Dealing with Finances

[CEF]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

You have limited time before this season, but a good long term (>1 year) solution is to form your own 501c3 non profit for this purpose.

This is the route that our team took, and there's probably still enough time to do it before build season starts, depending on your state laws and, possibly, how fast the state government is.

It's a two-step process:

(1) Form some sort of non-profit organization. The exact boundaries of this all vary state-by-state.

In some states, you can create what's called an "unincorporated nonprofit association" very easily -- you just need two people to say "Hey, lets do this." They will need to adopt bylaws (for the next part), but that's really about it.

In other states, you have to form a nonprofit corporation, which involves doing a filing with the state. This is a bit more complicated than setting up an unincorporated association, but not horribly.

(1.5) Get an EIN from the IRS, which you can do electronically.

(2) Ask the IRS to recognize you as a 501(c)(3). You can do this by filing a form 1023EZ with the IRS, which you can do electronically. The IRS says "you can expect to hear from us within 90 days," but they actually average about 2 weeks.

Then, you have the 501(c)(3) set up a bank account, and you're off to the races.

Total cost will be $275 - $600 depending on state. $275 is the IRS fee; the rest is whatever charge the state has.

It's not rocket science, but it's not trivial, either. If you have a lawyer among your parents, they can probably handle it if they're willing to stretch beyond their comfort zone a little bit (most lawyers don't deal with nonprofits much).