It makes NO sense to donate to charity until you are retired

It helps mentally to spend time helping others regularly.

health wrote:

It helps mentally to spend time helping others regularly.

Again, that seems like it would be better spent when you're retired and your time is less valuable in terms of opportunity cost.

Donating to charity is silly when you’re in the middle class. Your $50-100 isn’t going to accomplish anything. At least 25% of it will get eaten up by administrative fees. Take your wife out to eat or throw it into your kid’s college savings account instead. Most people aren’t truly financially well off enough that they should be giving even a dime of their money away before retirement.

Nothing wrong with paying yourself 1st, but charitables are a pretty big help for me come tax time. And you can't use clothing, furniture, and other items to fund a 401k. You should be doing both if you have the means to do so. Giving also feels good - FWIW.

some charities/causes/etc simply can't wait.

That child you could have helped instead went to prison [and killed someone else's child to get there]

woops

or you could consider that the problems your money would go to help will be exacerbated and more expensive to fix when you're retired. So a given amount of money will go farther now than when you retire.

health wrote:

It helps mentally to spend time helping others regularly.

Shows that you know you are more fortunate than a lot of people, and that even if you can't see how exactly you are going to fund the entire rest of your life, you trust yourself to do fine.

That positive and healthy outlook will more than make up for what is given away, be it time or money.

Ca$hclay wrote:

Nothing wrong with paying yourself 1st, but charitables are a pretty big help for me come tax time.

How so? If I donate $100 I maybe save $30 on taxes. I'd still lose $70.

Thing with a lot of charities is you usually dont really know how much if any money goes directly to the cause. Most money probably goes to admin fees that pay someone's salary or in some other person pocket. Lot of greedy people out there unfortunately who take advantage of charity money. Churches are a prime example. They tell you it goes to a good cause but really it goes to their vacation fund. Look at the crook Joel Osteen for example. Uses God as a means to take gullible people's money.

Charities exist to benefit the interests of people who run charities, and people who donate to charities.

gdm wrote:

Charities exist to benefit the interests of people who run charities, and people who donate to charities.

This is a generalization but unfortunately very common. A previous poster mentioned donating your time is a positive thing to do, and I can attest to that. At least when you are spending time playing or interacting with underprivileged kids (homeless kids in my case,) you can see the direct impact it has immediately. I think doing some charity runs for a good organization is a decent win-win. Direct monetary donations is pretty sketchy but I can’t afford that anyway.

charities are crap. Those people who are involved in charities have too much free time. They organize events that cost money in order to give them something to do. So they are just inefficient organizations where most of the money goes to administrative expenses. I wouldn't donate anything. Government is supposed to provide the needed services and people pay them in taxes. This is a same kind of an idiotic system what tips are, i.e. mostly an American problem.

One of my favourite charities had the CEO busted for spending the money on travel for herself, all kinds of things, and having looked into it further I suspended any donations (I was not giving much, but some). I don;t trust the money ends up where they say - I'd thought that before, but thought I was circumventing that by donating to a more local one. It's sad.

There are still small, local charities I would like to support (e.g. taking kids from here to the seaside, they have never been on holiday before and some have not been out of this city for their entire lives).

Also there is a setup at Christmas where people donate shoeboxes filled with set gifts - again, some of these kids, without this, would not have a Christmas present. I know the person who distributes them so I have a fair amount of confidence they end up where they say they are going. The reason I like this one is I don't like to see kids punished due to circumstances they cannot control and have no say over or input to.

If people are shying away from national charities it might make more sense to look at what's on your doorstep. You may be surprised just how many charities there are. Some of the local projects here are finite (fund a community garden that children can grow vegetables in) and some are ongoing. These are the ones I now prefer to donate to.

This only makes perfect sense if you are concerned about not having enough money to survive until your own death.

Most people don't spend every waking minute working, even in their prime earning years. You have to make a decision about how to spend "non-productive" time. Even looking at it from a "selfish" perspective, many people find that they maximize their happiness by spending some of their free time volunteering. They may also be more effective at certain tasks at that stage of their lives. They may model volunteering to their children, who would be unlikely to pick up new lessons from their elderly parents many years in the future.

Some are crap, but it's not hard to do your due diligence. Their IRS forms are publicly available, and every reputable charity sends a lot of data to Charity Navigator. Administrative overhead averages around 10%, which is actually really good.

I actually think many of the worst charities are the really big ones. They're usually very well managed, and they put a high percentage of their money towards programs rather than overhead, but the problem is that they just have way too much money to know what to do with it all. It's the same problem you see in the private equity sector these days. Smaller, local charities are much better at making an impact on a shoestring budget. The problem is that it takes a little effort to learn what those organizations are, so instead, people just leave a bunch of money to the Red Cross or something in their wills.

Setting aside the question of whether the government should be doing all of the things that charities do (obviously there's a huge range, from soup kitchens for the destitute, to modern art museums for the upper middle class), the reality is that government ISN'T doing all of the things that charities do. I'm not sure what kind of moral principle could at the same time dictate (1) that society has an obligation to create government programs to care for the less fortunate, and (2) that individuals with the means to help the less fortunate have no obligation to do so, even when government isn't doing it. Either there's a moral obligation to help other people or there isn't.

I don't know, I have donated to some pretty important GoFundMe's in my day. Like the guy I went to high school with who needed to furnish his apartment (at the age of 29) or the girl I saw on twitter who needed to finance her Europe backpacking adventure!

You can write it off against your taxes so it does make sense if you're in danger of owing taxes. Better yet open a Charitable Giving Trust and donate the money to yourself to grow.

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM wrote:

You can write it off against your taxes so it does make sense if you're in danger of owing taxes.

Even if you owe taxes I don't see what's the advantage of donating $X so you can save a fraction of $X on taxes.

To help an organization that is making a difference in something you feel strongly about and care about.

Joseph Missouri wrote:

HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM wrote:

You can write it off against your taxes so it does make sense if you're in danger of owing taxes.

Even if you owe taxes I don't see what's the advantage of donating $X so you can save a fraction of $X on taxes.