The important thing is not to burn out, which would substantially reduce future giving. Right now I'm aiming only to max out Google's $6K/year matching limit. I probably won't increase that until I have a lot of savings, like on the order of several months of salary. Then if my partner is OK with it I'll head towards giving 10%, and after that I'd hope to give away 50% of future pay rises; whether we go beyond that will depend on how our income and outgoings compare at that point.
I wouldn't pay any attention to any comments that don't discuss the commenter's giving, by the way! You would probably get more informative answers if the question was "How did you decide how much of your income to give to charity?"
Meta: please consider crossposting this (and future topical posts) to the Effective Altruism Forum.
The logical thing to do seems to be: figure out how much more you value yourself than a random African. Figure out how much money you have to have so that the marginal dollar is that many times more valuable to them than to you. Donate everything beyond that.
I just plan on trying to spend as little as I can, and just donating the rest.
Giving What We Can recommends over 10% of income. I currently donate what I can spare when I don't need the money, and have precommitted to 50% of my post-tax income in the event that I acquire a job that pays over $30,000 a year (read: once I graduate college). The problem with that is that you already have a steady income and have arranged your life around it- it's much easier to not raise expenses in response to income than it is to lower expenses from a set income.
Like EStokes said, however, the important thing isn't to get caught up in how much you should be donating in order to meet some moral requirement. It's to actually give in a way that you, yourself, can give. We all do what we can :)
My temporary solution is to max out my employer's annual match. That the maximum match is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of my income is very convenient, as that makes me feel like I'm contributing the "expected" amount for an EA (this feeling is only important for fuzzies) but still leaves me with what seems to be a good amount to save and spend. It also allows me to avoid committing an answer to the question of whether to donate now or invest and donate later. The guaranteed, almost-immediate, soon-to-expire 100% return provided by the match wins pretty clearly over the EV of investing and donating later, and since I feel like I'm donating enough for now, I can evaluate what to do with what's being invested later on, based on my wants and needs.
Historical Reasons
Growing up, I had a pastor who advocated setting an upper limit on your income and donating everything you earned beyond that. I admired the principle of that stance. (It helped that he followed his own advice, living simply even though his books sold many copies.) But when I started making money after college, I learned how easy it was to increase your spending as your income grows.
A few years ago, when I was in the process of converting from being an Evangelical Christian to an agnostic/atheist, I decided that I didn't want a financial ...
I see a lot of “rules of thumb” suggestions in the comments (% of income, match Google/employer, etc.). I disagree with these approaches.
I recommend that you spend the requisite time to create a detailed projection of your cash flow. Try to determine how you want to use every dollar you will ever have.
A probabilistic projection will return an optimal giving range. The range may be wide, but at the very least I think this exercise will help you identify upper and lower boundaries.
Added bonus - It’s a great way to take account of your true priorities.
"What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity?" My answer: how much better a place do you want to make the world? Do you want to make it a little better, a medium amount better, or a lot better? And how does this goal trade off against your other goals? How much would you sacrifice by making the world a lot better? Keep in mind that money is not a good way to buy happiness. So you sacrifice surprisingly little. But giving up things that you already have is painful due to the endowment effect. Try to fight status quo bia...
My current rationalisation for my level of charitable giving is "if, say, the wealthiest top billion humans gave as much as me, most of the worlds current problems that can be solved by charity would be solved in short order".
I use this as a labor-saving angst prevention device.
Me: "Am I a good person ? Am I giving too little ? How should I figure out how much to give ? What does my giving reveal about my true preferences ? What would people I admire think of me if they knew ?"
Me: "Extra trillions thing. Get back to work."
If you are looking to build up savings while donating in the third world, a good middle ground is to make 100 dollars a week of short term (6months To a year) loans on Kiva.
After not too long you build up a decent roll of money each month and in the meantime you are helping third world business growth
I have a good intuition on how to allocate the money
Isn't that a far more formidable problem than just deciding how much to give? Maybe you should tell us your allocation method.
I think that something is better than nothing.
Sometimes setting an amount to give that is high can be discouraging, and can lead people to not give at all, or spend time feeling bad about not meeting their standards, rather than focus on what they can do to help.
If you give more than 0.7% of your income, you are doing better than most governments around the world, many of which have promised to spend 0.7% of GDP on foreign aid, but do not meet that threshold.
I don't think "How much money shall I give to charity?" is as important a question as &...
This post demonstrates a common failure of LessWrong thinking, where it is assumed that there is one right answer to something, when in fact this might not be the case. There may be many "right ways" for a single person to think about how much to give to charity. There may be different "right ways" for different people, especially if those people have different utility functions.
I think you probably know this, I am just picking on the wording, because I think that this wording nudges us towards thinking about these kinds of questions in an unhelpful way.
But it asks about “the right way to think about how much to give to charity”, not “the right amount to give to charity”. It is well possible (depending on what one means by “way to think about”) that there is one right way to think about how much to give to charity but it returns different outputs given different inputs.
I'd like to chime in to counter the common intuitions seen in the other comments.
First, that the more you give, the better it is.
It's known that money has a powerful effect on human psyche, and I strongly doubt that pouring say a million dollar to a charity that is used to manage ~10K$ donations will suddenly multiply its efficency hundredfolds. More likely, that money will be wasted. Or given to local warlords. Or used to pay higher salaries, etc.
The unreasonable assumption here is that there's a direct path from money to utility for other people, as if c...
It's known that money has a powerful effect on human psyche, and I strongly doubt that pouring say a million dollar to a charity that is used to manage ~10K$ donations will suddenly multiply its efficency hundredfolds. More likely, that money will be wasted. Or given to local warlords. Or used to pay higher salaries, etc.
Why would you give to charities past the point where they have room for more funding?
The unreasonable assumption here is that there's a direct path from money to utility for other people, as if charities were engines of perfect efficiency that burns money and churns out utility for poor people. Extremely unlikely, even for charities listed top tier on GiveWell.
Life is full of uncertainty, and there's nothing wrong with that. If you're saving lives on expectation, it's worth doing.
I agree that investing in R&D can be a better way to improve the world than donating to traditional charities.
Reading over the other comments, I think a lot of this is about finding the right schelling point.
This past summer, I put a bunch of reminders spaced out by a month or two into my google calendar that say "make effective altruist plan" - the idea being to make some sort of contract with myself before I graduate and get a regular income again, and sit down and think about what goes into that contract many different times before actually "signing" (which will probably be showing it to a trusted friend or two and asking them to help hold m...
I was recently thinking about the same thing. I recommend starting small and giving to every cause you like, including causes that don't have 501c3s. Start with a small amount, maybe $1k or so, and the same amount for everyone. They'll all want to treat it as annual, so don't overdo. Then once you know them better, decide whether you're happy with it, want to increase it, or want to cut it before they ask for an annual contribution.
I also pick one month of the year for all of it so you don't make 3 "annual" contributions a year. My parents ...
I agree with Mr Mind that there are a number of questionable hidden assumptions here. I would suggest that if you truly care about improving the world, you should seek to invest, not to give to charity. Ideally, this would be an area in which you already have some expertise, so you can pick wise investments. Most problems that charities work on are also business opportunities for entrepreneurs to solve; by being part of that, your money will do far more good in the long run. Market feedback makes sure that for-profit businesses really are solving the probl...
I am precisely questioning the assumption that effective altruism == charitable giving.
In that case your example of bike rides is pretty bad. It's a strawman. The comparison is bed nets or deworming.
There is no fixed tithe... Donate slightly more than required to not feel guilty. If in doubt, increase the amount until you are sure.
The more is donated, the better, so figure out how much you expect to want for your own spending/saving and donate the rest. Don't give so much that it takes a toll on you; it must remain something achievable that you want to do.
I'd like to hear from people about a process they use to decide how much to give to charity. Personally, I have very high income, and while we donate significant money in absolute terms, in relative terms the amount is <1% of our post-tax income. It seems to me that it's too little, but I have no moral intuition as to what the right amount is.
I have a good intuition on how to allocate the money, so that's not a problem.
Background: I have a wife and two kids, one with significant health issues (i.e. medical bills - possibly for life), most money we spend goes to private school tuition x 2, the above mentioned medical bills, mortgage, and miscellaneous life expenses. And we max out retirement savings.
If you have some sort of quantitative system where you figure out how much to spend on charity, please share. If you just use vague feelings, and you think there can be no reasonable quantitative system, please tell me that as well.
Update: as suggested in the comments, I'll make it more explicit: please also share how you determine how much to give.