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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

I was recently a rep for the office's annual charity drive. At the end of it our office (west coast) was compared to offices in other parts of the country. While we had lots of one-time donations, literally nobody signed up for "workplace giving", to have money regularly taken off their paychecks. It is about fear an uncertainty. When people are stretched thin they will still give money when they can. But when is key. They will give money out of their pockets when asked but will not commit to future giving because they are unsure of that future. Subscriptions are for people who are confident in their month-to-month financial position. If you want to sell to the normal people, those who live from paycheck to paycheck, then you need to stick to single payment schemes.

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I think the explanation is even simpler: People don't like adding yet another monthly expense unless it's truly necessary.

Even for financially comfortable people, a one-off donation to a charity is easier to reason about than taking the same amount of money and dividing it into 24 bi-weekly payments. Then I'd have to remember where to get the end of year receipt for those payments when I do my taxes. I'd also burden myself with the decision of when to cancel the donations, which is something the charity probably makes as difficult as possible to increase their retention numbers. If I did decide to cancel, I'd have to invest potentially an hour or more to track down the information, maybe call someone, deal with their retention pitch over the phone, and then remember to check in a few weeks to confirm it actually ended.

It's all a lot of hassle that I really just don't want or need. Far easier to just donate once at donation time and then file the receipt in my tax folder. I can always decide to donate again next year.

I already have probably 20 or more monthly recurring payments from my mortgage to all of the insurance payments and internet, gas, water, electric, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, all of the software services I use and so on. Running a business can easily add 10-30 more monthly bills. I really, really don't want to add anything else to that list if I can avoid it.

Office charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.

It was a little more than that. There was some employer matching of funds, up to a point. And having it come off your paycheck saves a step come tax time.

My father mentioned that while working for banks, back in his day (~25 years ago), there were "guidelines" of how much you should donate to $bigNameCharity depending on your position. He was pretty much forced to donate $1500/year, a lot of money back then. Of course, way up the hierarchy, someone was friends with the charity's founders. And of course, these charities paid out huge salaries and expensed extravagant "business trips". Typical.

There's a lot of awful charities out there. I've used "https://www.charitynavigator.org" in the past to determine which charities are worth giving to, or not. However, I've personally interacted with three charities "on the ground" (in Hospital situations): Shriner's (burn unit in Galveston); McDonald's; and, St. Jude's. I 100% guarantee you that those charities are in the business of helping people (kids, in these cases), and doing so for the best-bang-for-their-buck they can. All three are non-religious (if that's important to you).

I think a lot of the people who read HN are probably in a life situation where they can help. Please do so.

All charity done by big companies smells shitty to me... you're a multimillion $$$ company, and you want me to donate 20$ to feed the poor?

I get it, but - anecdotally - I know someone whose son was dying of cancer and the McDonald’s foundation absolutely helped them a great deal.

For charity by companies I agree with your position. But when a company will match your donation (which is given in your name) why not?

I also don't agree with those big name-things donations by HNWs. If you really want to give, why name the thing after yourself? And depending on the charity of billionaires is a sign of a broken system anyway.

I worked at a college and during the hiring process, they tried to coerce you to sign up to automatic payroll deductions for donations to the college itself. I believe it was an opt-in by default, and you had to explicitly opt out by filling out a paper form. I was kind of confused by the absurdity.

Woah! Opt-in is bad enough, but opt-out "give us back part of your check" should be outright illegal.

Many years ago I worked for a company where the CEO or maybe his wife were associated with the local United Way branch. We were asked to contribute our "fair share" to the United Way campaign. We got a day off or something like that but it was also made very clear that this was not actually optional.

And, yeah, to the other point, while I have subscriptions to various things it's not something I really want to do when I have a choice given that such things tend to be out of sight/out of mind.

This took a lot of my mental energy when I was a teacher. I didn't have any of my bills on autopay because I had to constantly manage when I would have enough money in my account to pay any given bill. Even now that I'm much more comfortable I only have about half of my bills set to autopay just in case, e.g., one bill comes due the day before my paycheck lands in my account.

Seems like it would be a fantastic feature for payment processors to provide scheduling! (and negotiating with subscription providers to operationalize that)

I dunno how many Bay Area SWEs/PMs can even grok such a lived experience, for them to prioritize it as a feature request.

I've never seen a credit card that did not allow you to schedule your payments. If you auto-pay everything with credit cards, then by default you are scheduling your payments. Same with mortgages. For the few things that don't accept cards (rent/water/gas/electric?) you could schedule payments whenever you want through your bank, though you'd likely be paying in advance rather than in arrears.

I've never paid bills from the CC side, but from the provider side. I don't even know how I'd tell my CC to automatically pay some entity on a set schedule. It's all pulled by the service providers, separately, on whatever schedule they decide (or choose to let me configure). I know I can do it with account-to-account transfers (so, electronic checks) from my checking account, but had no idea that was a thing for credit cards. Where do you tell it to send the money? Do you have to get bank account info for the receiver?

[EDIT] On reflection, I've even built subscription systems reliant on credit card payments, and didn't know you could do this.

You don't need to tell your CC to pay some entity on a set schedule. I don't think my initial post was clear enough.

Credit cards are paid in arrears, usually with a 15 day grace period, so you are effectively getting a 15-30 day interest free loan on all purchases. When you set up a credit card, you can select any payment date you want. So, if I get a new AMEX, I can choose to have the bill due on the 1st, or 12th, or any day I want.

If I pay all my bills (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.) with my AMEX, I know the AMEX bill is due every 12th (or whatever day of the month I choose). For any bill paid by the credit card (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.), it doesn't matter what day of the month that particular bill gets charged to the AMEX. I only pay AMEX once a month, on the day I selected. So, by choosing what day my AMEX gets paid, I am effectively choosing which date I am required to pay all of the bills that got charged to my AMEX.

There are very few things that you can't pay by credit card. For those (i.e. mortgage, some utilities), you can schedule auto-payments on any day you want, through your bank.

> Seems like it would be a fantastic feature for payment processors to provide scheduling!

No, no, no. You have it wrong. You're not thinking about being able to charge late fees. How are you going to charge late fees if nobody is ever late?

I mean, doesn't everyone do this, even if they aren't living on a shoestring budget? I usually plan ahead about 1-2 months in advance: Pay my bills on the due date, keep track of when each pay check will come in and the expected amount, on days when the balance is expected to drop below zero, either 1. find some way to deposit some cash or 2. (if able) schedule a small transfer from my savings account to cover the difference. On days when the balance is more than what's needed for my next set of bills, schedule a small transfer into the savings account. Checking account never contains more than what's needed until your next paycheck.

I pay every possible bill on a 2% cash back credit card that is basically dedicated to that purpose. That way my bills can come out whenever and it is my job to pay off that card every month to avoid interest payments and in exchange for that convenience I get rewarded with 2% of my mandatory spending to be put back into my pocket, and it gives me flexibility should I need to dole out on an unexpected expense with cash.

Even if I could, I wouldn't sign up for workplace giving, because I know it's just a ploy to get tax breaks for the company. I'd much rather donate directly, and get the max tax breaks for myself. Same with giving donations in the checkout line. Amazon Smile is the only one I use, because it doesn't cost me extra.

I'm not in any immediate danger of being overdrawn, and I still detest automatic billing in general. (I do it for one bill where there's a significant upcharge for not doing it and switching providers isn't easy.) If I'm spending or giving away my money, I want to sign a check or at least tap a button every time. It's insulting to me for a charity to say, "Here, giving what you want is a bother, let us just take care of it."

I don't mind subscriptions as they're more valuable to the organizations I support than a similar dollar-value of one-time-gifts. Though I do get why people in precarious positions (e.g. low paid workers, founders, or many people in high cost-of-living areas) would prefer not to use them.

But the only reason I can imagine routing charitable giving through work is to take advantage of company matching. At a past company that did 100% dollar-for-dollar matching (up to something like ten thousand dollars) I was happy to shift as many of my donations as possible through work to direct more of the company's giving towards my preferred charities. At my current company that does 0% matching there's no reason for me to involve work in my charitable giving.

I see a lot of people at my place of work giving from their gross income via salary sacrifice simply because they've maxed out their pension allowance and would rather see a charity get it than pay the government another penny in tax.

Once I reach that level of income I'd probably do the same, even if on a take-home basis I didn't feel "rich" due to high CoL.

Right now though, my primary concern is having a big enough pot in retirement, so my tax advantaged contributions go to pension (401k equivalent)

Really great insight. I have absolutely seen this in my own approach to subscriptions. I cancel them when I work for startups and sign up for them when I work for big stable companies.

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