Hi. I'm interested in donating ~50% of my lifetime disposable income. For context, I'm a salaried professional making mid-6-figures. I've lately been thinking about this, and realized by accident that there are many nuances to my plan that I'm not very knowledgable on. Such as:
1. I had originally planned to donate most of it directly from my 401k savings, in order to minimize taxes. I just realized however, that the IRS only allows "direct giving" on IRAs, and has a 100k limit as well
2. I also realized recently that there is a ~20-50% cap on the tax deductions you can claim per year, for charitable giving. In isolation, this seemingly benefits amortizing my donations over many years.
3. On the flip side to the above, because of the recent SALT cap in the tax bill, I wouldn't be getting any tax benefits for the first $14,000 in donations that I make every year. In isolation, this seemingly benefits lumping together my donations into a handful of tax years
I would love to hear others' advice on the most tax efficient way to handle the above. But that is actually not the main reason for this post.
More generally speaking, I've come to realize that I may have other financial blind spots that haven't occurred to me yet. Are there any articles or discussions or forums that are focused on the financial-planning aspects of making 5-6 figure charitable contributions?
Even though you may not get a full federal deduction for charitable contributions due to the higher standard deduction, you should pay less state tax. I ran a simple Turbotax calc for 2019 for a joint return with 150K$ income and 10K$ in mortgage interest. Base fed/ca tax was $19976/$7312. With 14K$ of donations, the state dropped to $5973. Bumping up donations by another 14K$ yields taxes of $16687/$4579. So the first 14K$ donation saves ~$1339 and an additional 14K$ saves an additional ~$4572. As you donate more, your tax savings will also start to reduce due to being in a lower tax bracket.
Caveat: don't trust these numbers - run your own analysis. These $$ are for USA/CA.