Lincoln County residents generosity ranks 6th in the state

Dec. 10--Lincoln County ranks sixth out of the top 10 counties with the most generous givers in New Mexico.

The study was released last week by SmartAsset, a personal finance technology company,

The study takes into account charitable contributions as a percentage of net income and the proportion of taxpayers that gave any amount in any given county, according to a summary from SmartAsset. New Mexico consists of 33 counties.

To determine the amount of money that people donate as a percentage of their income, Smart Asset staff calculated the net income of all people in each county. To do that, they looked at tax return data and accounted for federal, state and local taxes paid.

They also accounted for deductible entries, including mortgage interest, mortgage points and mortgage insurance payments. They then divided each county's total charitable donations by its total net income to see how much county residents are donating relative to their income, the summary stated.

"Next, we took the total number of tax returns with charitable contributions and divided them by the number of total tax returns for each county," the summary stated. "This gave us the proportion of people in each county who make charitable donations.

"We then indexed and equally weighted the two factors to yield our most charitable places index."

Lincoln County's most generous places index rating was 33 points, about half of that of Los Alamos County at 62.9 points.

The Top 10

1. Los Alamos

2. Santa Fe

3. Sandoval

4. Bernalillo

5. Eddy

6. Lincoln

7. Lee

8. San Juan

9. Taos

10. Valencia

The study and chart can be viewed at https://smartadvisormatch.com/data/most-generous-counties-2019/new-mexico.

Dianne Stallings can be contacted at [email protected].

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