I asked friends to share their strategies and targets for charitable giving. In the spirit of \u201cshow me yours \u2026\u201d here\u2019s our current plan:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We\u2019ve got a budget that works pretty well these days. It took about 3 years of effort to get good at home budgeting \u2013 and it turns out that you don\u2019t 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\u2019s possible to see where your money is going and to make changes \u2013 a little at a time \u2013 in a couple of categories at a time. We used to be really bad at this \u2013 we got better with practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Within that budget, there\u2019s space for charity. We\u2019re shooting for \u201c10% of the monthly paycheck\u201d, but we\u2019re not there yet. As atgatg<\/a> put it, 10% feels like a substantial, yet achievable and sustainable fraction. We certainly won\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So anyway, I\u2019ve 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\u2019ve got to spend \u2013 and that it\u2019s 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\u2019t have to go to redmed<\/a> and have a new conversation every month about how much we can afford. Instead we can skip right to \u201cwho gets it this month?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018long term\u2019 support. Our major target at the moment is Family Health Ministries<\/a>. They\u2019re the ones with whom we go to Haiti, and I trust them completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n