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Economics Explained talked about something similar w/ art. [1] - Buy N paintings form one artist for $1 million USD a piece. - Put 1 painting up for auction.

Economics Explained talked about something similar w/ art. [1] - Buy N paintings form one artist for $1 million USD a piece. - Put 1 painting up for auction. - Have coconspirators bid the painting up to say $20 million. - Buy your own painting for $20 million, and imply that your other paintings by the same artist are also worth $20 million. - Donate a "$20 million" painting to an art museum (that maybe you control) & save $10 million in taxes. - Complain about tax hikes on the rich as the not-rich subsidize your art collection [1] The Economics Of The Art Market: Why This Painting Isn't Worth $450 Million -- https://youtu.be/V5sOuET8UWA https://youtu.be/V5sOuET8UWA

delaaxe 5y ago
That was insightful
ludamad 5y ago
You still have to take a capital gain on $1 million -> $20 million when selling it, right? I suppose the charitable offset is much better?
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  Nope. You don't sell it. You donate it. It's considered a charitable contribution, not a sale, and that makes it 100% tax deductible. [1] I guess you'd have to spend $20 million on the painting, but you're buying it from yourself, so in reality you're only on the hook for the 2% fee from the auction house. [1] https://www.usa.gov/donate-to-charity#item-211605 https://www.usa.gov/donate-to-charity#item-211605
  - nightski 5y ago
    Before that though, when you bought your own painting for $20M. I'd imagine it would be pretty difficult to write off that purchase as a business expense or something. The IRS is going to notice a $20M write-off for a business with no additional income pretty quick. But you will have to pay taxes on the $20M income, even if it is coming from yourself.
    - cronin101 5y ago
      In the above example you pay capital gains on the one (1) $20m initial painting that allows you to then donate N "equal value" paintings. So you can dilute the capital gains % indefinitely (1/N).
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        But your tax basis in the other paintings is still $1M. If you donate them claiming they're worth $1M, you don't get a $20M deduction. If you claim they're worth $20M then transferring them is a realization event and you owe capital gains on $19M. Then you get a $20M deduction which cancels out the capital gains and leaves you with just the original $1M deduction for what you actually paid, right? What people really do this for is insurance fraud. Buy some paintings for $1M each, get them appraised and insured for $20M each, then somebody "steals" them or you have a convenient structure fire and make the N*$20M insurance claim.
        sbelskie 5y ago
        Unless paintings are different than other assets commonly donated (e.g. stocks), this doesn’t sound right. If I donate a stock that has appreciated in value, I pay no capital gains tax and am still able to deduct the full market value of the stock (up to certain limits).
        toast0 5y ago
        As another poster said, assuming paintings are treated like stock, as long as you've held it for more than one year, donating an aprechiated asset is magic. In this example, you get a $20M deduction and you don't have to realize the $19M gain. Depending on how the shill purchase in the hypothetical is arranged, you might have realized a gain there... but then again, maybe you just pay the auction fees.
        ThrustVectoring 5y ago
        EDIT: this was wrong, did research and you actually have to hold for a year Original: Holding a year or not doesn't matter for donating appreciated assets, AIUI
  - ChrisLomont 5y ago
    Any charitable giving of over a low threshold would be audited for value to prevent this type of grift. You'd likely end up in serious tax trouble. For example: "Donating non-cash items to a charity will raise an audit flag if the value exceeds the $500 threshold for Form 8283, which the IRS always puts under close scrutiny. If you fail to value the donated item correctly, the IRS may deny your entire deduction, even if you underestimate the value." https://budgeting.thenest.com/much-should-donate-charity-tax-purposes-triggering-audit-33706.html https://budgeting.thenest.com/much-should-donate-charity-tax...
    - coliveira 5y ago
      Yes if you're poor, that would stick out on your tax returns. If you're rich and other parts of the tax returns are even more complex, I think this would fly without any problem.
      - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
        From rich friends' experience, that's not how it works. The bigger the fish, the more resources get thrown at it. A friend got audited and they came up with the most absurdly tiny mistakes in really complex things. It turned out they couldn't find anything they thought was more than a mistake, but their thoroughness was pretty incredible.
        coliveira 5y ago
        The difference is that the rich have the lawyers to deal with that. You shouldn't worry about them. An audit for a rich person is just another annoyance that they pay to go away, it is not gonna change their behavior.
        lozaning 5y ago
        On average, the more money you have and the more complex your taxes the less likely you are to be audited. https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/eitc-audit https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/eitc-audit
  - josho 5y ago
    OMG, I wonder if this is why Trump has his own charities that also happen to make frequent donations of paintings!?
    - MagnumOpus 5y ago
      That’s a bingo. (Sometimes it is just bribery or money laundering, transferring worthless hard-to-value art for millions is ideal not just for tax fraud.)
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    There is a hole in this logic. It’s perfectly legal in the US to create your own religion proclaiming you as a deity whose boredom will destroy the universe and thus you need lots of expensive toys to keep your boredom from collapsing the universe. Any religion can have a nonprofit organization formed around it, making it acceptable and even expected that any donations made to that religious nonprofit are used to carry out the observance of that religions doctrine, that being the purchase of more expensive toys to prevent your boredom from ending the universe. Any donations to the religion would be not taxable.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > You still have to take a capital gain on $1 million -> $20 million when selling it, right? Sure, the idea is that you only realize the gain on one work by the artist, and then can donate multiple. But even at one work “sold” and one donated its a win if you hold the piece for a year and a day before selling, since you (assuming you are at the top marginal rate for income and cap gains for simplicity) pay cap gains on $19 million @ 20% ($3.8 million) and then get a deduction of $20 million against income that would be taxed @ 37% (saving $7.4 million) for a net savings (even after the $2 million cost of purchasing the paintings) of $1.6 million.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  Couldn’t it be said that by holding onto the coin instead of selling it /avoiding the taxable event you are inherently depriving the government of the interest they would have made from the taxes on that amount?
tokenmonster 5y ago
How does that save $10 million in taxes?
- gruez 5y ago
  The $10M figure is incorrect because donating a $20M painting doesn't save you $20M in taxes, it only allows you to deduct $20M from your income, and even that amount is capped. The actual amount of taxes you save is roughly $20M * your marginal rate. There's also the $10M you spent to acquire the painting, which eats into the savings. That said the general premise is valid. The loophole comes from the fact that when you donate something, you don't have to pay capital gains on it, yet you can deduct the full value from your returns[1]. [1] "If you donate long-term appreciated assets like bonds, stocks or real estate to charity, you generally don’t have to pay capital gains, and you can take an income tax deduction for the full fair-market value." https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/guidance/charitable-tax-strategies/charitable-contributions.html https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/guidance/charitable-tax-s...
  - NickM 5y ago
    If you take state income tax into account, it's possible to hit a marginal rate of about 50% if you live in, say, California.
    - zeusk 5y ago
      I'm guessing that doesn't really gel well with the $10k SALT deduction cap in place at the moment.
      - NickM 5y ago
        I'm not sure if I see your point. The SALT deduction is completely separate from the deduction for charitable contributions. Maybe before the cap, you could argue that the true combined marginal rate was lower than 50% since the deduction for the state income tax would offset some of the federal tax, but a $10k deduction doesn't matter much to someone who's making enough to be in the top income brackets.
mFixman 5y ago
That only works if the IRS considers the price of the art to be $20m. If it were that easy then you could just donate anything at whatever price you want. High art is valuable because high art is expensive. I'm not losing $450 million when I buy a $450 million painting any more than I lose money when I buy a house. This whole thing is a conspiracy theory created by judgemental people with null knowledge of art to complain about the latest modern art pieces and it spiraled out of control to an urban myth in the level of "the Facebook app is secretly using your microphone" or "vaccines give you tracking microchips".
- sabellito 5y ago
  Do you have any links explaining how art valuation works?
  - cameron_b 5y ago
    Bachelors of Fine Art degree holder here, Everything is made up and the example cited above is very close to the story of “For The Love of God” by Damien Hirst [0] The sculpture is more of a pointer, or some direct object upon which could be acted the work of art which was the financing valuation and theoretical sale of the work In most experiences, it starts with how anything is priced. How long did it take to make it and how much money did it take to do so. Plus some. And then what will someone pay for it. But that’s just “most” and that never makes headlines or anecdotes [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God
- coliveira 5y ago
  You cannot "donate anything" and get away with this. You need to go through a proper art collection selling process, that's the whole point.
pjc50 5y ago
This has been replicated in the NFT market, with a slightly different structure: sell NFTs to yourself to "paint the tape" and create the impression that a hot resale market exists, then sell to random suckers looking for appreciating assets.
- sf_rob 5y ago
  Someone minted 1 million Neeraj Agrawal (cryptocurrency advocate* who's big on Twitter) NFTs, sent him 999,999 without his consent, and kept the other to sell. Which leads to the interesting question, should Neeraj report the 999,999 as a gift receipt if they have some value, and is he in a bad position that the tax value of the gift is large due to the price being determined by the 1 that was sold? (I don't understand NFTs so I may be incorrect on details). *edited, said “VC” prior
  - chabes 5y ago
    Neeraj isn’t a VC. He works for coin center, a advocacy/lobbying org.
  - throwaway_isms 5y ago
    If the 999,999 were worthless at the time they were initially transferred, then there is no taxable event. Now if they become worth $1 each and he sells them at that price then it is a taxable event. The threshold may have changed with respect to gifts but if the coins were worth $1 at the time they were initially transferred there may be a taxable event, I think it used to be $50k was tax free.
  - suifbwish 5y ago
    People aren’t in control of who sends their wallets coins and unless there is a notification system setup it seems like the tax responsibility would arise when they attempt to use the coin. Also if everyone were responsible for every trade that occurs within their wallets, and have say with one trade they make a large profit and owe the government taxes, then in the next trade they lose the profit, are they responsible for loss of government property? Also what about an auto trading bot that is run by a neural network that makes trading decisions based off key words in the news, if it is responsible for losing the would be taxes, who is to blame? It’s creator? The philosophical questions from this stuff pick apart out we normally think about this.
Aunche 5y ago
Economics Explained is somewhat of a hack when it comes to topics outside of basic supply and demand. On the internet, every struggling business and every collectible hobby is a front for money laundering. While there is certainly a lot of money laundering and tax evasion in the high art world, that's only because they can hide their transactions behind the majority of legitimate transactions. In the case of the Salvator Mundi painting, the valuation of the painting skyrocketed because allegedly the last two bidders were both Arab princes who thought the other bidder was from their mutual rival, the Qatari royal family. $450 million was the legitimate market value if the painting to the Saudi royal family.
- devoutsalsa 5y ago
  If I question the legitimacy of Economics Explained, then I'll be forced to asses the value of the honorary PhD in economics that I gave myself from my prestigious, non-accredited university, and I don't want to do that.
tannhauser23 5y ago
If you want to see this played on a massive scale: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/28/samsung-inheritance-lee-family-to-pay-over-10-billion-inheritance-tax.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/28/samsung-inheritance-lee-fami... “The late Chairman Lee’s collection of antiques, Western paintings and works by Korean artists — approximately 23,000 pieces in total — will be donated to national organizations,” they said, in recognition of his passion for art collection and “his belief in the importance of passing on our cultural heritage to new generations.” I wonder what the pieces will be valued at.
FabHK 5y ago
Matt Levine wrote about something similar today in his column "Money Stuff" (the third story, "Tax Law"): > You have zero-basis stock that is “really” worth $100, but that happens to be trading at $300 right now because the market doesn't know the bad news that you know. If you sell it, you get $300, pay 20% tax, keep $240, and go to prison for insider trading. Or you can wait until the news is public, sell it for $100, pay 20% tax, keep $80 and avoid prison. > But if you donate it while it’s still trading at $300, you get a $300 tax deduction, which is worth $120, which is more than $80. And you don’t go to prison because you never traded the stock while you had inside information. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/elon-musk-made-tesla-some-money-on-bitcoin https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/elon-m...
amscanne 5y ago
I’ve had a similar scam explained to me by someone who said they do it for their own tax obligations (on a much smaller scale). I have no clue why non-liquid donations are allowed. Stock with a clear market value (publicly traded) seems fine, but everything else should require an arm’s length transaction to liquidate the asset. (And maybe you would be able to 1) book the donation in the year you initiate the sale to account for assets that take a long time to sell, and 2) still have gains exempt provided all proceeds are going towards a donation.)

delaaxe 5y ago

That was insightful

ludamad 5y ago

You still have to take a capital gain on $1 million -> $20 million when selling it, right? I suppose the charitable offset is much better?

devoutsalsa 5y ago
Nope. You don't sell it. You donate it. It's considered a charitable contribution, not a sale, and that makes it 100% tax deductible. [1] I guess you'd have to spend $20 million on the painting, but you're buying it from yourself, so in reality you're only on the hook for the 2% fee from the auction house. [1] https://www.usa.gov/donate-to-charity#item-211605 https://www.usa.gov/donate-to-charity#item-211605
- nightski 5y ago
  Before that though, when you bought your own painting for $20M. I'd imagine it would be pretty difficult to write off that purchase as a business expense or something. The IRS is going to notice a $20M write-off for a business with no additional income pretty quick. But you will have to pay taxes on the $20M income, even if it is coming from yourself.
  - cronin101 5y ago
    In the above example you pay capital gains on the one (1) $20m initial painting that allows you to then donate N "equal value" paintings. So you can dilute the capital gains % indefinitely (1/N).
    - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
      But your tax basis in the other paintings is still $1M. If you donate them claiming they're worth $1M, you don't get a $20M deduction. If you claim they're worth $20M then transferring them is a realization event and you owe capital gains on $19M. Then you get a $20M deduction which cancels out the capital gains and leaves you with just the original $1M deduction for what you actually paid, right? What people really do this for is insurance fraud. Buy some paintings for $1M each, get them appraised and insured for $20M each, then somebody "steals" them or you have a convenient structure fire and make the N*$20M insurance claim.
      - sbelskie 5y ago
        Unless paintings are different than other assets commonly donated (e.g. stocks), this doesn’t sound right. If I donate a stock that has appreciated in value, I pay no capital gains tax and am still able to deduct the full market value of the stock (up to certain limits).
      - toast0 5y ago
        As another poster said, assuming paintings are treated like stock, as long as you've held it for more than one year, donating an aprechiated asset is magic. In this example, you get a $20M deduction and you don't have to realize the $19M gain. Depending on how the shill purchase in the hypothetical is arranged, you might have realized a gain there... but then again, maybe you just pay the auction fees.
        ThrustVectoring 5y ago
        EDIT: this was wrong, did research and you actually have to hold for a year Original: Holding a year or not doesn't matter for donating appreciated assets, AIUI
- ChrisLomont 5y ago
  Any charitable giving of over a low threshold would be audited for value to prevent this type of grift. You'd likely end up in serious tax trouble. For example: "Donating non-cash items to a charity will raise an audit flag if the value exceeds the $500 threshold for Form 8283, which the IRS always puts under close scrutiny. If you fail to value the donated item correctly, the IRS may deny your entire deduction, even if you underestimate the value." https://budgeting.thenest.com/much-should-donate-charity-tax-purposes-triggering-audit-33706.html https://budgeting.thenest.com/much-should-donate-charity-tax...
  - coliveira 5y ago
    Yes if you're poor, that would stick out on your tax returns. If you're rich and other parts of the tax returns are even more complex, I think this would fly without any problem.
    - Matticus_Rex 5y ago
      From rich friends' experience, that's not how it works. The bigger the fish, the more resources get thrown at it. A friend got audited and they came up with the most absurdly tiny mistakes in really complex things. It turned out they couldn't find anything they thought was more than a mistake, but their thoroughness was pretty incredible.
      - coliveira 5y ago
        The difference is that the rich have the lawyers to deal with that. You shouldn't worry about them. An audit for a rich person is just another annoyance that they pay to go away, it is not gonna change their behavior.
      - lozaning 5y ago
        On average, the more money you have and the more complex your taxes the less likely you are to be audited. https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/eitc-audit https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/eitc-audit
- josho 5y ago
  OMG, I wonder if this is why Trump has his own charities that also happen to make frequent donations of paintings!?
  - MagnumOpus 5y ago
    That’s a bingo. (Sometimes it is just bribery or money laundering, transferring worthless hard-to-value art for millions is ideal not just for tax fraud.)
- suifbwish 5y ago
  There is a hole in this logic. It’s perfectly legal in the US to create your own religion proclaiming you as a deity whose boredom will destroy the universe and thus you need lots of expensive toys to keep your boredom from collapsing the universe. Any religion can have a nonprofit organization formed around it, making it acceptable and even expected that any donations made to that religious nonprofit are used to carry out the observance of that religions doctrine, that being the purchase of more expensive toys to prevent your boredom from ending the universe. Any donations to the religion would be not taxable.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> You still have to take a capital gain on $1 million -> $20 million when selling it, right? Sure, the idea is that you only realize the gain on one work by the artist, and then can donate multiple. But even at one work “sold” and one donated its a win if you hold the piece for a year and a day before selling, since you (assuming you are at the top marginal rate for income and cap gains for simplicity) pay cap gains on $19 million @ 20% ($3.8 million) and then get a deduction of $20 million against income that would be taxed @ 37% (saving $7.4 million) for a net savings (even after the $2 million cost of purchasing the paintings) of $1.6 million.
suifbwish 5y ago
Couldn’t it be said that by holding onto the coin instead of selling it /avoiding the taxable event you are inherently depriving the government of the interest they would have made from the taxes on that amount?

tokenmonster 5y ago

How does that save $10 million in taxes?

gruez 5y ago
The $10M figure is incorrect because donating a $20M painting doesn't save you $20M in taxes, it only allows you to deduct $20M from your income, and even that amount is capped. The actual amount of taxes you save is roughly $20M * your marginal rate. There's also the $10M you spent to acquire the painting, which eats into the savings. That said the general premise is valid. The loophole comes from the fact that when you donate something, you don't have to pay capital gains on it, yet you can deduct the full value from your returns[1]. [1] "If you donate long-term appreciated assets like bonds, stocks or real estate to charity, you generally don’t have to pay capital gains, and you can take an income tax deduction for the full fair-market value." https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/guidance/charitable-tax-strategies/charitable-contributions.html https://www.fidelitycharitable.org/guidance/charitable-tax-s...
- NickM 5y ago
  If you take state income tax into account, it's possible to hit a marginal rate of about 50% if you live in, say, California.
  - zeusk 5y ago
    I'm guessing that doesn't really gel well with the $10k SALT deduction cap in place at the moment.
    - NickM 5y ago
      I'm not sure if I see your point. The SALT deduction is completely separate from the deduction for charitable contributions. Maybe before the cap, you could argue that the true combined marginal rate was lower than 50% since the deduction for the state income tax would offset some of the federal tax, but a $10k deduction doesn't matter much to someone who's making enough to be in the top income brackets.

mFixman 5y ago

That only works if the IRS considers the price of the art to be $20m. If it were that easy then you could just donate anything at whatever price you want. High art is valuable because high art is expensive. I'm not losing $450 million when I buy a $450 million painting any more than I lose money when I buy a house. This whole thing is a conspiracy theory created by judgemental people with null knowledge of art to complain about the latest modern art pieces and it spiraled out of control to an urban myth in the level of "the Facebook app is secretly using your microphone" or "vaccines give you tracking microchips".

sabellito 5y ago
Do you have any links explaining how art valuation works?
- cameron_b 5y ago
  Bachelors of Fine Art degree holder here, Everything is made up and the example cited above is very close to the story of “For The Love of God” by Damien Hirst [0] The sculpture is more of a pointer, or some direct object upon which could be acted the work of art which was the financing valuation and theoretical sale of the work In most experiences, it starts with how anything is priced. How long did it take to make it and how much money did it take to do so. Plus some. And then what will someone pay for it. But that’s just “most” and that never makes headlines or anecdotes [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God
coliveira 5y ago
You cannot "donate anything" and get away with this. You need to go through a proper art collection selling process, that's the whole point.

pjc50 5y ago

This has been replicated in the NFT market, with a slightly different structure: sell NFTs to yourself to "paint the tape" and create the impression that a hot resale market exists, then sell to random suckers looking for appreciating assets.

sf_rob 5y ago
Someone minted 1 million Neeraj Agrawal (cryptocurrency advocate* who's big on Twitter) NFTs, sent him 999,999 without his consent, and kept the other to sell. Which leads to the interesting question, should Neeraj report the 999,999 as a gift receipt if they have some value, and is he in a bad position that the tax value of the gift is large due to the price being determined by the 1 that was sold? (I don't understand NFTs so I may be incorrect on details). *edited, said “VC” prior
- chabes 5y ago
  Neeraj isn’t a VC. He works for coin center, a advocacy/lobbying org.
- throwaway_isms 5y ago
  If the 999,999 were worthless at the time they were initially transferred, then there is no taxable event. Now if they become worth $1 each and he sells them at that price then it is a taxable event. The threshold may have changed with respect to gifts but if the coins were worth $1 at the time they were initially transferred there may be a taxable event, I think it used to be $50k was tax free.
- suifbwish 5y ago
  People aren’t in control of who sends their wallets coins and unless there is a notification system setup it seems like the tax responsibility would arise when they attempt to use the coin. Also if everyone were responsible for every trade that occurs within their wallets, and have say with one trade they make a large profit and owe the government taxes, then in the next trade they lose the profit, are they responsible for loss of government property? Also what about an auto trading bot that is run by a neural network that makes trading decisions based off key words in the news, if it is responsible for losing the would be taxes, who is to blame? It’s creator? The philosophical questions from this stuff pick apart out we normally think about this.

Aunche 5y ago

Economics Explained is somewhat of a hack when it comes to topics outside of basic supply and demand. On the internet, every struggling business and every collectible hobby is a front for money laundering. While there is certainly a lot of money laundering and tax evasion in the high art world, that's only because they can hide their transactions behind the majority of legitimate transactions. In the case of the Salvator Mundi painting, the valuation of the painting skyrocketed because allegedly the last two bidders were both Arab princes who thought the other bidder was from their mutual rival, the Qatari royal family. $450 million was the legitimate market value if the painting to the Saudi royal family.

devoutsalsa 5y ago
If I question the legitimacy of Economics Explained, then I'll be forced to asses the value of the honorary PhD in economics that I gave myself from my prestigious, non-accredited university, and I don't want to do that.

tannhauser23 5y ago

If you want to see this played on a massive scale: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/28/samsung-inheritance-lee-family-to-pay-over-10-billion-inheritance-tax.html https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/28/samsung-inheritance-lee-fami... “The late Chairman Lee’s collection of antiques, Western paintings and works by Korean artists — approximately 23,000 pieces in total — will be donated to national organizations,” they said, in recognition of his passion for art collection and “his belief in the importance of passing on our cultural heritage to new generations.” I wonder what the pieces will be valued at.

FabHK 5y ago

Matt Levine wrote about something similar today in his column "Money Stuff" (the third story, "Tax Law"): > You have zero-basis stock that is “really” worth $100, but that happens to be trading at $300 right now because the market doesn't know the bad news that you know. If you sell it, you get $300, pay 20% tax, keep $240, and go to prison for insider trading. Or you can wait until the news is public, sell it for $100, pay 20% tax, keep $80 and avoid prison. > But if you donate it while it’s still trading at $300, you get a $300 tax deduction, which is worth $120, which is more than $80. And you don’t go to prison because you never traded the stock while you had inside information. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/elon-musk-made-tesla-some-money-on-bitcoin https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/elon-m...

amscanne 5y ago

I’ve had a similar scam explained to me by someone who said they do it for their own tax obligations (on a much smaller scale). I have no clue why non-liquid donations are allowed. Stock with a clear market value (publicly traded) seems fine, but everything else should require an arm’s length transaction to liquidate the asset. (And maybe you would be able to 1) book the donation in the year you initiate the sale to account for assets that take a long time to sell, and 2) still have gains exempt provided all proceeds are going towards a donation.)