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united-states tax-deduction charitable-contributions

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April 12, 2025 Score: 9 Rep: 150,405 Quality: Expert Completeness: 20%

The deadline for charitable contributions is December 31st.

That end of year deadline is the reason for all the ads, emails, and other solicitations to get people to donate just before the deadline.

While it would be nice in some cases to be able to make a post-new years donation count as a previous years, the cutoff is 31 December.

Remember when trying to beat the deadline, in most years charitable contributions don't save you any money on taxes unless you are itemizing. Even when they are deductible they only save you at the most your contrition amount times your marginal tax rate.

April 12, 2025 Score: 12 Rep: 194,027 Quality: High Completeness: 10%

No, you cannot make retroactive charitable contributions. IRA is a special case since you have to have earned income to contribute to IRAs, and you may not know until the end of the year whether you have such income and how much. But there's no such issue with charitable contributions.