AARP Hearing Center
| Charitable giving traditionally spikes in December, and no wonder: The holidays tend to put you in a generous mood, and the approach of the year’s end signals a last chance to do some tax planning. But while your sense of charity may be unchanged this year, financial considerations may not matter anymore, as a result of the 2017 overhaul of U.S. tax laws.
Here’s why: In recent years, you typically could earn a tax break on your charitable gifts only when you itemized them as deductions. And up to this year, about 1 in 5 Americans used this tax break, according to the Tax Policy Center. That included 17 percent of middle-income earners, who saw an average benefit of $420.
But the new law changes the math. The 2018 standard deduction was nearly doubled, to $12,000 for single filers and $24,000 for those married and filing jointly. Plus, the write-off for state and local taxes was capped at $10,000.
As a result, the number of filers who will deduct charitable contributions this year will fall from 36 million to 15 million, the Tax Policy Center predicts. “Except for those with the highest incomes, the charitable deduction will be largely irrelevant,” says Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the center.
The impact on charities? Nearly a 5 percent drop this year in donations, experts project. “You want to give because you’re charitably inclined, but people do like getting a tax break,” says Jeff Levine, a financial planner in Garden City, N.Y.
You still have some opportunities, however, to be rewarded for your generosity. Here are three ways to make that happen:
Group your gifts
One way to join the 1 in 10 tax filers expected to itemize this year is to do something called bunching. With this strategy, you shift as many deductible expenses (for example, medical expenses) as you can into one year so that you can itemize and then take the standard deduction the next year or two.
