In his Wall Street Journal article, Tom Herman offers an explanation of some of the rules regarding valuing old clothes, furniture, golf clubs, and other household items laying around your house or stuffed in the back of your closet in order to claim an itemized charitable deduction on your tax return:
The Internal Revenue Service says gifts of clothing and household items generally must be in “good” used condition or better in order to be deductible. But officials still haven’t offered guidance on what “good” means. Moreover, there’s an important exception: You can deduct a household item that isn’t in good condition or better as long as you deduct more than $500 for it and include a qualified appraisal of it with your tax return, the IRS says in Publication 526, available at www.irs.gov.
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One easy way to figure out the value of your items may be to use inexpensive tax-preparation software and online programs, which list larger numbers of items. Intuit’s TurboTax, for instance, includes estimates for thousands of items. These published estimates can come in handy in case your donation values later are challenged by the IRS.
Keep detailed records of items donated, with videos and photographs, and get the required acknowledgments from charities.