Giving to charity can be a very noble thing and to many of us it comes quite naturally, unfortunately it’s also rather easy to give incorrectly, at least as far as taxes are concerned. To prevent a simple but all too common mistake, the Wall Street Journal offers a mantra: “Get the letter. Get the letter. Get the letter.” If you are making a donation of more than $250, the charity must properly acknowledge your donation before the IRS will, and that means a letter. Indeed, the IRS is surprisingly literal about this and refuses to bend or accept other…
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The IRS has issued a statement clarifying an otherwise confusing situation for retirees hoping to make charitable donations directly from an Individual Retirement Account (IRA). The confusion began when Congress extended the timeframe to make a 2010 charitable donation from your IRA. The deadline should have been December 31, 2010 –but recognizing that their own delays had caused problems, Congress extended the deadline to January 31 of this year. The IRA charitable donation is a popular rule, which had expired at the beginning of 2010, allowing taxpayers age 70-1/2 or older to donate up to $100,000 a year of IRA…
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The speculation won’t be over until the final bill is written up, passed, and signed into law, but with prospects looking reasonably good for the Obama Tax Proposal, it may be time to review your year-end tax planning. Reuter’s is ahead of the game and recently listed their top three suggestions: Timing on deductions and income: If you thought you were going to see increased taxes in 2011, you may have planned to push income forward into 2010 and deductions back into 2011. With the Bush-era tax cuts extended to all income brackets this won’t be the case and…
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