Donating equipment for tax deduction?

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sphinx99

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 23, 2006
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TLDR So, I'm gun-shy about selling old hardware privately due to time/effort involved (details below) and am wondering if there is a lower effort, lower risk path forward that still nets me some financial benefit without being so costly of my time. One option was whether I can donate things like bare hard drives, etc. and get a tax deduction for it. Has anyone dealt with anything like this before? Any experiences, pros or cons you'd be willing to share?


-- Details/Experience so far --

So, I have about two dozen hard drives I need to get rid of, from interesting stuff like Raptors to various 2, 3 and 4TB drives. I went through all the effort to thoroughly wipe and extended test them then decided to start listening about 10 of them on eBay. No crazy pricing - $25 here, $30 there. A bunch sold and although my time is valuable and I wasn't sure the overhead of packaging etc. would be worth it, 8 of them sold pretty quickly and I was somewhat pleased and thought this could be a good way to get rid of excess equipment and get a bit of $ back for it. Then the problems began.

One person claimed the drive didn't work and requested a return. I acquiesced. The drive I got back was a different serial number than the one I sent. I was able to sort this out but between emails, research, navigating the eBay process etc., it cost me about an hour of time.

One drive shipped from my hometown to San Diego and the USPS lost it from that point onward. Obviously the buyer wanted a refund which I requested. I thought, since I shipped USPS priority I should be able to get insurance. Between filling out forms, opening cases, having cases randomly closed as "resolved!' when no work was actually done etc., I've so far lost about 2.5 hours on this one.

One drive I dropped off at my local USPS on the table they told me to but it never entered their system. Same story as above - I'm probably 2 hours into phone wait times, dealing with cases opening and closing and so forth.

In every case my time is worth far more than this.
 
short version, yes you can donate raw parts to Goodwill if you want. But what you declare the value as being (and don't go over $500 on a single donation to avoid audit alarm bells) is probably not worth much. I have donated tons of stuff including whole computers, monitors, etc to Goodwill and still not meet the standard deduction. It's better than just throwing it into a dumpster, just don't expect much/anything back in return.

This is the FS/FT forum so you can list stuff on here and know you'll be dealing with (mostly) honest folks. And computer oriented people too not just random ebay dudes.
 
I would sell here.

EBay is a pita to deal with.

Here you can either have mostly plesent transactions with honest individuals. Or if your really at the point where your tired of dealing with it, offer a whole flat rate box sold "as is".
 
You might want to try taking a whole bunch of drives and stuffing them into a basic enclosure with other old/leftover parts to make a basic NAS system and donate that to some charity who could use it for that purpose or as a workstation. Have them give you a receipt for a reasonable value of all the parts and get a high three or low four figure tax deduction.

Way back when I built a high end system around an i7-930, I donated my old Dell Workstation for over a third of it's original MSRP before the combo-ed sales and discounts. The women's shelter I donated the machine to was happy to have a new to them computer that was about 5 years newer than their other machines at them time.
 
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Teenyman45 said:
Way back when I built a high end system around an i7-930, I donated my old Dell Workstation for over a third of it's original MSRP before the combo-ed sales and discounts. The women's shelter I donated the machine to was happy to have a new to them computer that was about 5 years newer than their other machines at them time.
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Yeah that's a good idea too... check local organizations that would love to have computers/parts. Women's/childrens support orgs, etc. At least with those they might be more grateful than say GW, where they basically don't care.
 
Since your time is worth so much (since you wrote that a few times) I'm surprised you took the time to write on the forum :) Kidding aside. Have you considered chatting with a friend who might have a teenager or young adult who can be your proxy to sell? You give them the gear, they sell it, and you get 50%. I actually did that for some older people when I was in my early 20's and it built some long term networking and relationships that really helped my life.

When I sell bulk smaller dollar items (anything sub $50), to be honest I made it easier by just getting packaging material, boxes,and etc preordered. USPS will give you the boxes for free, and tape guns are super cheap at places like thrift stores. I have a space in the closet for all the shipping stuff, and it makes it super easy. Mailbox is big enough to get USPS flat rate Medium boxes out and in, and I just do a quick drop off to the USPS dropbox 1 mile away if I want more security or anything bigger to go out.

The suggestions above are great btw. I also have just donated to local thrift stores, and they just give me a form to fill out. List it at a reason price, and sub $500 like Burticus mentioned above.
 
ha, fleecebay, ha.....

not no...
not hell no...
but F**K no....

If you value your sanity (& time) that is :D

Use the FS/FT forum here or at Anandtech or TPU, way easier, no fees (except paypal etc) and a good, mostly honest bunch of tech folks to deal with, and WAY less hassles too :)

I've sold (& bought) moar stuff here in 1 week than I have on fleecebay in the past 6 months...
 
Yea sell it here. I always had a good experience selling on here. Granted I will only deal with established members. Half the time I sold something on ebay I had some kind of issue with the buyer that ended up costing me some money. FB market been pretty good for me also for getting rid off junk. People will buy anything for the right price there.
 
If you can't take the hit, don't sell on ebay and Amazon when it comes to pc parts or whatever highly valued items according to the hip crowd. Was a power seller on ebay for a good 10+ years. When I complained to them about theft or switcheroo they told me to suck it up becuase as a seller I have to factor in theft and loss. If you thought Amazon is better, they also told me the same.

Find a third party who will take your items and sell them for you. They take the loss. All you need to do is pack it once, send it to them. Or like others have said, sell on forums, reddit hardwareswap. fb marketplace, offerup, craigslist. If you sell on the interweb, insist the other party has refs.

And lastly, only sell online what you can afford to lose.

EDIT: About the tax wrtie offs; my old tax guy would tell me if if I didn't donate more than the standard (12k individual, 24k couple), just don't bother with it.
 
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Unless you are just barely into your tax bracket the donation isn't worth it. Unless it knocks you down a tax bracket.
 
NobleX13 said:
Unless you are just barely into your tax bracket the donation isn't worth it. Unless it knocks you down a tax bracket.
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Tax brackets are a marginal rate. If you hit the 37% bracket, you only pay that rate on income over the start of the bracket; so it's not a big deal to have say $100 into the bracket, that just cost you $37 instead of $35. Donating reduces your taxable income, but (generally) only if your donation and other deductions are bigger than the standard deduction which is a big hurdle; you're probably not donating that much hardware, but maybe if you already have big deductions for other stuff, it could be kind of ok. Again though, if you can sell something for $100 and you donate to save $37 on taxes, I guess you value the hassle saved at $63.
 
I would recommend craigslist w/ meet-ups at a local police station as the least hassle free way or selling to people on here with a long history. I've had issues with parts from people here but it's either been my fault or they've been honest about resolving stuff. There's very little recourse for either side. Craigslist has generally been pretty good to me as well, but for little stuff not worth much individually you'd need to sell it in bulk to make it worth your and their time.

I like ebay for some things because there's a higher volume of buyers, but it's definitely not hassle-free like you asked for and I usually just use it when I think I'll get much higher prices or I'm selling a niche product. I only use UPS or FedEx for shipping because I can't stand dealing with the post office anymore. I'd rather pay extra than deal with the headache. If you're just selling cheap hard drives on ebay try to list that they're used and don't accept returns when you post the auction. I thought ebay was generally on the buyer's side but I got caught by the scammy "box" sales one time where a seller was selling boxes of noctua fans instead of actual noctua fans for the same price. They had put in no returns on their auction and of course boxes were in the description so I lost about $100 on that one.
 
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