If you give to charity and you itemize, there is a change coming that a lot of generous people are going to walk straight into without warning. Starting with the 2026 tax year, the return you will file early next year, a new law puts not one but two separate cuts on the charitable deduction. They stack on top of each other, and for higher earners they take a real bite out of the tax benefit of giving.
Archives for September 2026
“We Gave Them a Discount. Can We Write It Off?”
Here is a real question a client asked me recently, cleaned up only slightly. “We gave a 501(c)(3) a discount off the full price on a project, and they sent us a letter confirming the discount. Can we claim that as a donation?”
Giving is good, and some giving is deductible, but the deduction follows the rules, not your generosity.
You Changed Last Year’s Books. Here’s What You Just Set in Motion.
Here is a situation I run into more and more often. A business owner, or their bookkeeper, goes back into a prior year that is already closed and makes a change. Maybe an invoice was missed and gets added. Maybe something was sitting in the wrong account and gets moved. Maybe a number just gets cleaned up because it looked off. The change feels small, so it gets made quietly and everyone moves on.
The problem is that a closed year is not really a quiet place. The moment you change a number in a period that has already been reported, you have touched two different systems that both have rules about it, your tax return and your financial statements, and neither one lets you slip a change in without consequences. This week’s Three Things Thursday is about what actually happens when you reach back into a closed year, and the one simple habit that keeps a small change from becoming a real headache.
The Augusta Rule: Tax-Free Rent Is Real, But Not the Way TikTok Says
You have probably seen the video. Some supposed multi-millionaire explains how he bought a Ferrari using a tax strategy involving his house, and the comments are full of people who think they have just found the secret the IRS does not want them to know. That version is total nonsense. But buried underneath the nonsense is a strategy that is completely real, hard-coded into the tax law, and genuinely useful if you run it correctly.