The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act raises the standard deduction for married couples to $24,000, $18,000 for those filing as head of household, and $12,000 for single taxpayers. For those taxpayers with mortgage interest deductions not exceeding $15,000 and who do not have regularly-occurring deductions, there may be a way to derive some benefit from the standard deduction, even with generous charitable giving. A possible tax-saving measure is bunching contributions. As an example, you could have made all your charitable contributions prior to 2018. After this donation, you would wait until 2019 to make another charitable contribution. Your itemized deduction would be, at most, $10,000 of state and local tax. A married couple implementing this technique would gain an additional $14,000 in tax deductions by utilizing the standard deduction every other year.
See Bernie Kent, Upper-Income Taxpayers Can Benefit from the Standard Deduction: What You Need to Do Now, Forbes, December 18, 2017.
Special thanks to Bob Levy for bringing this article to my attention.
