Apparently you aren't signed up for cryonics. You should be; flying your near-corpse in ice to the US (or maybe Russia) is strictly better than letting it rot. Not sure how life insurance interacts with a cancer diagnosis.
Give to whichever charity you estimate is best. Your donations are always too small to affect which helps most at the margin.
I give 5% of my income, which will go to 10% once I reach financial security (defined as holding a job for six months and lack of terrifying immediate prospects). That's "all money going in", not just taxable income. If I acquire money illegitimately (finding it with no obvious owner, borrowing it and the lender not wanting it back), it all goes to charity. I try to be frugal, save for investments (nice shoes help get raises), but fail miserably. I donate once a year, for practical reasons.
Selfish motives are fine, but that's probably a typical psyche fallacy. A whole lot of people defend causes at great personal cost.
Not sure how life insurance interacts with a cancer diagnosis.
Poorly. If you presently have cancer, I'm sure you can't get individual life insurance.
If you had cancer a long time ago and it hasn't been a problem for years, I don't know whether life insurance is impossible or you'll just have to pay a higher rate.
If you're employed have cancer and might get life insurance through your employer, I don't know.
Related to: People who want to save the world
I have recently been diagnosed with cancer, for which I am currently being treated with good prognosis. I've been reevaluating my life plans and priorities in response. To be clear, I estimate that the cancer is responsible for much less than half the total danger to my life. The universals - X-risks, diseases I don't have yet, traffic accidents, etc. - are worse.
I would like to affirm my desire to Save Myself (and Save The World For Myself). Saving the world is a prerequisite simply because the world is in danger. I believe my values are well aligned with those of the LW community; wanting to Save The World is a good applause light but I believe most people want to do so for selfish reasons.
I would also like to ask LW members: why do you prefer to contribute (in part) towards humankind-wide X-risk problems rather than more narrow but personally important issues? How do you determine the time- and risk- tradeoffs between things like saving money for healthcare, and investing money in preventing an unfriendly AI FOOM?
It is common advice here to focus on earning money and donating it to research, rather than donating in kind. How do you decide what portion of income to donate to SIAI, which to SENS, and which to keep as money for purely personal problems that others won't invest in? There's no conceptual difficulty here, but I have no idea how to quantify the risks involved.