Am still having trouble reconciling why TurboTax is not allowing all of my cash donations. There's plenty of publications to read, but none of them explains my problem. My wife and I are filing a joint itemized return. This year is different from most years in that our Adjusted Gross Income is around 75,000 and we have cash donations of around 40,000. TurboTax is allowing only 12,000 in cash donations. One of our cash donations was to a church for 24,000 (all by itself = just one check). In effect, TurboTax is denying roughly 29,000 of our cash donations. We can't afford to let this drop. We need to get it fixed or understand exactly what's going on. None of the publications have helped. Do I have to go directly to someone at TurboTax? Am I going to get charged money to have someone at TurboTax explain/fix this?
I didn't have an issue getting a full amount of 40,000 to be used on the Sched A. Cash $25,000 to one and $15,000 to another. With a 75,000 AGI.
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Two things to check:
1) Examine your form 1040/1040-SR and make sure your expected ~$75,000 AGI is on line 11. IF it's much lower, then the deduction may be limited because your donations exceeded 60% of AGI.
(or maybe you mis-entered some of your income, so that your AGI is lower than you expected. If you are retired, the $$ amount of your Social Security included in AGI may be lower than you expected too.)
2) After moving on from the table of charities, there is a question about the ones you donated to...
"Are any of the charities you donated to a fraternal society, veterans' organization, nonprofit cemetery, or private foundation?" Along with a series of checkboxes
Checking YES to any of them, can very well limit your cash deduction allowed for the ones you said Yes to. The church donation should not be labelled a YES....but i don't know who else you donated to.
Thanks for your response. My problem was caused by a "serious" overestimation of my AGI. After considerable research, I found the complete formula for estimating AGI. Once I understood, the problem went away. It would be helpful if that formula (spreadsheet) was available to everyone on social security.
Glad you found it. IF you have unused portion of your charity contributions, that could not be used this year...then they carry-over to be used on next year's tax return. So keep that in mind as you think of what you are giving to charities this year.
The carryover amount should show up in next year's filing as a charity deduction..as long as:
1) you use the same TTX account next year (so that the 2026 file can get the correct amount), and
2) you have entered all possible charity donations in this year's (2025) filing...even if the total isn't getting used.