In order for the Meeting to continue to provide a place of worship, welcome, peace, love, spiritual challenge, service and social witness, it needs the financial support of its members, attenders, and well-wishers.
To contribute, you can:
- Use this link to make a contribution using PayPal or Debit/Credit card:
Unless you wish to donate through your pre-existing PayPal account, choose to ‘Donate with a Debit or Credit Card’
- Write a check to Friends Meeting at Cambridge at 5 Longfellow Park, Cambridge MA 02138.
- Make regular monthly donations from your checking account (contact the office at office@fmcquaker.org or
617-876-6883) - Place cash or check in the box in the Meetinghouse or through the slot in the Office door.
Have questions? Please email fundraising@fmcquaker.org for support with your donation
Here are some other ways to give to Friends Meeting at Cambridge that may save you money or enable you to give more generously at the same cost to you:
Individuals over age 72 (70 ½ if you reach 70 ½ before January 1, 2020) who have a traditional IRA (individual retirement account) have to take a minimum amount out each year (the so-called “required minimum distribution” or RMD). But these funds when withdrawn from your IRA are considered income to you, increase your AGI (adjusted gross income) and you must then pay tax on this additional income (even if you put all the IRA funds withdrawn back into savings).
Here’s a much better plan for many of you. You can annually transfer anywhere up to $100,000 of these IRA funds directly to Friends Meeting at Cambridge as a donation, a so-called “Qualified Charitable Distribution” or a “QCD”. 100% of these funds benefit the Meeting and none of the contribution increases your taxes one penny. So regardless of how much you want to give, we can help you do it so neither you nor the Meeting pay any taxes on this transfer. You can probably give 20-40% more than you do now since it will not cost you an extra cent in taxes.
Moreover, by not increasing your taxable income, it may save you money on your Medicare Part B and D costs since some of this is pegged to your income level.
Since the federal tax changes in 2017 gave a more generous standard deduction to everyone automatically on their taxes fewer individuals itemize their deductions now. By making a QCD, you don’t lose the deduction when you are not itemizing.
If this sounds intriguing, please speak with a tax advisor. You can also e-mail the Fundraising Committee at: fundraising@fmcquaker.org and someone from our committee will try to assist you.
Note1 : if you have a Roth IRA, you can’t do the above. And the contribution to FMC must be done by December 31 of a year in order for you to avoid paying taxes on the RMD when you file taxes for that the following April. For example, if you donated by Dec. 31, 2021, when you fill out 2021 taxes in March or April of 2022 you could exclude that portion of your IRA RMD that went to FMC from being additional income.
Note2: the $100,000 cap is for an individual for ALL charitable contributions directly from IRA proceeds in a year. A married couple would have a $200,000 annual maximum for such contributions.
Normally when you sell stock or mutual funds that have been held for more than one year and have appreciated in value, you have to pay a federal tax of 15-20% and a Massachusetts tax of approximately 5% on the amount they went up – this is called capital gains tax. One smart thing to do, is to donate/transfer some of the stock or mutual funds directly to Friends Meeting without selling the stock. If you are itemizing your deductions, you get credit for contributing 100% of the value of the stock you give/transfer, and you don’t need to pay any tax on the appreciation. Moreover, Friends Meeting will sell the stock and use 100% of the proceeds for Meeting purposes and also doesn’t have to pay any taxes on it. So it is a way to give more generously to the Meeting without it costing you anything more. If you are donating stock or mutual funds, you will get the greatest tax advantage by donating stock that has gone up the most in percentage terms from when you bought it.
While you can arrange to have the stock itself transferred to FMC, one way to do this that is easier for FMC and may be easier for you is to set up a charitable gift fund if you are doing this again in other years or supporting other charities besides FMC. For example, there is the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, The Boston Foundation or the Schwab Charitable Gift Fund and several others. Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund reportedly is extremely easy to use. You set up an account and then arrange with your stock broker or the institution that has your shares to transfer the securities to your Gift Fund account (without selling them). It can sometimes take 7-10 days for the transfer to be done. If you itemize, you get a tax deduction in the year when you transfer the securities to the gift fund. You can write checks out of the Gift Fund to any recognized charity in any amount greater than $50 whenever you want. Think of it as a checking account for your donations. The recipient charity gets a check or wire transfer rather than having to deal with selling stock. You may also be allowed to fully disperse all the money in your charitable gift fund and leave it with zero balance and then one or two years later donate more stock to create new funds to disperse. You should check with whatever Gift Fund you decided to use to see what charges are incurred. Fidelity charges a nominal annual administrative fee based on the balance in your account. Once funds are transferred to your charitable gift fund they cannot be transferred back to you; they are in a fund that has to be spent on charities over whatever time frame you would like.
If this sounds intriguing, please speak with a tax advisor. You can also e-mail the Fundraising Committee at: fundraising@fmcquaker.org and someone from our committee will try to assist you.
If this sounds intriguing, please speak with a tax or estate advisor. You can also e-mail the Fundraising Committee at: fundraising@fmcquaker.org and someone from our committee will try to assist you.