The important thing is not to burn out, which would substantially reduce future giving. Right now I'm aiming only to max out Google's $6K/year matching limit. I probably won't increase that until I have a lot of savings, like on the order of several months of salary. Then if my partner is OK with it I'll head towards giving 10%, and after that I'd hope to give away 50% of future pay rises; whether we go beyond that will depend on how our income and outgoings compare at that point.

I wouldn't pay any attention to any comments that don't discuss the commenter's giving, by the way! You would probably get more informative answers if the question was "How did you decide how much of your income to give to charity?"

The logical thing to do seems to be: figure out how much more you value yourself than a random African. Figure out how much money you have to have so that the marginal dollar is that many times more valuable to them than to you. Donate everything beyond that.

I just plan on trying to spend as little as I can, and just donating the rest.

Giving What We Can recommends over 10% of income. I currently donate what I can spare when I don't need the money, and have precommitted to 50% of my post-tax income in the event that I acquire a job that pays over $30,000 a year (read: once I graduate college). The problem with that is that you already have a steady income and have arranged your life around it- it's much easier to not raise expenses in response to income than it is to lower expenses from a set income.

Like EStokes said, however, the important thing isn't to get caught up in how much you should be donating in order to meet some moral requirement. It's to actually give in a way that you, yourself, can give. We all do what we can :)

My temporary solution is to max out my employer's annual match. That the maximum match is somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of my income is very convenient, as that makes me feel like I'm contributing the "expected" amount for an EA (this feeling is only important for fuzzies) but still leaves me with what seems to be a good amount to save and spend. It also allows me to avoid committing an answer to the question of whether to donate now or invest and donate later. The guaranteed, almost-immediate, soon-to-expire 100% return provided by the match wins pretty clearly over the EV of investing and donating later, and since I feel like I'm donating enough for now, I can evaluate what to do with what's being invested later on, based on my wants and needs.

"What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity?" My answer: how much better a place do you want to make the world? Do you want to make it a little better, a medium amount better, or a lot better? And how does this goal trade off against your other goals? How much would you sacrifice by making the world a lot better? Keep in mind that money is not a good way to buy happiness. So you sacrifice surprisingly little. But giving up things that you already have is painful due to the endowment effect. Try to fight status quo bia... (read more)

My current rationalisation for my level of charitable giving is "if, say, the wealthiest top billion humans gave as much as me, most of the worlds current problems that can be solved by charity would be solved in short order".

I use this as a labor-saving angst prevention device.

Me: "Am I a good person ? Am I giving too little ? How should I figure out how much to give ? What does my giving reveal about my true preferences ? What would people I admire think of me if they knew ?"

Me: "Extra trillions thing. Get back to work."

I have a good intuition on how to allocate the money

Isn't that a far more formidable problem than just deciding how much to give? Maybe you should tell us your allocation method.

I think that something is better than nothing.

Sometimes setting an amount to give that is high can be discouraging, and can lead people to not give at all, or spend time feeling bad about not meeting their standards, rather than focus on what they can do to help.

If you give more than 0.7% of your income, you are doing better than most governments around the world, many of which have promised to spend 0.7% of GDP on foreign aid, but do not meet that threshold.

I don't think "How much money shall I give to charity?" is as important a question as &... (read more)

This post demonstrates a common failure of LessWrong thinking, where it is assumed that there is one right answer to something, when in fact this might not be the case. There may be many "right ways" for a single person to think about how much to give to charity. There may be different "right ways" for different people, especially if those people have different utility functions.

I think you probably know this, I am just picking on the wording, because I think that this wording nudges us towards thinking about these kinds of questions in an unhelpful way.

I'd like to chime in to counter the common intuitions seen in the other comments.

First, that the more you give, the better it is.
It's known that money has a powerful effect on human psyche, and I strongly doubt that pouring say a million dollar to a charity that is used to manage ~10K$ donations will suddenly multiply its efficency hundredfolds. More likely, that money will be wasted. Or given to local warlords. Or used to pay higher salaries, etc.
The unreasonable assumption here is that there's a direct path from money to utility for other people, as if c... (read more)

I agree with Mr Mind that there are a number of questionable hidden assumptions here. I would suggest that if you truly care about improving the world, you should seek to invest, not to give to charity. Ideally, this would be an area in which you already have some expertise, so you can pick wise investments. Most problems that charities work on are also business opportunities for entrepreneurs to solve; by being part of that, your money will do far more good in the long run. Market feedback makes sure that for-profit businesses really are solving the probl... (read more)

There is no fixed tithe... Donate slightly more than required to not feel guilty. If in doubt, increase the amount until you are sure.