Qualified Charitable Distributions

One way to make all of your contributions with one distribution is to go through a donor advised fund, such as the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund. You can make your QCD to this qualified 503(c) charity, and it will make grants to the charities you specify on the dates you request. Fidelity Charitable is at

I'm pretty sure there are other similar funds.

I have used Fidelity Charitable for a few years now, and it works very well. I make both scheduled (monthly or quarterly) and unscheduled (one time only) gifts to about 8 charities.

Dave

It's also a nice way to be able to get a charitable deduction for donations of appreciated securities (and so get the double tax benefit) and be able to make donations to organizations that either aren't set up to take donations of appreciated securities or have a lot of red tape around doing so.

I know, I need to find the citation. It was my understanding that the Fidelity/Schwab type charitable funds are now allowed for use in the Charitable IRA distribution. The IRA distribution must be made to the real end charity. You are right, Rich, these are great for the cap gain issue.

[Frank asked about how many "qualified charitable distributions" he can make from his IRA]

Rich and Dave are both right that Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund is a great way to make charitable contributions with minimal fuss and especially as a vehicle for doing so with appreciated securities.

However, unfortunately for Frank, the law that allows the Qualified Charitable Contributions directly from IRAs explicitly excludes donor-advised funds.

QCDs must be made directly from the IRA to a qualifying charity. You must be (as Frank is) over 70-1/2. The contributions are limited to $100,000. And they cannot be made to a donor-advised fund.

Any distributions made from an IRA - including the QCDs - will be reported on your 1099-R. I don't know if the final instructions for 2011 QCDs have been written up, but presumably they'll be pretty much identical to the ones from 2010:

As far as I know, (back to Frank's question), there is no limit to the number of actual distributions you make so long as the total of the QCDs adds up to less than $100k. You do the subtraction of the total of the QCDs yourself (for the 2010 taxes, on line 15 of your 1040, you put into 15a the full total of your IRA distributions (QCD or not) and the taxable amount -- which calculation may or may not involved your 8606 (if you had any non-deductible money in your IRA) into line 15b. If you had QCDs, you write "QCD" next to line 15b. (Not sure how such notes written next to something get transmitted when electronically filing - Rich?)

Anyway, yeah - donor-advised funds are great - but they won't work for QCDs.

On Nov 7, 11:30 am, David S Meyers CFP wrote: ...>