We thought it would be worthwhile to remind our readers about ­popular approaches for significant year-end charitable giving. In particular, this article will review ­various charitable planning techniques whereby valuable income tax deductions can be generated currently, but the distributions to charitable recipients, and the decision ­making about which charitable recipients will benefit, may be postponed to later years.

Although charitable gifts can be made throughout the year, the end of the year is a popular time for donors to make final charitable giving decisions. This is mainly because it's the last opportunity to ­generate an income tax deduction for the year through a charitable gift. Also, as the holiday season gets underway, business affairs tend to slow down thereby providing some donors with the greatest giving capability extra time to reflect on more personal matters which include fulfilling charitable objectives. Of course, in many cases, another factor is that it's the only time of the year for many taxpayers to have a handle on the amount of surplus funds they have available for charitable giving after assessing their net income and expenditures for the year.

For folks who have had a particularly high income year (such as may be the case when a donor's business has had a particularly successful year, or, perhaps, due to a scheduled ROTH IRA conversion), it may be an ideal time to frontload gifts for future years. Such foresight allows a taxpayer to benefit in the current year from an income tax deduction attributable to the charitable contributions to be deployed further down the road. This can be accomplished in a number of ways—such as through a contribution to a donor advised fund, a private foundation, a charitable remainder trust, a charitable lead trust or even a gift of a remainder interest in a house. In considering such potential gifts, donors should check with their tax advisers (or run the numbers themselves) to ­understand how the potential phase out of their itemized deductions, based on a donor's income tax bracket, as well as general AGI limitations for charitable contributions, might impact the ­charitable deduction available for 2017. To the ­extent a ­deduction for charitable ­contributions might be limited in any particular year, generally the ­nondeductible amount will be ­available for use over the next 5 years as a “carry forward” 
item.