitable account and you want it to be somehow associated with your member account with minimum processing friction, then here are some instructions:

Disclaimer I'm not a professional/expert and you should do your own due diligence for your own personal circumstances.

1. From the "Grant to Charities" screen in fidelity charities, click the "Find Charity" button, and then find the LDS church which has tax id 87-0234341, address 50 E North Temple Rm 1521 Fl 15 (Treasury department), and is available for electronic transfer
2. In the "Use" field, select "Create your Own"
3. Include the following information
• Your member record number (if you are not a member or want to make an anonymous donation, you can probably use one of the other 'Use' options)
• Allocation (e.g. Humanitarian, Tithe, Fast Offering)
▪ Ward Unit Number and Name (Only needed for Fast Offering & Ward Missionary)

I believe statements will be made the month following the donation via the 'third party donations' tab on the church's website. I'm still waiting to make sure everything looks good. It sounds like the church is receptive to questions via email at the address:
- donations 'at' churchofjesuschrist 'dot' org
(I formatted the email this way to avoid robotic spam against their account).

I'd like to thank the helpful people in the Church offices that had to trace down my first few attempts at this.