Drive-by commenters reacting to the title of this post with their personal opinions on charity would do well to learn more about the effective altruism movement's focus on evidence-based giving. The word "effective" in the title is doing a lot of work, and represents a huge amount of research and fact-checking done by effective altruism organizations.

Example: here's a massive report on global warming charity Cool Earth by Giving What We Can: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/report/cool-earth/

GiveWell's cost-effectiveness spreadsheet is a sight to behold as well: https://www.givewell.org/how-we-work/our-criteria/cost-effec...

I started donating 10% of my after-tax income about a year ago.