It's not. When I imagine trying to respond to a question of how much I give, I'm worried by the difficulty of explaining what I'm doing. This would be especially hard with a radio show or something where I'd be unable to gauge audience reaction, though I don't think I'm likely to be on one.
It may have kept me from bringing up numbers in cases where they would have been relevant, and it has definitely kept me using 2009's numbers, when I need numbers, instead of more recent estimates.
Your situation seems somewhat similar to if your job paid you in a combination of cash and lottery tickets and you decided that you would keep the cash for yourself but donate the winnings of the lottery tickets to charity. As such, your charity dollars vary year to year, but they average about 1/3 of your pay.
I don't think that's a perfect explanation (Options are not equal to lottery tickets) but I don't see any large inferential gaps in it. And I think people are more likely to understand lottery tickets than they are to understand options, so the chanc...
When I started my new job at a startup about a year ago, I started getting about a third [1] of my pay in stock options. Being risk neutral in donating, I decided to spend my salary on me and donate any proceeds from my stock options. This let me increase the fraction of my pay I was giving away without decreasing what I keep. Mathematically and economically, considering just what I can give, I think this was the right decision.
The problem is, much of my potential impact is from convincing others to give, and if I have to talk about stock options, expected value, and money that I intend to give away it's confusing and distracting. Things were much simpler when we could just say "we lived on about $22,000 and gave about $45,000". Should I switch back to giving money?
It would not be an easy switch. Options represent a small chance of a lot of money, and they're not very valuable to me personally. (Each additional dollar is worth less than the last). If I were to start giving a third of my compensation away as cash, that would be about 2/3 of my paycheque [2]. Which would be pretty hard. Maybe I should donate some combination of cash and options? Making this more complicated, I had negotiated more options in exchange for a $10K lower salary, figuring that for money I was giving away this was the right thing to do. Suggestions?
[1] You might say "how can you say 'about a third' when you have no idea whether your stock options will even be worth something ever?" What I did was estimate how likely I thought Cogo Labs was to be worth $X in about ten brackets ($0, $10M, $50M, ...), and then calculate an expected value as $0*P_1 + $10M*P_2 + $50M*P_3... Then I multiplied by the fraction of the company whose options would vest to me each quarter, and got something about half my quarterly salary. So: one third of compensation.
[2] It's 1/2 my salary (the last third is options) but 2/3 of takehome pay because 1/6 of my pay goes to taxes and other paycheque deductions.
(I also put this up as a blog post)