I asked friends to share their strategies and targets for charitable giving. In the spirit of “show me yours …” here’s our current plan:
We’ve got a budget that works pretty well these days. It took about 3 years of effort to get good at home budgeting – and it turns out that you don’t need too much cool software at all. You just need a way to track expenses by major category (auto:fuel, groceries, books, dining out, etc) and the discipline to reconcile it every month. With a few months of real data in hand, it’s possible to see where your money is going and to make changes – a little at a time – in a couple of categories at a time. We used to be really bad at this – we got better with practice.
Within that budget, there’s space for charity. We’re shooting for “10% of the monthly paycheck”, but we’re not there yet. As atgatg put it, 10% feels like a substantial, yet achievable and sustainable fraction. We certainly won’t be 10% less happy if we put 10% of our cash into making positive change in the world rather than (for example) eating more sushi.
So anyway, I’ve got a system where I know my monthly budget for charity. This means that I can write checks with impunity. That might seem trivial, but knowing how much I’ve got to spend – and that it’s not coming out of anything else (i.e: yes, we can still go to the movies even though we gave $100 to whoever) is a huge psychological advantage. I don’t have to go to redmed and have a new conversation every month about how much we can afford. Instead we can skip right to “who gets it this month?”
Within that, we looked for a split between major ongoing support for a few organizations and minor support for lots of them. Not knowing any better, we just split it 50/50 between major and minor. Every month, 50% of the budget goes to the group(s) who are getting ‘long term’ support. Our major target at the moment is Family Health Ministries. They’re the ones with whom we go to Haiti, and I trust them completely.
The other 50% is up for grabs on a monthly basis. I’ve got a stack of potential charities pinned to my corkboard. When I get a request for money, or when a new charity comes to my attention, they go on the stack. When I do the bills at the beginning of the month, I pick up that stack and go through it with redmed. We sort it and then write checks for what seem like reasonable amounts (relative to the group) until we’re out of money for the month. Sometimes it’s a single check to the top of the stack, sometimes groups want a couple bucks here and couple of bucks there and we get to support several of them.
If a group doesn’t make anywhere near the top of the stack for a long time – I usually discard them. No hard feelings – just keeps the stack manageable.
If something urgent comes up (“hey! My kid is walking 10k for charity, can you help out?”) we’re flexible enough to put a bit of next month’s money into it, and I’ve got a way to be sure that I don’t spend the money twice.
Beyond looking for “balance,” I don’t have a specific system to manage:
* Personal interest (old college clubs, etc)
* Local vs. global
* Targeted (this one classroom) vs. general (women’s education worldwide)
* Even semi-selfish (NPR) vs. totally altruistic (stoves for Darfur)
Anyway, that’s what we do.
