 So we'll get into that in more detail, but if you're in high cost of living states like California and New York, for example, then it's quite likely that even an average home could push you over to itemizing. But if you're in an area where you don't have as high cost of living areas, you might see situations still where you're purchasing a home and people are still taking the standard deduction because it's fairly high and they're not taking on as big a loan with the standard deduction or paying as much of the property taxes in that case. So in practice then, the general idea that we wanna keep in mind with the standard and itemized deductions, we wanna have an idea of what the standard deductions are, when people might itemize, what kind of things push people over from the standard to itemizing, usually purchasing a home is the big one. And when that might take place so we can explain that to clients and then determine when it would be worthwhile for us to compile the added information of the itemized deductions because we think it could possibly clear the threshold of the standard deduction. Okay, so we're down here on line 12, standard deduction or itemized deduction, note that the normal standard deductions that we talked about in the past are on the left side of the form. So we have the single filer at the 12, 9, 50, doubling that to the 25, 9, head of household at the 19, 4. We'd have to clear those thresholds before it would be beneficial for us to take the itemized deductions. The itemized deductions then would be populated on the schedule A. So here's a schedule A, this is the itemized deductions and we won't, we don't have the full schedule A here but these are the items you can see on the left-hand side if you go to the schedule A and you can look at the medical expenses, taxes, interest and so on and so forth. We'll dive into each of those in more detail, at least most of them. So these are the standard deductions which you want to be able to keep in mind because these are the hurdles that you need to clear. So if someone is nowhere near clearing these hurdles, then you can be quite certain you're just gonna take the standard deduction fairly easy. So this is from the left side of the tax return that we saw before right here. And so that's gonna be the single, is gonna be the 12, 9, 50, married, you double that. So you might just wanna memorize 12, 9, 50, double it to 25, 9, head of households in the middle between those two, 19, 4, those are the general hurdles. So if you have a single filer and you're like, they're nowhere near having itemized deductions up to 12, 9, 50, you're fairly close, you're fairly sure they're gonna be taking just the standard deduction, 25, 900, fairly large number for the married couple. So if they're nowhere near that, you could say, okay, they're just gonna take the standard deduction. And then we have these added components if they were over 65 or blind or both. So in those situations, we up the standard deductions for those particular situations. And that's what this table is doing on the right. All right, itemized deductions. Use schedule A form 1040 to figure your itemized deductions. In most cases, your federal income tax will be less if you take the larger of your itemized deduction or your standard deduction. So we're gonna figure the two, if the itemized deductions are greater, we'll typically do that one. Obviously tax software is kind of useful to do these calculations because it'll help us to determine what the best tax benefit situation would be. But if we're nowhere near the itemized deduction, it might not be worth compiling all the data related to it. Because we're just gonna take the standard deduction. So if you itemize, you can deduct a part of your medical and dental expenses and amounts you paid for certain taxes, interests, contributions and other expenses. So these are the categorizations. We'll dive into each of these categories, most of them at least, in more detail. You can also deduct certain casualty and theft losses. So if you and your spouse paid expenses jointly and are filing separate returns for 2022 SIPLA publication 504 to figure the portion of joint expenses that you can claim as itemized deductions. Caution, don't include Schedule A items deducted elsewhere such as Form 1040, 1040 SR or Schedule C, E or F. Now this gets a little bit messy because you can imagine situations where a deduction might have been included on a Schedule C or a Schedule E and you can't, what I would call double dip. You can't take two deductions for the same thing. You can't say I paid this much for this thing and I'm gonna deduct it over here like I paid mortgage interest or whatever and I deducted it on the Schedule E and then I'm also gonna deduct it on the Schedule A. That would be double dipping. You paid the one amount, you don't get two benefits from it. So oftentimes we have to then think where would we get the best benefit or where does that particular deduction most properly belong and we might have to allocate something like a mortgage interest or something. We have a mortgage, a reverse mortgage. Paid off mortgage. To where it properly would be long a Schedule C, Schedule E and Schedule A. So we'll get into some of those issues. What's new? Mortgage interest premium. The election to deduct qualified mortgage, I'm sorry, mortgage insurance premium. The election to deduct qualified mortgage insurance premiums you paid under mortgage insurance contract issued after December 31st, 2006 in connection with a home acquisition debt that was secured by your first or second home doesn't apply for tax years beginning after December 31st, 2021. Then we have the charitable contributions for non itemers, itemizers. So the election to claim a charitable contribution for taxpayers who do not itemize their deductions expired December 31st, 2021. So it's kind of interesting a few years ago they increased the standard deduction to try to simplify the tax codes because now more people can just take the standard deduction instead of doing the itemized deductions but you can kind of predict what's gonna happen when they try to simplify the code like that because a lot of the favorite categories that were in the itemized deductions no longer have as much influence. So you can see, for example, with the charitable deductions they kind of seeped over out of the itemized deductions on the Schedule A, allowing charitable deductions actually on the first page of the Form 1040. So that was kind of an interesting development but now that has expired. So now that has been removed again. So if you're gonna take the charitable deductions they're gonna have to be taken on the itemized deductions. It'll be kind of interesting going forward because once again, as it currently stands the standard deduction is making the itemized deductions those special categories less relevant than they were in the past. So we might see more laws in the future trying to make some of those items more relevant by possibly putting them somewhere else outside of the Schedule A or possibly attempting to lower back down the standard deduction to make those itemized components more relevant. This is kind of like the push and pull that we end up seeing with the tax code. So in any case, health coverage tax credit. The health coverage tax credit has expired if you are a trade adjustment assistance, a TAA recipient and alternative TAA which is an ATAA recipient, a re-employment TAA which is an RTAA recipient or a pension benefit guarantee corporation which is a PBGC payee, then you will no longer use form 8885 before completing Schedule A line one. Then we have the standard mileage rates. Now note when we think about the standard mileage rates the first thing that usually comes to most people's mind is for applicability to the Schedule C but there's different rates depending on what your mileage is for. We're talking here for medical reasons because it's being applied to the Schedule A. So the standard mileage rate allowed for operating expenses for a car when you use it for medical reasons increased to 18 cents a mile for January 1st through June 30th, 2022 and 22 cents a mile from July 1st through December 31st, 2022. So those could differ then from other standard mileage rates you might use for other reasons. Obviously we've got this difference in the middle of the year that complicates things. If you're trying to calculate that standard mileage rate note that the software is often helpful for those types of calculations. So the 2022 rate for use of your vehicles to do volunteer work for certain charitable organizations remains at 14 cents a mile. So they haven't been like increasing these as steadily as they generally do for like the mileage rates for a business like the Schedule C mileage rates if you were applying mileage rates for vehicle use related to a business, a sole proprietorship, which we'll talk about in a separate section when we do the Schedule C discussions.