Clarity on Terry Savage IRA Article — custodian may send check to you!

Each year we have our financial company write checks to our favorite charities from the IRA as a QCD so they are not counted as income. They send the checks to us and we mail them in to our charities.

The Terry Savage article this year on QCD donations from an IRA quotes ” You do not take the money; instead the custodian sends the check directly to the charity”.

Perhaps this could be more complete if it read, “the custodian “writes” the check to the “exact” name of the charity. They could send it, I suppose, but we have the custodian send the checks to us and we mail them ourselves since they probably would not want to bother with the extra work. This way we know its done and sent. Also, the charity sends us a thank you letter of confirmation which is always good for IRS documentation.

I said “exact” name because one charity last year returned the check because of a very slight typo error.
Then this year we requested a check to the World Wildlife Fund. The Custodian made a typo and wrote World “Wildfire” Fund. We caught the error when they mailed us the check and had them create a new check. This avoided saddling the charity with an extra delay and cost.

Bill

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