Do not donate to me (2013)
blog.futtta.be
blog.futtta.be
Not worth the hassle unless we'rw talking at least thousands a year.
I'd maybe look into it at $1000+, but most bounties aren't really anything close to making it worth your while if you have a job.
If you're at the edge of the 45% rate, the extra 100€ will be taxed at 50%, but the amount you earned previously will not be impacted and still be taxed as before.
Our taxes in Belgium are high, the salaries for engineers are well above average. In pratice, it's possible to end up in different tax 'scales', but they'll not end up in a net loss.
I'm also hugely in favour of the system here. Health care is a non-issue. I need prescription glasses (dioptry -8.5) and I pay nothing for those.
Yearly dentist appointment? about 20 euro you end up paying after the 'mutualiteit' pays you back. Similar for doctors appointments or hospital appointments.
Being married with a Mexican (family living in the US) I can tell you that I hugely prefer our system over the US or Mexican system.
Tax evasion: You get some money. (Legally or not; the tax system doesn't care.) You are supposed to pay taxes on it but don't want to. You find a way not to, e.g. by hiding the income from the tax authorities.
Money laundering: You get some money by illegal means (theft, blackmail, whatever). You want to be able to use the money without having the authorities notice it, get suspicious about where it came from, and discover your crime. You find a way to pass the money from place to place so that by the time you actually do anything that might be noticed, it's difficult or impossible to trace it back to anything illegal.
[EDITED to add:] Also different from both: tax _avoidance_. You get some money. You don't want to pay taxes on it. It turns out that the law actually allows you not to, and you take advantage of that. But this feature of the law is unintended, or blatantly unfair, or clearly the way it is because of someone lobbying on behalf of people in situations like yours.
I suspect your second suggestion would actually get classified as tax _evasion_, though.
- ~37€ if the self-employment is not subject to VAT (less than 25.000€ per year as self-employed)
- ~30.7€ if subject to VAT
(100€ / 1.21) [VAT] * (1 - 0.21) [Social contributions] * (1 - 0.53) [Federal tax 50% + local tax 50% * 6%]
Which is yet another reason to not want donations, since you're basically describing employment, turning their casual hobby into an obligation.
That's my take, anyway: a social rather than fiscal incentive.
> Thank you very much for your contribution towards the development of Vim! This will motivate me to spend more time on improving Vim. The money will be used to help needy children in Kibaale, Uganda.
Honest giving is great, but undermining the value of work to do so isn't always constructive. In this case presumably the hypothetical people who would have given him cash are also in a good place financially.
This is a common complaint among people who take donations for a living, such as Twitch streamers. If you ask any streamer, they will tell you they prefer Twitch "bits" over any one-off donation specifically because bits are non-refundable.
Unfortunately, there are people out there who go around donating and then doing a chargeback just to troll streamers they don't like. It's a really frustrating element of the system which happens to be set up to prefer the customer over the vendor in all disputes, making it ripe for abuse.
Source? As someone who helps support an online credit card gateway, in my experience it is the merchant who has to shoulder the cost (plus an extra penalty fee) of the transaction. Perhaps there are different chargeback policies for card present transactions for physical products, but for online (and therefore card not present) transactions for digital products, I have always seen the merchant have to cover the cost of the chargeback (plus fee). There's a process for disputing the chargeback, saying the customer absolutely made the purchase and got what they were asking for, but almost every time the card would side with the customer, because there was no physical product.
This is one of the reasons when card companies pushed for chip cards, merchants pushed back for chip and pin like cards used in Europe -- to cut down on fraud, which they end up paying for. The only system I've seen where the cost of a chargeback is on the bank instead of the merchant is if the merchant has setup 3D-Secure/Verified by Visa with their products, giving the banks and card companies the opportunity to have an extra login for making the purchase. However, those verify pages are made by the bank, not the credit card company, and are widely unreliable. I tried to set it up for our payment gateway, only to find that some of the banks had completely broken systems for it, leaving customers at an error page instead of buying the product.
Verified By Visa is a nightmare, and was killing conversion rates by up to 60%. [1] I'm not sure if it's still the case, but when it first came out Amazon refused to integrate it.
[1] https://econsultancy.com/verified-by-visa-a-conversion-rate-...
... But even providing the option was a non-starter, because of how many different banks had completely broken systems. We ended up ditching the feature entirely.
It took me giving up buying several products over the last year and complaining to the bank every time before I eventually had the correct key to that puzzle.
The details it asks for are not much better than random. Stuff like mixing your residential address and postal address, using a neighboring postcode, including random stuff like a building number or weird artifacts like " , ,".
How anyone is expected to figure out the frankenstein address that MasterCard want's by themselves is beyond me.
You can avoid chargebacks by pro-actively refunding any transactions that look suspicious. And if a real customer asks for a refund, you should always give it to them since they can chargeback anyway. But if it's a stolen credit card that got through, the first you'll hear about it is when you get the chargeback from the real cardholder's bank.
Side note: back in the days of shareware, a few of the 'cracking' groups didn't do any cracking at all. They just used stolen credit cards to buy the software and post the licence codes online - no technical talent involved. I'm looking at you, Team OXiDE....
[1] https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/changes-to-visa-charg...
[2] https://chargeback.com/visa-chargeback-monitoring-program/
Some kid getting pocket money from a lemonade stand is significantly different to accepting recurring donations as an adult. Dealing with either setting up some sort of non-profit, managing tax in your country, accepting international currencies or supporting largely unethical/hostile US based financial institutions like Paypal, it can be a rabbit hole that some just can't be bothered with.
It's also just really weird to critisise people for wanting their users to donate to worthy causes.
However there is nothing weird with discussing this, and that claim is exactly the sort of "moral" short circuit that I find so unpleasant about the whole thing. I would wager few if any people have donated to a charity in lieu for this case. But by announcing such a moral standing they've undermined anyone else who does accept or even request compensation for their creations: Do they have an adequately bad situation to justify such a request?
Is that really true? What if I say I only accept checks, or certified checks even.
Wouldn't depositing such checks be trivial?
Yes, you do have to pay taxes on the money (which in countries other than the United States can be very simple), but apart from that the other things you list such as setting up a non-profit, accepting international currencies, or dealing with corporations like Paypal are all optional.
It would be, yes. But getting an appreciable number of people to donate via check instead of PayPal/Stripe would be highly nontrivial :)
In Belgium? No, not really, nobody uses checks and I'm fairly certain that for most banks it will cost quite a bit of money to deposit.
And of course, there are plenty of people like parents and employers who find it convenient to perpetuate these notions at times.
I "lose" about 10 euro per month in ad revenue but I have a good job, I don't care about 10 euro.
When you have money, you may like the power it gives you to make incentives so people do what you like. However, in some rare cases, someone doesn't need your money and prefers doing thing how himself likes. If you don't like that, that's your problem and not the one of the people refusing your money.
The sums listed are often too high to be ignored, but too little to call it a job, even jut part-time. Few hours a month.
Me that would put in a strange situation. I would get the feeling of having to return some work for that, which takes the fun out of some projects, but doesn't pay the bills. (especially if I add time for accounting, declaring axes on it etc.)
Of course my view dosn't transfer to others and I understand that many people have a need for a more diverse income sources and eve low recurring (monthly) Patreon payments are planable, giving some base line, but I understand the author's point.
Forrest shivers in fear
Also I recommend https://www.givewell.org