Should You Make a Charitable Contribution from your IRA?

Good news for taxpayers over the age of 70 1/2. Congress has voted to make permanent the exclusion from income of up to $100,000 per person, per year, for Individual Retirement Account (IRA) distributions which are given directly to charities. The President is expected to sign the bill. This law will end the uncertainty which has existed for the past several years when taxpayers were trying to decide whether to direct their IRA distributions to charity. Congress generally did not get around to extending the expired tax legislation known as "extenders" until very late in the year. One year the extenders were not passed until the January of the subsequent year and were applied retroactively. Now that you are able to plan for charitable contributions from IRAs, is this something you should be doing?