How much would you give to charity....

[OrgasmingNeighbour]

... if you had £70K per year spare?

£15,000k. Split between 2 charities.

Depends,

how close are you to the charity?

Thank you for your replies.

Not close to any particular charity.

Some, depending on considerations like pension and legacy plans.

@PhilosophicalCheeseSandwich What do you mean by 'legacy plans'? Sorry
Pensions all topped up.

Hope much I'd like to leave to the beneficiaries of my will.

How much savings do you have?

Honestly if there wasn’t a charity I was passionate about and didn’t need any tax relief it is unlikely that I would be giving any money.

i would use it on making my life more sustainable

Define 'spare' I guess??

I give a third of what I've got available for long term savings.

So all monthly spends / fun spends / clothes / beauty etc. plus annual bills / emergency savings / holiday savings etc already accounted for separately. Not that any of these are large amounts but are what I feel comfortable spending!

Then the rest could either go into long term savings / paying off mortgage etc and I put a third of that sum to charities.

10% of income is the general rule of thumb. But if you have much more to give, maybe try and find a local charity where you can see the money making a difference?

Not a penny. I have children and believe firmly that charity begins at home.

I'm afraid I'm fairly skeptical about the amount of good that most charities do. I might use it for "good works" but I wouldn't necessarily give much to charity.

You could donate things to the charity shop when destashing rather than donating a cash sum. Alternatively you could donate your time, probably bono, to a charity. I am skeptical of cash charity donations (I used to work in the third sector!!)

If I had that spare after savings etc., feasibly all of it could go. I do have charities I care about though.

It depends on the alternative though e.g. paying my niece's student fees and cost of living would mean I would pay that first.

"have spare" - do you mean that someone wants to give away 70k and who would they give it to ie charity?

If that is what you mean - I'd have to research a lot about the potential charities as most have very highly paid bosses at the top and side-kicks/ Then i want to know how they sue their money, ie what percentage of that woul go to the cause. Then I'd decide

Thank you - yes, that's really obvious now I think about it

The aim is to have nothing left when we die. But that's many years away (I hope!). We're still building, rather than spending.

About £300K but we're still building/saving. Now we're on an even keel with income (renovating a house, DP's had some income fluctuation etc.), I want to start giving more to charity each year.

By "spare" I mean the amount left over each year after all expenditure which would be invested. I feel we can use some of the money we'd usually put into long-term investments for charity.

I hear you about cash donations to charities, I really do. And I absolutely take your points about really digging into the details.

I've worked with several large national cancer charities through my career. I absolutely wouldn't give them a penny after seeing how they operate.

Sorry, no, I mean that I have £70K left over each year after all spending. I feel there is room in that sum to contribute towards long-term investments but also to give to charities. But I'm not too sure how much to divert to charity.

I fully believe in tithing.

There is a great need in the world for charitable donations.

We give to local charities (where we see the direct impacts) and our local church. For the local charities we support a local village foodbank / homeless charities for their weekly appeals and larger donations at Christmas etc when they do appeals. We also donate food / toys / bedding etc when local animal charities appeal, or just randomly send a load of things via Amazon wish lists. Another way we like to do it is find people on just giving and help them along their way.

This probably works out around 10-15% per year. I think it's a good thing to do if you can afford to, and with keeping it fairly local I'm not worried about some giant conglomerate using the money poorly. I think you could aim for 1-2k per month to donate to regular causes then perhaps a bit more for any special cases?

Ok, thanks for the clarity
Give what you feel is right
Give to those that will properly use the money as per my intial post here

Keep enough savings in order to remain feeling good so you find it easier to give

You could also nominate a charity in your Will and leave them some or everthing

Good luck

Honestly OP I would look at local charities/local fundraising projects/local community groups because you know your money will be spent on what they are saying it will be spent on. And even donating 10/20% of your spare money would make a huge impact on small local charities/groups.