Charitable Giving with 2018 Tax Changes. We're going to be sharing strategies that will help your wallet match the size of your heart.

It's Brian Preston, the Money Guy, restoring order to your financial chaos, retirement, investing, taxes.

You've got financial questions, he's got financial answers. It's Brian Preston, the Money Guy.

Hey, Money Guy family, it's your host, Brian Preston. Go on beyond common sense to help every dollar that you make.

Go just a little bit further. We've got an exciting one that we're going to have to kind of move on today, though.

There's two things that are near and dear to our heart. It's being giving and being generous.

And then of course, not paying taxes. You have such a great story on why you have this giver's heart.

Can you share that with us? Yeah, so what's interesting is you know, I came up from very humble beginnings and I recognize that a lot of the opportunities that were given to me and a lot of the opportunities that I had were based on the generosity of others, whether it was families or people in my life pouring into me.

And so now that I've had some success and that I've had a chance to sort of give back, it's really important to me that I do that.

So I love when I can either talk with our clients or share information about ways that you can successfully help others or really efficiently help others.

And I don't know if that makes me the Ebenezer Scrooge that has the wake up call after the ghost coming deliver because my thing is, in addition to being generous is also avoiding taxes.

I mean, we know the two biggest things that really impact what's in your wallet besides the behavioral stuff is what you pay people in fees and also what you pay on the same taxes.

So if we can help minimize that, it leaves more dollars to work for you because we're always talking about that army of dollar bills.

Well, 2018 was an interesting, well, 2017 leading into 2018 has been an interesting year because a lot of tax changes and a lot of these tax changes will impact the way you think about giving as well as the way you do your tax preparation.

So we want to give you an overview of these changes as well as any concerns that it might be bringing forward.

It's the biggest one that's going to probably affect charitable giving is that the standard deduction, which is not a schedule itemize the duchts, that's where normally your charitable contributions flow through to the numbers increased drastically.

So there's a lot of folks who previously were able to deduct charitable contributions, they may not be deducting those anymore. That's probably the biggest change that happened in 2018.

Yeah, and then they also they they capped and eliminated several categories as well. So you probably heard people on the news media, especially if you live in a high income tax state.

They're talking about the cap on salt, which is the state and local taxes, as well as a lot of your miscellaneous itemize deductions.

You're those deductible miscellaneous expenses like tax prep fees, your unreimbursed employee expenses, going away starting in 2018.

So you need to be aware of those things.

And so what we've recognized is that if the obviously no one gives to charity, some most folks don't give to charity solely for the tax benefit.

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