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joeteicher comments on Missed opportunities for doing well by doing good - Less Wrong
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I don't think that anyone who works should feel guilted into giving money to charity. Unless what you do is somehow completely selfish (substinence farming would be an example) you are creating a lot of value for other people via your work. If I try to estimate the value that I create for the world vs. what I actually get paid, I get somewhere between 5:1 and 20:1. So, no matter how selfishly I spend my money, most of my product is being enjoyed by others, and that means I am doing good. Giving away 5% of the meager fraction of my product that I actually get to keep will hurt me while barely increasing the amount of good I do.
Also, you're anchoring :-). When you say "barely increasing the amount of good that you do" you mean "barely increasing the percentage of good that you do." But a small increase in the percentage of good that you do probably amounts to a lot in absolute terms: it could make a very meaningful difference in the lives of one or more people.
I agree that you're doing good as a productive member of society.
I don't think that anybody who works should feel guilted into giving money to charity either. If giving to charity makes your life worse then you should not give to charity.
The point in my post is that people (including myself) may be systematically deluded into believing that they'd experience a drop in life satisfaction if they gave more of their income to charity when they would really experience a gain in life satisfaction.
As I indicated, I think that it's worth it to try out giving for a year. If it makes you less happy then you can simply resolve never to do it again. If it makes you more happy then you can do it over and over again for the rest of your life. If 5% of your income seems like a lot and you're presently not donating at all, you could experiment with donating 1% of your income.