If I’m in the checkout at a business, say McDonald’s or Walmart or Kroger or whatever, and they ask if I’d like to round up to donate to some charity, I usually say yes. But should I be doing this? I heard somewhere that I shouldn’t because they can claim that as a donation from them which contributes to them paying less taxes or something, I’m not sure if that’s 100% how it works but I figure that it benefits them somehow or why else would they do that?
How are we defining “worth it?”
Yes, the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes. If it’s a business you like, maybe that’s a good thing, if it’s not then that may be a bad thing. Does the money that goes to charity outweigh whatever harm may come from that company paying less in taxes? I don’t know if there’s any good way to objectively say that.
You don’t really get much say in which charity that money goes to, it’s just going to whatever charity that company has chosen to partner with. Some charities can be kind of sketchy, not all of them are on the up-and-up. If it’s a cause you care about, you may be better off just donating directly yourself to a charity you trust.
Now your individual contributions doing this are really a drop in the bucket, let’s say you go to a store and donate at checkout 3 times a week, and since you’re rounding up to the nearest dollar, you’re donating a max of $1 × 3x a week × 52 weeks a year = a maximum donation of $156 dollars a year donated by rounding, probably going to several different charities, and realistically you’re probably donating about half of that unless you have some real OCD about your purchases being even dollar amounts, so probably about $78/year divided up among however many different charities the various places you shop at are involved with.
Now of course you’re not the only person making those donations at any given store, each store is probably making hundreds or thousands of dollars in donations between all of their customers rounding up their checks.
Unless you’re really struggling, you’re probably not going to miss the maybe $100 or so that get siphoned off from you making these donations spread out over a whole year.
Can you Deduct those donations from your own taxes? I’m genuinely not sure, my gut says no, but let’s say you can. Do you think that $100 or so + whatever other deductable expenses you have in a year are going to beat the standard deduction? If it does, then sure, feel free to save those receipts and try to add it all up, that sounds like more trouble than it’s worth to me, but maybe it’s worth it for your purposes, there’s a lot of different tax situations I won’t pretend to know for certain.
Are those charitable donations going to improve your life? That’s hard to say, I don’t know your life.
Going to stop you right there and say, No the business does not take your contribution and offset their own tax liability with it.
The whole partnership with charity is purely a feel good transaction.