[wallcrawlr]

Hello Everyone,

I have noticed the many posts here and at yahoo that have been interested in supporting this site. Even myself a couple weeks back urgently offered to help support this site because of bandwidth costs. I think it is a good and obvious thing to do.

Please understand that it may not just be as simple as setting up a paypal account. That money donated to the forum owner would become income and is taxable.
Your donation would not be tax deductible unless somehow this site became a charitable organization. (I have not looked into that too hard, although my experience tells me that it is probably not possible) This site could be non-profit, but not a charitable org. That is 2 different things.

CS.com owner would need to incorporate. It may be very important for the forum owner to now split this cs.com activity away from his personal activity. I am thinking mainly of liability issues.
He should start maintaining accounting records so that he can reduce his taxable income. It is quite possible that this site works on a loss but it is becoming serious now when the hobby (supported by himself) turns into a business with memberships (ie our donations).
There is no reason why those expenses shouldnt be deducted whether as a schedule c business or sub s.
If it were me Id capture every dollar spent here and get my taxes reduced because of it.

So when setting up this paypal account or however donations are going to be made careful consideration needs to be given on how that is going to be done.

However it happens, this site needs to be maintained. They (The Man) can send our cars to the crusher but this site singularily devoted to it shouldnt go down again.

 

[sloopercat]

Could we pay funds directly to the web server? We could just donate when needed to support the site. That might avoid the tax/income issue.

 

[pdupler]

I'm no accountant, but I don't think Mike would get into any trouble with the IRS. Incorporation to 501c3 status is expensive to file and requires some legal overhead so its probably not worth it. People make minor contributions to their neighborhood associations for block parties, local car clubs for meets, amateur sports associations for facility fees, student organizations for flyers (alcohol), etc. Hardly any of these are 501c3 and as long as they keep detailed account and return unused funds, the IRS couldn't care less. I don't think we're talking about enough money to raise an eyebrow here. If we were, I don't think Mike would've been so gracious to cover it out of his own pocket already. But if Mike is worried, soas not to be confused as just Mikes Internet hobby, I think all we'd need is to write up some simple by-laws, elect a couple of officers for legitimacy, most importantly, a treasurer, to collect funds and pay the hosting fees. I nominate Malloy for treasurer!

Phil D.

 

[Malloy]

wall: thanks for the info. As Phil said, I do not really think it will be a big issue. It will cost ~500 to run this site per year, not a big deal. (assuming I do not use up more BW (unlikely)

I only want to fund the site, nothing more. I think Paypal will be the best deal. Will make a post soon