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Special Report
DO MORE GOOD
Wishing you could give more—or more effectively— to the causes that matter to you? Here’s how. BY LESLIE GARISTO PFAFF
It’s the end of the year—I mean the very end of the year, the ball-dropping, last-square-on-the calendar finale—and I’m once again crunching to make my charitable donations before the fireworks flare and the first notes of “Auld Lang Syne” are struck up. I give for the reasons most of us do—I look at the world, see all the broken places, and hope that I can help to fix at least a few of them. And I give at the last minute because I’m a habitual procrastinator who nevertheless wants to take advantage of the Internal Revenue Service’s current-year tax deduction for charitable giving. But lately I’ve begun to wonder if there might be a better way—one that would allow me to give without the attendant stress, and maybe even give more. And in this I suspect I’m not alone. As a whole, Bergenites are a charitable bunch. By one metric, known as the contributor index—arrived at by dividing the number of residents who list charitable donations on their tax returns by the total number of residents who file tax returns—we’re the fifth most generous county in New Jersey. On the other hand, we’re the state’s fourth wealthiest county,
and we have the state’s highest amount of disposable income (and the country’s tenth highest), so we’ve got a lot of Benjamins lying around that could be doing more good in the world. And so we have to ask ourselves, as I’d asked myself: Could we be more efficient—and yes, even more generous—givers?
DEDUCT WISELY The answer, according to Stephanie Burke, an Oakland-based, advice-only financial advisor, is yes—for most of us. “When it comes to charitable giving,” she says, “the more the IRS allows you to deduct for tax purposes, the more money you have in your pocket and the more you’re then able to give.” But taking a charitable deduction is about to get a lot more complicated. What you should know: • Decide whether—and when—to itemize. If you’re among the 90 percent of taxpayers who don’t itemize deductions, you won’t be able to deduct your charitable contributions in 2025. But starting next year, thanks to what the Trump Administration called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), individuals BERGENMAG.COM
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filing singly will be able to deduct up to $1,000 and couples filing jointly can deduct up to $2,000. If you don’t plan to itemize this year or next, says Burke, “you might consider donating on Jan. 1 of 2026 rather than in 2025, because then you can take the charitable donation.” (She notes that this only applies to cash donations and not non-cash items such as clothing and furniture.) If you don’t itemize but make large charitable contributions, Burke suggests you consider bundling—combining several years’ gifts in a single year and itemizing your deductions in that year. Keep in mind that the OBBBA will also affect those who regularly itemize their deductions: Starting in 2026, itemizers will be allowed to deduct only those amounts that exceed 0.5 percent of their adjusted gross income (AGI). If your AGI is $100,000, say, and you’ve given $5,000 to charity, $500 of those donations won’t be deductible. LET CHARITIES HELP YOU That’s the hard-cash part of the equation, but there are also ways to make giving easier without that
DECEMBER 2025
11/11/25 2:44 PM