Giving Half

July 15th, 2014
ea, money
Starting with 2014, I'm going to try and donate half of what I earn to the most effective organizations I can find. This isn't entirely new, but it's an increase and a simplification from past years. Julia and I had built a bit of a complex system, with different rules [1] and percentages, and it just made incentives too weird. We wanted something simple, so now we're both giving 50%.

It's funny: when I originally decided to start donating, back in 2009 I wanted to go for half, but at the time that turned out to be pushing myself too hard. Five years of optimizing later it's much more doable.

I think 2014 will look something like this:

50% donations
23% taxes
21% saving
6% spending

(I'm planning to leave my Giving What We Can pledge at 30%, because I don't know if I'll always be able to do 50%. In particular, wages for programmers are high now because there's lots of demand, but I expect this to fade at some point.)


[1] One of the weird things was that some things were in terms of pre-tax income and others were post-tax. For example, the percentages on the donations page are currently post-tax. There are arguments both ways, but I want simple and I think pre-tax is simpler. I'll update the donations page once I have final 2014 numbers.

Update 2014-12-20: The donations page now has 2014 numbers, and I've rewritten it to be pre-tax.

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Jealousy In Polyamory Isn't A Big Problem And I'm Tired Of Being Gaslit By Big Self-Help

The nuance is in the post, guys

via Thing of Things July 18, 2024

Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly

non-trust is reasonable • trust lets collaboration scale • symptoms of trust deficit • how to proactively build trust

via benkuhn.net July 13, 2024

Coaching kids as they learn to climb

Helping kids learn to climb things that are at the edge of their ability The post Coaching kids as they learn to climb appeared first on Otherwise.

via Otherwise July 10, 2024

more     (via openring)