Our old car (ie Trish’s car from her college days) finally got picked up by the American Cancer Society this morning. It was a bit of a weird process, since we actually donated it in November and expected it to be gone by Xmas, but they seemed to have lost track of us until yesterday.

We initially got the idea to donate the car because I see a number of billboards and hear radio ads touting organizations who accept car donations on behalf of other non-profits. After searching a bit online, I was surprised that there seemed to be quite few companies who accepted car donations for either a specific charity I’d never heard about (usually involving children) or a much wider swath of charities (resulting in the ‘you pick the charity you want to donate to’).

This all seemed really convenient – too convenient. And there seemed to be quite few options for donation, enough that I had to google further to find more info. I finally found one web page that confirmed my suspicions – that a lot (not all) of these organizations keep most of the proceeds to cover their ‘overhead,’ and in some instances the charity can get as little as 5% of the money from the car sale. So the page made a common sense suggestion – donating directly to a charity.

Googling ‘donate car cancer’ brought up the American Cancer Society as the first result, which we felt good about. There seem to be a number of other legit cancer charities as well, but after all the suspicions, we stuck with the one we knew was totally legit. The process involved filling out the form and mailing them the title with it and waiting. And waiting. And some more waiting, which I guess isn’t that unusual since it was the holiday season and plenty of other people probably wanted to donate before the year ended. We just happened to be the one who slipped through the cracks.

In the end, we’re happy to help a cause. It may not be the best decision financially (our accountant recommended against it if we could sell the car for more than $500), but it felt like the right decision.