Speaker 1: Hey, welcome back to the Crowdfunding Demystified YouTube channel. My name is Salvador Brigman and today I want to talk about taxes and GoFundMe, particularly taxes as they relate to a personal crowdfunding campaign or fundraiser. That is the topic of today's video and I also have to say that I am not a lawyer or a tax consultant so these are technically my opinions. Make sure that you actually conduct a thorough analysis of this yourself. You also have a conversation with a lawyer or an accountant. That's going to be the best way moving forward to make sure that you're doing things, you're following things by the book, but I can provide some of my opinions and my thoughts here on the matter in today's video. So are GoFundMe donations taxable? Is this something you should be taking into account when you're running a GoFundMe fundraiser and is this going to later on get you in a lot of trouble or potentially some legal hassle if you are not paying attention to that? The first thing I want to say when it comes to GoFundMe donations is that usually they're considered personal gifts. If someone is giving you money, $25, $50, even a hundred bucks, and it's for a charitable fundraiser, a personal fundraiser, going to maybe your medical bills or going towards a memorial fund, going towards travel costs, any other types of personal expenses, typically these are going to fall into the realm of a personal gift and in that way it is not going to be taxable in any kind of way. You're not rendering a service, you're not trying to ship a product to them, you're not doing something like a consultation or giving them advice or anything like this, so there's no rendering of services, there are no goods or services that are exchanged. That person is simply making a donation to your crowdfunding campaign and since you're not a 501c3 registered non-profit, it technically isn't going to be labeled under giving money to a non-profit organization, so you're just an individual and they're basically giving you a personal gift, it's just happening online. While this income may not be taxable, I would 100% recommend that you are diligent in making sure that you keep your records should anything change for your particular circumstance, so make sure that you actually keep the records of your campaign, don't delete your campaign or the data related to that in any kind of way. If possible, download all this into just a folder you can put onto your laptop or onto an external hard drive and in that way if you ever have any issues in the future, you can consult this data and it's going to be a lot easier going from there. The other thing that I would say is one of the downsides I would say of actually running a personal crowdfunding campaign is that because you are an individual and you're not a 501c3 registered non-profit, you actually will not give the ability for those donors to have their donations be tax deductible in the traditional way. If they were giving money to a registered non-profit organization, they would be able to deduct that donation or write it off of their taxes, but because you're not, they're not able to unfortunately because it constitutes a personal gift. So make sure you don't have any claims in your campaign that people can write off this donation or something like that or that there are kind of tax advantages to supporting your GoFundMe campaign because typically that is not going to be the case. The other thing that you should know is that when you're running a personal fundraiser like this, GoFundMe is not going to issue any kind of tax documents to you at the end of the year. They're not going to send you tax documents saying, okay, this is the amount of money that was given to you. They're not going to make any kind of indications that this was a personal gift and therefore are not taxable. So really the onus is on you to make sure that you're following things to a T by the book so that you don't get any kind of legal hassles or legal troubles going from there. I do have a very in-depth book that I've written on running a GoFundMe campaign or any other type of crowdfunding campaign for personal expenses that's actually called crowdfunding for personal expenses, crowdfunding personal expenses. This book is available out there on Amazon. It's also available on Audible. I put a lot of research and time and effort into creating a valuable piece of education for those out there in the community that are interested in running an online fundraiser like this. It doesn't just talk about those kinds of things like the technicals of putting together a fundraiser, but it also gets into the marketing. How do you get strangers to support your campaign? How do you get people to care about what you're doing if they've never met you in person and the ways you can push people to action so you can raise more money with your GoFundMe campaign? That book is called Crowdfunding Personal Expenses. I will include a link down below. In addition, I have a free online course that goes through step-by-step how to set up and run a GoFundMe campaign. I think really valuable if this is your first time doing this, you've never done this before, or you're stuck in the middle of one of these campaigns and you're a little bit frustrated because you don't know what to do. You feel like your campaign is stalling, you feel like it's not really connecting with your base. This course is designed to get you up and running with that, and I hope that it helps you out a lot. I will also link to that down below in the description of this YouTube video, but I hope that this video helped out when it came to understanding whether or not these donations are tax deductible. If it did accomplish that for you, give me a thumbs up so that other people know that and they can discover this video. Leave a comment down below if you have any questions, and also come subscribe to this channel if you want more content like this. Again, my name is Salvador Brighman, and I will see you next time.