Life after Google, with millions

I agree with dcurtis. You can donate money instead of volunteering. If anything, donating an hour's wages is harder than donating an hour's worth of volunteering (assuming your job is not as pleasant as volunteering, which by and large seems to be the case). You might make $20 an hour after adjusting for everything (this gets distorted because of tax deductions and the like), but people have to pay you to do it. You take more pain. While volunteering, you take less pain. Giving an hour of wages might be equivalent to giving two hours of volunteer time (in terms of opportunity cost). If one creates more wealth for the charity than the other, you should do more of that. It might not make sense to volunteer.

I wish I could find an article I read a long time ago. The general message was that most people give up to early, and that most people do things like give away money too early to people that will waste it. It reminds me to make it to a billion networth before distributing that wealth.

Something else to keep in mind:

If a lawyer volunteers for an hour serving soup to the homeless his donation should be valued at minimum wage. If he helps set up a trust to stop the corrupt "directors" of the charity from helping themselves to the money both now and in the future, his hour is worth a whole lot more.

This is the same for any trained professional. Anyone who has to pause and ask him/herself, "does my insurance cover me if I donate my time doing X" has highly valuable time to donate.

> a lot more people by using your wealth than you can by volunteering your labor

My wife volunteers a hour a week at a local school (about 3 miles away) the school has really low state test scores (about 65% lower then our own kid's school state test scores). By volunteering her time she shows something that is worth more then money could ever, that people care.

Some money is often needed but you really cannot replace volunteering your own time. You can volunteer your time at what you are good at, not the soup kitchen but some other capacity.

With OfficeZilla.com I am able to support charities like MercyShips.com which has 20 gigabytes of files uploaded to the system. Granted they use the materials to seek donations, but if they didn't have 300 volunteers on the ship they would have seek even more donations then they have to do now. So much more in donations they might not be able to continue on.