Hacker News Reader

Comment by raz32dust | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com