I think thinking in terms of percentage of income doesn't work, because the lower your income, the lower a percentage you can afford to give away. I have found it better to think of it as a percentage of your non-essential expenses. e.g, if you spend $500 per month on non-essential things (eating out, movies, netflix, amazon impulse buys etc.), then you can afford giving away 10% of it ($50 per month) to charity.

As each of my children have left home I have had the following conversation with them:

You didn't get here by yourself. You know some of the people who have generously contributed to you. There are more than you know. The ones who stick out are relatively wealthy. Do you think they are generous because they are wealthy? I submit to you that normal wealth does not make it easier to be generous. A person rich enough to buy a boat has just created more demands on their wealth. A big house usually involves more ongoing financial obligations than a small house.

For most people, generosity is not a function of net worth. It is a matter of character. You can make it part of your character beginning today. You are about to leave my house and face the world on your own. There will be challenges. Money will be tight. "Starving college students" isn't always an amusing tagline. I encourage you to make a point of doing something generous. Maybe commit to giving $1 to a random person on the street every week. Maybe donate plasma. Maybe volunteer to be a Salvation Army bell ringer. But make a point to do something frequent. At least once a month. Even when tuition is due, or rent. Even if just an hour of your time. It's up to you. But do it regularly and relentlessly. If you ever get to where it is easy, it is probably because your circumstances have improved but your generosity has not kept pace.

Agreed, Some people are more generous by nature, some are not. For those who are not, one of the main reasons is that they are scared that giving away money now will put them at a disadvantaged position later. Putting donations in the terms of current spending helps alleviate some anxiety.

That's how I do it. I don't have a 6+ figure salary, or tons of disposable income, so I can't afford to give 10% of my income without reducing how much I put into savings. One thing I do have is more time on my hands than the average person. So for things like open source projects that I benefit greatly from, I always try to give some portion of my time with things like improving documentation, always submitting detailed bug reports, or writing updated versions of tutorials that are out of date.

On the other hand, it's easy to "cook the books" by classifying expenses as essential in your own mind. Or rather, most people (especially the sorts of relatively affluent people who could realistically give 10% of their income to charity) don't really budget that concretely. They just sort of have a lump of money left after paying basic expenses and then spend it on whatever strikes their fancy.

Making a commitment up front to donate 10% just creates a situation in which its not any sort of conscious decision to give $X to charity. You just operate as if your taxes were 10% higher or your income is 10% lower and go from there.

Jewish tradition says to give from 10%-20%. I have been giving 20% for the last few years and that is exactly how it works. The first thing I do when receiving my paycheck is putting 1/5 into a separate account which must be used for charity. It is anyhow all accounted for with monthly donations to various charities. I find it to be incredibly empowering personally, as I can support the charities I choose without agonizing over each donation. I already made that commitment a few years ago.

WRT income, I am thankfully able to afford my lifestyle, but I currently earn 5 digits a year and always have (I am still young). I don't regret a penny I gave.

Shouldn't it be a % of (income - essential expenses), rather than % of non-essential spending?

If you're very frugal, you'd end up giving away a very small amount of money, saving all the rest... Saving is super important, but giving money to effective charities is also a great way to use your money.

To take a typical example of someone that might be reading HN, any software engineer working in NY or the Bay Area can easily give away $10K a year while saving enough money to get a very cozy retirement.

I am not sure if you can easily give away that much money. If it were easy, people would already be doing it. Buying a nice home is a distant dream even for many software engineers in the bay area for example, and future education and healthcare costs are very unpredictable. Putting it in terms of money you are already spending helps put it in context.

There are many beneficial things people can do but are not doing. For example: investing your money. Many people aren't doing it (instead leaving cash in their bank account for a large part of their life) out of pure laziness/ignorance of its benefits.

Let's assume you're a junior SWE in the Bay Area, making $130K. Annual take home is ~$85,753 according to [1] You pay $3K in rent (nice 1 bedroom apt in South Bay, or just a decent one in SF), $2K for various expenses, that's $60K and you're left with $25K.

This is for a junior engineer, and granted they might want to save $25K vs $15K (arguable; I would consider those savings don't matter much in the long run, the goal being to quickly increase your salary by advancing your career), but an engineer in a large tech company is making closer to $250 - $300K total comp, and you'll see that the $10K donation isn't making much of a dent in your savings at that point.

[1] https://smartasset.com/taxes/california-paycheck-calculator#...

> but giving money to effective charities is also a great way to use your money

Those charities aren't going to help you when you're retired and subsiding on a meagre state pension. Or if there's a resurgent global pandemic and you lose your job and home.

Save first, always.

I mentioned that you can do this on top of saving money. Just saving money with no goal in mind (or with the goal of buying a $1M house) is IMHO not always worth it.

Absolutely for saving to be able to survive ~1 year as life is very unpredictable, but we're talking about altruism here... Let's for a second assume we all want to have the largest positive impact on other people, is that $1M really the best way to spend your money to both improve your and other people's life? Could you instead buy a house/work elsewhere, pay $400K, and invest $600K in saving a hole bunch of people from certain death / extreme poverty?

I'll echo this sentiment and add that during my career I've experienced a number of ups and downs. During the downs, when it felt like I've wasted years of my life for something that went nowhere, what always felt worthwhile to me was the time I spent doing charity work and volunteering. You don't need to be a Feeney to make a huge difference. Many of the people on HN are insanely well educated and knowledgable and have skills and traits that can be put to good use helping others or inspiring a new generation, especially among the less privileged. Just spending an hour or two a week over a period of years can yield tremendous results in the lives of others.

That point about cost effectiveness is what always leaves a bitter taste in my mouth when donating. I didn't realize people put lists of recommendations together, that's nice to see.

But how would you go about verifying any stated claims?

Givewell's process is detailed at https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/process

It's very plausible to disagree with some of their choices. For instance, you might be interested in efficient charitable giving within your country, and bite the bullet of "this means I value starving africans a lot less." The important part is to prompt charities to document costs and outcomes in general (preferably to a scientific standard), so that people can make more informed choices about their donations no matter their values.

This site ranks charities based on their finances, with breakdowns on different axes: https://www.charitynavigator.org/

Overhead is a bad thing to look at: http://overheadmyth.com/

If an organization cures blindness for $20 through cataract surgeries in developing nations, and another spends $40,000 to train a seeing eye dog for a single individual, we are looking at ratios of 1:1000 in terms of effectiveness. The amount spent on 'overhead' is irrelevant!

I think a big part of the Feeney story is that he didn't just donate money. He got involved. He took an interest and made sure he was making a difference, or at least was doing his best to make a difference. He gave his time and his personal effort.

I remember watching a documentary on him some time ago. There was some issue he was interested in. I think it involved a community in Ireland. He put his money into the issue, but it didn't have the desired outcome. He looked closely at what they were doing and decided the strategy wasn't a failure, so he committed some astounding amount more with specific strings attached. His strings forced others to put skin in the game with him. Then they worked together towards their desired outcome.

How do you make sure that your donation to the blind center will get that roof repaired? Grab a hammer.

This assumes Feeney is more qualified to know where his money will be most effective and that no one else is out there already doing a ton of research validating the effectiveness of different charities. (both questionable)

I think this could be a convenient excuse that keeps some from donating more money (I'll wait until I can spend time creating my own charity / doing some hands-on vetting on who gets my money). There are already plenty of organizations (GiveWell, OpenPhil, etc.) that have very good research on the impact different charities have, often with RCTs on those interventions proving how much each $ buys (in terms of quality-adjusted life years or else).

If the roofing example didn't illustrate the point, let me try again.

Donate $100 to a literacy campaign, then volunteer for 30 minutes each week at a beneficiary elementary school to have a struggling reader read to you from one of the books your money purchased. You don't have to buy the book. You don't have to decide which books are purchased. You don't have to decide which student gets to read the books. But you can be involved enough to know that books were purchased and the students are benefiting. And your extra effort makes the $100 so much more fulfilling.

While it's great to get fulfillment out of your philanthropic activities, and it may incite you to do more; I hope you keep focus on the main goal: helping others.

A $3 donation (via Against Malaria Foudation) buys a bednet that protects about 2 people from malaria for 3-4 years. As a donor you don't get the satisfaction of meeting the individuals you help (though you can look at some photos). But is the fulfillment you seek important enough to donate to a charity that is a thousand times less efficient at converting dollars to benefits-for-others?

A good suggestion here is to "purchase your fuzzies separately". That is, give to the most cost-effective charities you can find, regardless of how fulfilling it feels. And then find the most fulfilling activity you can, and maximize that until you had your fill.

Agree whole-heartedly that everyone should give more. If you find a way to give automatically (ideally from your paycheck, not your credit card) you never even feel it.

It's important to recognize that some causes are not as cost-effective as others, but are still worthy. I'll use my own donations as an example:

  1. Against Malaria Foundation - widely recognized as one of the charities that can do the most for a dollar. Malaria nets cost about $2-3 and it's estimated every ~$2500 given to them saves a life from Malaria.
  2. Larkin Street Youth Services - helping homeless youth in San Francisco (where I lived). A very expensive city and they provide not just housing but education, job services, medical care, etc.  Helping just one full-service client can cost $40,000 a year.

I don't think giving to both of these causes makes me inconsistent. After all, no number of malaria nets in Africa can take a person off the street in San Francisco. And I want both outcomes. I believe nobody should die of malaria, and nobody should be homeless. So I give to both.

Thank you for sharing that. I think at the outset, whenever we all discuss donations, no one should be bullied or told they are doing something wrong. Helping people should be encouraged, even if there are better ways to help.

I think it's a productive discussion when those involved learn something new. My hope is always to share the counterintuitive finding that in today's world we are able to help people a tremendous amount with (relative-to-our-lives) very little financial involvement.

I hope that when people learn about this remarkable fact, they reflect on their goals and consider giving to more-cost-effective charities, and to give more overall.

I'm thrilled to hear you too give to one of GiveWell's top recommended charities!

Cheers!

I mean, props for donating, and I believe that you want both outcomes, but for the sake of completeness the revealed-preferences meaning of your giving patterns is that the marginal badness of a SF youth being homeless is equivalent to 16 africans dying. Like, I'm not saying that to denigrate your choices, it's just an inherent fact of donation splitting.

https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/post/2013/11/should-you-only...

I believe that article calls me out in point #6:

> Bad Reason #6: I care about multiple issues! I want to end disease so I give to an anti-disease charity, I want to end crime so I give to an anti-crime charity, and I want to end poverty so I give to an anti-poverty charity.

> Yes, we have many different values. But at any given time, one of these will be the most pressing; one of them will be easiest to make headway on. And that's the one we should concentrate on. By focusing all our resources on one cause, we have the greatest chance of accomplishing our cause.

It's not bad logic, but I don't personally buy into it. It may be easy when dividing up a pile of cash, but it's harder when you take it down to a personal level. Imagine if someone on the street says "Can you spare a dollar, I am hungry?", could you look them in the eye and say "No, I gave your dollar to end malaria in Africa. It's more effective". I certainly can't do that! And having met so many of the clients at Larkin Street and knowing how deserving they are of a better life, I can't do it to them either.

Furthermore it's a pretty slippery slope to say that every dollar I spend reveals my marginal preferences when compared to every other dollar I spend. I don't think every person who buys a new laptop for $2500 is saying they'd rather have a faster web browser than save a life from malaria. We don't expect everyone to operate that way. Spending money is a hybrid between emotion and rationality, and I think that's ok.

> I don't think every person who buys a new laptop for $2500 is saying they'd rather have a faster web browser than save a life from malaria.

So there's this thing called "revealed preferences". I have a $2000 laptop, and I was very aware when I bought it that I was saying that this laptop was more important than an african life. I don't have a moral defense for this. I think it's not so much that people don't prefer a laptop to an african child surviving - they do prefer the laptop - but they don't want to perceive themselves to be the sort of people who prefer a laptop to an african child surviving. And so they don't think about it, and get angry at you when you make them think about it. But they still act in that way.

Personally, I sort of feel I'd be a lot more ready to donate a fraction of my income to worthy causes if everyone else was willing to help as well. Maybe we need to run charities like very long term kickstarters - say "we need X trillion dollars over a span of ten years to have an even shot at wiping out Malaria forever, commit yourself to a monthly payment, payment starts once we cross the threshold." I think something like that would be better at motivating me, at least - humans are inherently more sensitive to relative local standing than absolute global effects.

I support charities and think more people should give.

At the same time, I think it is a bad systemic solution to rely on charitable giving to solve large-scale problems.

Imagine an island with 100 residents, each with $100. Their moral compass varies randomly from Mr. Rogers all the way to a few outright sociopaths. Each day, everyone decides how much to donate. The kinder people donate more because they're kinder. The selfish assholes obviously don't.

What does tomorrow look like? Well, now all the good people are a little poorer and have a little less power. The sociopaths are richer and stronger. They use their edge to secure a little more power, maybe skim a little more off the top.

Watch that island for a few years and what do you start to see? A few avaricious monsters with all the wealth and a horde of poor decent folks doing their best to distribute fewer and fewer scraps equitably amongst themselves.

This is the real magic of taxes. Because taxes are morally neutral. They don't preferentially take more money away from the most decent folks. Ultimately there are some bad selfish people out there and if you don't have some way of forcibly reducing their power, they will take it all. Taxation backed by the force of government is one of the least violent ways of doing that.

Givewell.org is another great resource for identifying extremely impactful organizations.

To be honest, I'd recommend just giving as directly as you can. Right now, I ordered remote teaching equipment for teachers in my community. You can too. Identify people doing good important things, and give them money to do it.

Especially if you give resources to volunteers doing genuinely good work in your community, it has a huge multiplier effect.

This is a common viewpoint, but quite different from OP's. $5000 can save a person from Malaria or it can buy all the history teachers at a first world school document cameras. No doubt, both are worthy causes, but if you are choosing between which change to make in the world, one thought is to choose things like the former, which are seen to do more good for the same resources.

Well, to be fair, I know people and projects in the developing world, and buy things for (or give money to) people there too.

I've also seen the impact of organizations which promise to spend money to save people there, and it's not always pretty. You can't serve two causes well. Picking between Western donors and local recipients, successful NGOs must choose to serve the former and not the latter. That often just distorts markets and causes its own problems.

To be frank, with that attitude, we'd never make better decisions ever. We'd always see that things get complicated quick.

Things ARE complicated. Teams spend time navigating the questions and coming up with their best answers - the poster who started this thread posted a site that has done that exercise https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/giving-recommendations/

They have a model, and they can iterate on that model as they get new information or insights. It's hard for me to think that their model is worse than my lack of model.

Well, no. My claim is that donating to individuals doing work in the field is almost always a better path for individual donors than working through megacharities, or even through charity aggregators like this one.

For large-scale work of the type you describe, family foundations do a pretty good job. Gates, Schmidt, CZI, etc. all have exceptionally competent staffs who are able to take in grant applications, sort through those, and support quality projects in a way in which you or I can't. Program managers are top people in the field hired to rigorously evaluate projects.

They have billions of dollars to throw around too. If you want to fight malaria in Ghana, be Bill Gates. Or if it's something you're passionate about, take your next family vacation in Ghana, understand the people, context, and culture, and THEN donate to good people or organizations you know there. Combine your vacation with your giving.

What family foundations don't have are the cost structure to support individuals in the field or small organizations. If there is a good project in a school in Ghana, there is no way they are raising funding through Gates/CZI/Schmidt/etc. On the other hand, if you see a problem and spend money to fix it, you'll fix it. If you see an organization in need of resources and donate them, they'll have them. It's really not rocket science to do that.

There's something to be said for giving to one-off opportunities that you're directly aware of, and that are genuinely underserved by others; this can have some very real impact. But such cases are rare, and limited in scale. The basic benchmark of just donating to save people in very poor countries from malaria and the like is very hard to beat.

Here's a suggestion: Make some friends internationally, including in very poor countries. You'll find countless such opportunities.

> So your $1,000 donation can do as much good as $1 million, if given well.

Umm, no

A donation of half a billion can do as much good as six houses, if given poorly.

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-red-cross-raised-...

Well, it depends on your utility function, but judging by Zuckerberg's experience with the Foundation for Newark's Future vs. mosquito netting in Africa, I think that ratio is not out of the realm of possibility.

Yes. Consider mosquito nets (<10$) to protect against malaria vs. training a guide dog (~50k).

A $1,000 donation, if given well, can measure better on this metric than a $1 million donation, if given badly. Not a very meaningful thing to say, I agree.

Um yes. There are way more folks in a position to give $1k than $1m.