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Comment by Clubber | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, many charities are borderline fraudulent. Always ask what their administration fee is. I remember getting a call on Memorial Day asking for donations to veterans. I asked what the administration fee was and he said 90%. I said, "No, I mean what do you take to process these payments and make the calls?" He repeated, "90%." I was floored.

Anyway, to answer the OP's question, you need to save at least some of it. Just because you are making money now doesn't mean you will make it in the future. Plan for a life-changing event where you are unable to make money, or even worse, you are reliant on others to take care of you. Best to have something stored away, preferably an appreciating liquid asset so you can get to it fairly quickly.

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You need look no further than the amount of $ given to San Francisco charities to help the homeless and actual results on the ground.

An easy solution to "what charities should I give to": https://www.givewell.org/

Administration fee is less important than overall impact, which I assume is what people who worry about overhead actually care about. There are plenty of evaluators that skip worrying about overhead and get to them meat of the issue, how much does this charity help per dollar.

What's the difference? What portion of your dollar is neither "help" nor "overhead"?

The impact of the dollar changes depending on what you spend it on. If you want to help veterans there are tons of ways to do that ranging from mental health outreach, to political action, to just giving them money. You can figure out which organization has the most impact per dollar and donate there. Handing out money to veterans might have extremely low overhead since it can be done by a single person mailing out checks, but that doesn't mean it's the most effective way to help.

If any company takes 90% for administration, it's a scam, no if's and's or but's. That's actually a net negative impact because it gives people pause when donating to charities.

Although 90% is very high, it does take some money to figure out how to allocate the rest of the money. Spending 100k on a study on how best to allocate the remaining 400k but spending it twice as well results in a 20% administration fee but more good done.

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