Challenge: Every time you spend unnecessarily, match that with a charitable donation.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I'm throwing down this gauntlet as a personal challenge the wife and I have been doing recently, and figured others might like the idea as well.
Sometimes I struggle with charitable giving - how much, how often, finding the right causes, etc.
And, if I'm honest, there are too many times where it just isn't something that crosses my mind, and I haven't donated as much as I'd like in the past. However we DO think about our spending when we're buying an unnecessary item. Is that item worth it? We weigh the decision in our mind. So lately my trigger has been that when we deem an item worth buying, we donate that same amount of money to charity.
So there's the challenge: Every time you spend unnecessarily, match that with a charitable donation.
It's up to you to define the weasel word in it, "unnecessarily." I purposefully used a different word, frivolous, in the thread title.
We have also excluded a few certain items (trips to see family at double the cost with the matching would become prohibitively expensive to where we'd do them less frequently, and we don't want to discourage the behavior of visiting family). It's more of "I don't need this CD, so I'll donate a matching amount," or "Let's eat out tonight" (and donate a matching amount) -- those little wasteful spendings that we do to indulge. If we are so fortunate as to have extra money to blow on useless items/experiences/luxuries/whatever, we ought to have enough to donate that same amount as well.
It has the twofold benefit of making us consider our wasteful spending even more (i.e. this item will cost 2x as much) while encouraging us to contribute more than we may have otherwise.
We've talked about moving to an all spending match, but we're not that hardcore yet.
Sharing in the hope that it gives a few of you some ideas, I know we enjoyed the simplicity of the idea once it struck us. Thoughts?
