Charitable giving (pre-retirement)

[RunningBum]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bolt Yes as I mentioned above. Reading comprehension is often mistaken & easily misunderstood meanings on the www/net. Glad you agree. The NFL, not the individual teams, was a non-profit. The NFL (administration) has even deeper pockets! It's not like ''all involved'' didn't know. C6/c3 All are TAX FREE, that's is the benchmark RB https://www.501c3.org/nfl-drops-tax-exempt-status/ Best wishes....

We are not in agreement on much, if anything. I'll leave it at that.

To the OP, nobody is really keeping score if you need to take a year or two off of charitable giving. Make it up later if/when you can, if you feel that's right. Bill Gates was criticized for being stingy in his early years. I remember him stating that he felt the best strategy would be to focus on growing his wealth at that time, so that he would be able to do more when it came time to focus on charities. He lived up to those words.

[Jeffman52]

DW and I never completely stopped our charitable giving while we were getting out of debt. But we did pull back on it significantly. But as we paid off debt we increased our giving incrementally as each debt paid milestone was reached. The things we support with our giving, we feel are important enough to make it a priority. But as someone above said "Charity begins at home". If I keep digging a hole in my finances, eventually no one gets anything.

[karen1972]

One thought is if you do have to reduce monetarily, is there someway you can make up for it in other ways? Like give more of your time to the charity. We often have skilled jobs charities need so giving of my time quickly added up to lots of "free consulting $$$" which at least made me feel better about being light on the dollar amount.

It all depends on how "fluffy" ones budget is too, ie is there a vacation I can skip in order to still meet my charitable giving, delay a car or appliance purchase, etc. I don't mind sacrificing some comfort to give to causes I believe in. However if there isn't wiggle room, then reducing contributions is certainly ok and prioritizing giving is a good option.

[The Cosmic Avenger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by karen1972 One thought is if you do have to reduce monetarily, is there someway you can make up for it in other ways? Like give more of your time to the charity. We often have skilled jobs charities need so giving of my time quickly added up to lots of "free consulting $$$" which at least made me feel better about being light on the dollar amount. It all depends on how "fluffy" ones budget is too, ie is there a vacation I can skip in order to still meet my charitable giving, delay a car or appliance purchase, etc. I don't mind sacrificing some comfort to give to causes I believe in. However if there isn't wiggle room, then reducing contributions is certainly ok and prioritizing giving is a good option.

This helps, because we didn't really go anywhere this year, except for college visits in the area for the minion, and I used points for the hotel for that. We have cut back significantly on eating out, both by eating out less and choosing cheaper options, but as a two-income household we really depend on some of those time-saving indulgences.

You know, this is probably why I'm having trouble justifying pulling back at all on our charitable giving (although less so now) -- by doing the things and other cutbacks we had been well on our way to repaying the money we "borrowed" from our cash account. It feels like it won't take that long (maybe into early next year) to get back to where we were, but the cuts are starting to weigh on us. We finally felt like we were on track to the point where we could LBYM like we were middle class!