So, we’ve decided to list all of the things we’re donating in order to itemize the donations as a tax deduction. This was clearly not my idea. The most complicated tax thing I’ve ever dealt with was in 1999, when I had to fill out like five forms to pay taxes on the $100 I’d earned for one day as a sub in the New York City schools.

Since I knew we’d spend hours, hours, going through all this stuff and debating whether each t-shirt was worth $.50 or $.75, I invested in some donation software.

ItsDeductible, while NotGrammatical, and possessed of what Sandy refers to as an “assy interface,” was pretty easy to use, and seriously saved us time. It is programmed with a huge database of fair market values for all sorts of commonly donated items (Skirts-Casual-Denim, Caps-Baseball) in Good, Fair, or Poor condition.

What was interesting to us were the items that weren’t in the database. There are twenty brands listed for electric woks, but not a single listing for just Wok-Old-Rusty. And while there are 10 sizes and models listed for Cuisinarts, none of them corresponded to ours (Cuisinart-Broken-Old).

Luckily, you can make custom categories. For instance, for the group of stuff we labeled “Bag of Crap” in our notes, we created the entry Miscellaneous-Knicknacks.

I’m so ready to get this stuff out of Sandy’s living room.