If we’re all honest with ourselves, the idea of winning a lot of money is appealing not because it would allow us to help others, but because it would let us help ourselves. For some, though, the thought of seeing a wealth of funds hitting their account would present them with an opportunity to donate some, if not all, of it to charity. The question is, how does this actually work? We know that you can’t give money to other people, such as friends or relatives, without tax having to be paid on it, but is the same true of charity?
The good news on that front is that donations of any kinds, almost irrespective of where the money came from, is free from the complications of tax. The reason we say ‘almost irrespective of where the money came from’ is that money obtained through illegal or ill-gotten means will obviously not be accepted by charities, nor will you be able to do anything else with it should the origins of the money be discovered.
For most people, though, there will be nothing illegal about it and they will be pleased that they can donate money to charity free of tax implications.
Charitable Giving
There are many people out there that are cynical enough to want to know about what happens when they donate money to charity because they’re hoping for some breaks on that front from the tax man. The good news is that there are also a wealth of people that only care about how they can make a difference, often having a favoured charity for personal reasons. Perhaps they know someone suffering from dementia, for example, or who died of cancer. Maybe they’ve been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and want to give accordingly.
Whatever the reasons, people can give money to charity without having to worry about whether they will have to pay any tax on what they’re giving away. Some charities have begun to set up their own lotteries, which people play in order to help the charity in question and then help even more by donating any winnings back to the charity. Regardless of how you do it, you can rest safe in the knowledge that no tax will be due on any winnings that you look to pay to a charity of your choosing from the winnings of your gambling activity.
How Gift Aid Works
If you’re particularly charitable in your mindset, you might well have used Gift Aid in the past to help your chosen charities with any donations that you’ve made.
Gift Aid is a tax relief that applies when people donate money to charity, with the charity or community amateur sports club able to claim an extra 25 pence for every £1 given to them. As far as the giver of the money is concerned, it doesn’t cost them anything extra, with the only thing that you need to do being signing a declaration that says you meet the Gift Aid criteria.
When it comes to that, you need to be paying enough tax to qualify for Gift Aid. Donations will be ok on that front as long as they aren’t more than four times what you paid in tax in that tax year. Say you donate £100 to a charity, they claim Gift Aid on the donation making it £125. You can then claim back £25, which is 20% x £125. Gift Aid is a great way of helping charities get some more money, but you must remember that you can’t claim Gift Aid on money you’ve won through gambling as no tax will have been paid on it.
Giving Gambling Proceeds To Charity
There is no doubt that winning the lottery or seeing some other form of money hit your account thanks to a bet or two that you’ve placed is good news. Even if you’ve day-dreamed about what to do with the money, you might still struggle to think of how to use your cash for the betterment of others, especially if you’ve seen a lot of money come your way.
As a result, you might think about giving some of it to a charity, or even more than one charity. This is perfectly permissible and is very easy to do, which is great given it’s for a good cause.
If you were to win a chunk of money on the lottery, for example, or by putting together a particularly unlikely accumulator on the horses, you can do what you want with your money. The problem is, unless you have signed a syndicate agreement with friends and family that you’d like to give your money to, any winnings that you disperse to other people will have tax due on it. This isn’t true when it comes to charities, however. In the case of charity donations, there is zero tax due and you can give as much to them as you want.
Examples
In December 2020, a lucky French person won the EuroMillions. They found themselves on the receiving end of around £200 million, which was the largest jackpot in the history of the competition at the time.
Having confirmed that the money was real, he donated the majority of it to a nature foundation that he created. The Anyama Foundation was named after the town that he grew up in Cote D’Ivoire, where he had seen truck loads of trees that had been chopped down taking them to other places. It was, he said, done because ‘the priority today is saving the planet’.
He isn’t the only example of someone who decided to use their winnings to help a good cause. In the case of Frances Connolly, it was actually more than 21 charitable foundations that were launched in their wake of her winning £114.9 million on New Year’s Day 2019.
This extended into the pandemic, when she sponsored the attempt of Teesside Philanthropic Society to get electronic tablets for care home residents, amongst others. If you want to be generous, then, you can follow in the footsteps of others and do just that.