Dollar Jane

In my line of work, I review a lot of grant applications. This gets me thinking a lot about charities, and the many different options I have for charitable giving. This is probably the first year of my life that I’ve really had enough income to think seriously about planning my giving.

I’ve tried to give small gifts to my alma mater every year, and this year I’m thinking about how much to give. I gave $50 last year, and am thinking about bumping this up to $100 or $200. I’ve also got a payroll deduction plan. I take $10 out of each paycheck and divide it among six designated charities (it’s an annual amount of $260).

I also was inspired on the spur of the moment to donate $160 to a project on donorschoose.org. If you’ve never visited donorschoose.org, I’d highly recommend checking it out. School teachers across the country propose projects; the site staff then calculate the total cost of the project and visitors to the site can browse projects and choose which ones to fund. You can see the name of the school, the age of the students, the percent of needy students at the school, the location of the school, and the total amount of the project funded and the total amount left to fund. The site allows you to find a project that appeals to your individual giving criteria, which makes it highly appealing for me.

Anyway, I’ve committed $420 this year to charitable causes. I still need to decide how much to give to my school. But I’m wondering if I should try to give more. Even if I give $100 to my school, that’s still less than 1% of my annual income. I think that I should aim to donate 5% of my annual income, or closer to $2,500 a year. That’s $200 per month or $96 per paycheck.

It seems like a lot, but $200 per month isn’t really that much when I think about my monthly budgets for other things. From the articles I have found online, it seems that most Americans who give to charity give about 2% of their annual income. If I was to apply this standard, I’d give about $1,000 per year, or $83 per month, or $38.50 per paycheck.

I think that for 2008, I will aim to donate $1,000 to charitable causes. I will aim to give a higher percentage in 2009.