I don’t recall my parents giving to charity. Maybe they did, but they never talked about it or modeled it with their kids. Instead, I had to learn about giving as a young adult. I remember shrugging off Development Office requests from Mount Holyoke College, but got more enthused about helping the community after attending a United Way drive at work in my twenties. After joining a Unitarian Universalist Church, I’ve had plenty of […]
Sadly, in 2023 you’re going not going to be able to deduct any of your charitable gifts on the front of your tax return, as an adjustment to income, anymore. Congress tried it and then dropped it. It might come back someday, but for now, it’s gone. That was for a very minor amount, $300 per person. For anyone giving substantially more, though, here are some other ways to strategize around giving: Create […]
RMDs are suspended for 2020! That means that we do not HAVE to take a distribution. You still can, of course, you just aren’t being required to. It’s still a good idea to use up low tax brackets with IRA distributions even if you’re not being forced. I’ll be revisiting this for all my ProsperiTea Planning retainers during our regular tax planning meetings. If you’ve already taken them in 2020 you can roll it back in within […]
The Tuesday after Thanksgiving this year is designated locally as “Giving Tuesday.” A company called Razoo has figured out how to gamify giving. I don’t want to stop anyone from playing if they’re so inclined. Far be it from me to tell you social media has no redeeming qualities. But there are a lot of different ways to think about charitable giving. First, it’s good for you. There’s a fairly new field of study called […]
I work closely with the finances of hundreds (and over the years, thousands) of people. I learned early on that income doesn’t correlate to happiness once you get past starvation level. But in recent years I’ve really been noticing that feeling rich is almost entirely unrelated to income levels. For the past year or so I’ve been trying to nail down what being “wealthy” actually means. I think a better term for “wealthy” is […]
