I asked friends to share their strategies and targets for charitable giving. In the spirit of “show me yours …” here’s our current plan:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/a> and have a new conversation every month about how much we can afford. Instead we can skip right to “who gets it this month?”<\/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 ‘long term’ support. Our major target at the moment is Family Health Ministries<\/a>. They’re the ones with whom we go to Haiti, and I trust them completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n