Thoughts on 2019 donations:
Here are my current thoughts on 2019 donations. These aren’t final and I haven’t thought that much about it.
In general. this year I’ve been focused on generating value on a timescale of a few years. Almost all of my effort has gone into my job, with the goals of:
- increasing the long-term expected value of my company
- building my skills and getting career capital along the way
I haven’t been optimizing for short-term cash flow and haven’t spent any time looking for current donation opportunities, since I don’t think that whatever I can donate this year accounts for very much of my expected impact.
The first question: how much to donate?
Given that I’ve taken the Giving What We Can pledge, honoring that is a lower bound. My compensation is confusing, but 10% of the actual US dollars I got paid (plus taxes) seems reasonable for a lower bound.
The upper bound is my net worth, I guess.
Most of my wealth, as it were, is invested in an illiquid and volatile asset. I don’t think it makes sense to donate this now, as I don’t want to sell it. It’s also not any more tax efficient to donate this before year end.
I think it makes sense to have a decent amount of liquid savings. I’d like to have 2 years of runway; my job right now is pretty uncertain, I feel uncertain about my future career trajectory in general, and I want to make sure I can stay super flexible and unconstrained.
So the question is what to do with the money in between “GWWC pledge” and “2 years of runway.” I’m inclined to mostly donate it. It intuitively feels like just donating somewhere now compares favorably to the last dollar I’ll donate in the future, plus it just feels virtuous and stuff.
The second question: where to donate?
The obvious place given that I haven’t thought about this is a donor lottery. I’ll probably donate most of my 2019 donation to CEA’s donor lottery. I’m scared of committing time to things right now, but at $500k it doesn’t seem that bad to commit to spending a bit of time figuring out where to donate.
I’ll probably also give smaller donations to groups I like and/or have donated to in the past, just because it seems good:
- THL
- MIRI
- CEA
- political campaigns