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I think this is a really important concern. Btw, 5% is still quite a bit more than the average, so good work!

We're attempting to overcome this worry through community and behavioural economics hacks. E.g. I take every opportunity that I can (like this one) to say publicly that I'm planning to give away the majority of what I earn, which makes it a helluva lot harder for me to back out. Similarly for Matt - it would be embarrassing for him to renege on his commitments when he's been so open about it. And it feels like a much smaller sacrifice (if it's even a sacrifice at all) when most of your friends are doing the same thing - and some, like Jeff and Julia in Boston (http://www.givinggladly.com/2013/06/whats-it-like-to-give-ha...) are doing much more.

Not only is 5% of one's income a rather high number, even the average amount that people give in the United States is far higher than the corresponding amount in other countries (ex: Japan).

It may be the country's Christian leanings that contribute to this, but to be charitable is seen as a virtue and absolute good in this society. This is not necessarily the case in other societies.

> It may be the country's Christian leanings that contribute to this

Maybe so. I was taught to tithe 10% of everything I earned starting with my grade school allowance. 10% to God (which could go to a church or charity) and 25% to the bank. Everything else got spent on Legos and whatnot.

Fast forward twenty years (I'm 25) and I still siphon away 10% of my income into a separate account that I save for either church donations or charitable causes. At that point the money isn't really "yours" or at least that's what is typically taught in Christian culture. Makes it a lot easier to spend it on others.

Yeah, I seem to recall that the US gives a similar % of income as other countries once you subtract out donations to churches and to universities, which are both a much bigger thing than in other countries.

You're probably thinking of other Western countries. Remember that most Western countries have moral code derived from Christian morals.

What I mean is that if you look at countries with say top 50 GDP, many of them will be much lower than the "other western countries".

I'm not trying to make this political, but I sometimes wonder how much of our charitable exceptionalism is related to the US having a weaker social safety net than many industrialized countries.

Whereas an American might donate to a food bank, homeless shelter, disaster relief, etc., a European might consider those activities the proper role of government and expect their (higher) taxes to go towards remedying the situation.

So, it might be that all industrialized nations share the belief that we should take care of our fellow man, help the needy, etc. Some believe it should be mandated and codified in the laws and policies of a nation; others believe it should be optional and driven by individuals.

I would second this interpretation.

When I lived in Germany I wanted to do some volunteer work and read up on the possibilities. A local explained to me, "Offering to volunteer at the library or a school sounds as strange to a German as someone in the US offering to volunteer with street sweeping, or with the IRS. That's the job of the government. That's what taxes are for."

Someone volunteering at a library can be seen as a rich person taking away a paid job opportunity for a poor person.

This tends to break out along political lines.

Christians, people who lean right, etc tend to give to social welfare organizations like the Salvation Army, Goodwill, foodbanks, etc. Basically groups that help out individuals.

Atheists, people who lean left, etc tend to give to artistic or societal organizations like a symphony, Greenpeace, etc.

I think the reasoning for this is simple. People on the right believe it is up to individuals to solve these problems and don't want the government involved. People on the left believe it is the government's role to solve these problems so they address their interests elsewhere.

D'you have a source?

Sure, googling for "charitable contributions by political party" gives the original article I was thinking of:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/10/21/s...

which I favored as opposed to the various studies that show Liberals tend to give less often and in smaller amounts of both time and money: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/19/giving-back-_n_3781... and http://www.nationalreview.com/home-front/357562/which-politi...

Monies donated to charity are also tax-deductible in US, and as a result the nonprofit sector is well-organized in terms of public outreach and so forth. One of the minor culture shocks I experienced coming to the US (from the UK) was the variety of billboards, radio, and TV ads encouraging people to donate their car, or boat, or whatever to this or that charity. At first I wondered why so many different charities were involved in giving cars to poor people, until someone explained that it was because you could (then) deduct the general market rate for the make and model of car involved. Nowadays they require more detailed documentation, eg the nonprofit has to give the donor a copy of the bill of sale within 30 days so that the donor knows how much to deduct. Turns out that some generous souls were inflating the size of their charitable donation on the tax forms in order to reduce their tax liability.

I also can't help noticing that some people who extol the virtues of religious giving are strenuously opposed to any expansion of government services, and seem to consider the whole idea of government taxation an intolerable confiscation of their money and thus an infringement upon their liberty. Such folk don't buy into the notion of a secular social contract between the state and the citizenry, and I often wonder if it because they see the state as being in competition with the religious establishment.

My wife and I are also trying to do this, and I suspect a big part of why we've been able to stick to it is the growing effective altruism community. We commit to donating 50%, post our income and donations publicly [1], and we know people would hold us accountable if we started backsliding.

Still, 20 years is much longer than I have experience for, so I definitely respect people like you who have been working at this much longer!

[1] http://www.jefftk.com/donations

Yay! Thank you! As someone currently choosing to live very minimally and instead donate as much time as possible to the projects I believe in, I really am grateful to those similarly-minded people like yourselves working from the other end of the lifestyle spectrum :)

  The world got to us, though. You start to notice that 
  the coworkers that dress nicer and go to happy hour get
  promotions. One guy married a social worker and had four
  kids. One guy got tired of living in a studio apartment
  in New Jersey.

But in our industry, with salaries how they are at the moment, you don't have to forego nice clothes and happy hour to donate 20% of your income to charity. I mean, the guy with 4 kids is spending way more than 20% of his salary on them, right? As long as you don't have 4 kids, you just need to keep your discretionary spending under control and demonstrate a reasonable amount of ambition in the workplace.

Now granted, your colleagues might have more expensive houses and nicer cars, but even giving 20% of my income to charity I have a much higher standard of living than my friends who studied less remunerative subjects.

One thing that really helps is getting involved with the growing Effective Altruism movement. There are several effective altruists at Jane Street (where Matt works), as well as meetups in NYC (and most major cities in the USA) and being part of a community makes sticking to those ideals a lot easier.

Also, note that 5% of your income donated to effective charities is still huge, and enough to save many lives during your career.

What meetups are there in NYC? I've been really into this topic for years now, but don't really know anyone else who is. Would be cool to change that.

Here's the main one: http://www.meetup.com/Effective-Altruism-NYC/

The organizer Chris Jenkins is a great guy, you should definitely feel free to sign up and ask him any questions!

The muscles you use for giving are the same muscles you use to save or pay down debt.

Know what your expenses are and how much you are spending. Know which of the things you spend money for are really important to you, and what you wouldn't actually miss that much. Know how to keep your spending in check as your income grows, not just increasing spending because the money is there.

People tend to react emotionally to the teachers of these principles, like Dave Ramsey or Mr. Money Mustache. But it's not personal. It's just math. You can choose to cut way back on your spending if you want to retire really early, if that's what's most important to you. Or you can choose to spend more extravagantly and retire later (or not at all).

Or instead or retiring early, maybe you want to live really frugally but keep earning as much as possible, so you can give as much as possible. The underlying principles are the same.

You are saying it's just as easy to save/donate as it is to spend because the muscles and underlying principles are the same? I wish I'd heard about this sooner.

I was comparing saving to donating, and contrasting with spending. So the exact opposite.

Was I really that unclear?

No, you were clear.

I sometimes feel that some people on HN make a real effort to misunderstand people.

I did have to read bch's sub-reply to grok the metaphor. I'm not sure why.

To me you were. They are nothing alike to me. Different states of mind, different objectives, different strategies.

Donating and saving are two entirely different activities in my life, and the only similarity are the numbers on the ledger. (one has an immediate payoff (donating feels good) while the other is not satisfying at all (just helps me sleep)).

You're advice sounded a lot like the financial version of, "stop eating less and you won't be fat." ... but I guess that does work for some people ...

> The muscles you use for giving are the same muscles you use to save or pay down debt.

Citation needed.

I think all he's saying is that if you get in the habit of living on less $ (because you're giving 20, 30, 40, 50% away to others), if you decide to give it to _yourself_ to paydown debt, or save for retirement, you're already used to living on "50% income", so it may not be as difficult as for soemone who hasn't done this exercise.

Edit: sloppy typing

The motivations are different: paying down my debt enhances my own financial well-being, while donating to charities enhances others'. Or: paying down debt is self-interested, while donating is selfless (or at least self-interested in a different way).

The point is: living on 0.5 * $annual_income requires discipline. If you give 0.5 to charity, good for you. If you put 0.5 to a retirement plan, or apply to some long-term debt that you assume, good for you. Not everybody has the discipline to get $10 and only look at $5 as "available".

As someone who constantly struggles with the decision to save VS donate, I don't think the two are interchangeable. They seem interchangeable because most of the time they'll lead to the same endpoint, but I view savings as an insurance that protects me against catastrophic events. They enable me to live a riskier life by providing that cushion and security.

I've decided to donate after I've lived the life I envision. If I get sick or injured and can no longer live that life, my savings will be my charity to myself. The subtle difference is that savings can be turned into charity, but not the other way around.

The Effective Altruism community is working really hard to combat this. It's definitely a real problem. Jeff Kaufman has written a lot about this, and one argument that stood out to me was making very public commitments to charitable giving. You'll feel more compelled to keep donating if a large part of your public identity hinges upon it.

Do you know how well this actually works for people in practice? My friends, acquaintances, and coworkers know I'm frugal, but I avoid telling them it's because I donate a lot of my money. People can become very defensive and judgmental hearing about people who donate or are otherwise "do-gooders," and I just don't like that kind of attention.

Yeah - it's helpful to make public commitments about charitable giving if, e.g. you have a blog where you have enough space to explain the philosophical underpinnings of your need to publicly broadcast how much money you're giving away. Without that context, it can look like you're bragging about how much money you have.

We spend a lot of time agonizing over how much to tell "normal" people about what we're doing and the cost of being "weird". This isn't so much of a factor if you live in a nice EA hub like Oxford-Boston-San Francisco, but for those of us that don't....we're stuck with the internet.

still you can start out simple and build from that. I give to two charities, Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and St. Vincents. I started out with a good amount per month automatically taken from my account.

I became acclimated to that "bill" much as one does their car payment or home payment. It is in the range of a small car payment per month now and I only chide myself for not boosting it more. The idea is to make it a routine expense so that you don't consider it a burden. The danger is forgetting to raise it or give to other good charities thinking you have done your part.

I do not mind people who do not give, I only mind the ones who speak up at charity drives at work with any number of excuses or complaints. It is not hard to find a charity to give money too, its hard to give

That's a good strategy. Anything you can do to reduce the willpower it takes to give is a good thing.

    I became acclimated to that "bill" much as one does their
    car payment or home payment. It is in the range of a small
    car payment per month now and I only chide myself for not
    boosting it more. The idea is to make it a routine expense
    so that you don't consider it a burden. The danger is
    forgetting to raise it or give to other good charities
    thinking you have done your part.

That's a great approach!

    It is not hard to find a charity to give money to.

Charities vary dramatically in how much good they can do with your money, so I'm not sure why you would say it isn't hard. With the charities you support, how much do you know about what your money does? Did you compare them with competing organizations? Getting into this much detail about charities is more than a full time job! At this point I mostly go by GiveWell's recommendations, but identifying really great charities isn't something I'd say is "easy".

(I'm not saying this to discourage you, what you're doing is really good!)

>It feels like there's a constant friction to overcome--like every choice takes a bit more willpower than it should. I think this is part of the reason that truly counter-cultural people and movements tend to segregate themselves from the rest of the world

You neatly summarized something I have been thinking about lately.

My wife and I are "digital nomads". We work on our laptops while traveling the world. Been at it since late 2011 and we spend a lot of time in places like Thailand where nomads tend to congregate, the vast majority of which cobble together a living through various entrepreneurial ventures rather than traditional employment.

At the moment we are back home visiting family and friends. "Constant friction" is pretty accurate. Not meaning arguments necessarily but constant little cultural differences, differences in how we see the world that can become contentious as ideas about how things should be done inform everything we do.

Meanwhile if you remove yourself to a community of similar people all of those little points of friction go away. Its pleasant if a little group-thinky.

I completely agree. It seems to me that this is a problem of nationalism more than anything. In the United States we give many people many thousands of dollars a year in benefits, most for legitimate reasons. That said, If your end goal was the biggest net cut in human suffering wouldn't you get much bigger bang for your buck in the third world? I make exactly the low end of your range there and yet the government takes nearly 30 percent of my income each paycheck. Wouldn't the solution be for me not to give more(I can't really, my asthma medications wipe me out each month), but for the money I do give(taxes) to be used more effectively?

It would certainly be great if tax money were used more effectively (for whatever value of effectiveness). Causing that to be the case, though, is most likely out of reach for most of us. We can really only look at the best thing that we can do, rather than the best thing that someone else could do. Sometimes the best we can do doesn't involve being able to give to charities in the present.