Donate Odd Lots of Stock

Dong left a great idea on my post yesterday about donating stock to charity:

I did this earlier this year. Didn’t cost a thing via E*Trade. I imagine it’s true of other brokerages. It’s a great way getting rid of odd lots. I did this with a bunch spinoff shares that would’ve been expensive to sell.

Back when I owned shares of H.J. Heinz Corporation (whenever I’ve worked at a company, its shares have always gone up while I was there), they sold a portion of their business to Del Monte Foods and thus part of their stock was split into shares of Del Monte. Well, when you have like fifteen shares of a DLM, it’s only worth about $150 - the transaction fees of selling the shares would make it cost prohibitive. Eventually I did end up selling the shares but had I known what I know now, I likely would’ve donated them and saved myself some in taxes.