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Making Charitable Donations from your IRA

If you have reached age 70½ and are evaluating charitable giving options, you may consider making a charitable donation directly from your IRA.

The benefits

Contributions made directly from your IRA to a charity reduce the taxable portion of your IRA distributions and count toward your annual required minimum distribution (RMD).

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CARES Act Distribution Information

Under the CARES Act, individuals were eligible to take $100,000 of coronavirus-related distributions from retirement plans. In addition to the distributions being free of penalty there are also accommodations with the IRS for claiming the income as well as repayment of the distributions.

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The Secure Act: How it can possibly affect you

The Secure Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement) was signed into law on Friday, December 20 2019. Below please find some of the more important highlights of the new law. TD Ameritrade is working on accommodating the new rules with systems and internal process updates as they become effective January 1, 2020.

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’Tis the Season

The period between Thanksgiving and the end-of-year holiday season would seem like a sleepy time for financial planners, but in fact it is anything but. You might be surprised at how much activity takes place on behalf of you and your investments in the final month of the year.

For instance? Even though this has been a good year in the markets, not all investments will have gained value. This is the last opportunity to harvest any losses we find in taxable accounts, by selling investments that have gone down and “booking” the loss. Then we can look for investments that have gained value, sell some of those to offset the losses, and thereby save capital gains taxes in the future. Up to $3,000 of ordinary income can be offset by investment losses as well.

This is also the time of year when mutual fund companies post, in advance, the amount of ordinary income and capital gain distributions they will make to their shareholders. Since the value of the shares drops by the amount that is distributed, this would seem like a non-event performance-wise. But in fact some mutual funds are poised to make 20% or even 30% distributions, and this cash is immediately taxable, unlike gains in the share values, which are only realized when you decide to sell. By selling funds before the distributions, and buying them back later, we can reduce your tax bill this year.

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