The first time I heard my internship salary at Akuna Capital, I literally couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was this absolutely crazy number that I just couldn’t comprehend at the time - they were going to pay a 20-year old how much? Later, I got an email from HR asking for a good time to call - I thought they were going to fire me before I started; it turns out they had “updated” the salary to be 25% higher than before. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but I decided that I wasn’t going to do anything good with the money, so I might as well give some of it away. I’ll never forget the first chunk - I was eating at Eleven City Diner when I noticed that they were raising money to go to Malawi to build schools; I left $100. The waiter was just floored, and told me how he was involved with it and how grateful he was, and here’s some candy for you to take - it’s on us.

Since then, I’ve given 20% of my salary to charity, a practice I wanted to more-or-less commit myself to by making it public (granted, on a blog that attracts dozens of visitors per week. Dozens!) That wasn’t so much cash in the early days, when all of my donations were coming from internship salaries; now that I’ve started my full-time job out of college it’s a fair chunk of change. Had I given the money directly to the charity myself, I’d choose to itemize my deductions come tax season (though I try to some extent to funnel my donations through others that have the ability to match donations through their employer).

Where I donate money to has changed quite a bit from when I started. I’m a strong believer today in effective altruism; most of my donations go to GiveWell for them to allocate as they see fit between insecticide-treated bed nets, vitamin A supplements, cash incentives for childhood vaccines, deworming initiatives, or just direct cash transfers. I’m not fully sure how much my 20% rule has driven me toward Effective Altruism - would I have stumbled upon that organically and subscribed to those ideologies without my own little pledge? In any case, I definitely want my money to have an impact; I imagine my cash is able to save a few lives every year or improve the quality of life for people whom I’m likely to never once meet.

The craziest thing for me is how little I notice it. It feels a lot like saving for retirement: if you take the money “off the top” and just pretend like you never had it to begin with, it’s not all that difficult to do. It sounds like a lot of money to donate - 20% of salary (my commitment is pre-tax, not take-home) - but it’s not something I’ve really felt affect my life day-to-day. Even with taxes, funding my retirement (quite aggressively), and this secular tithe, I’m continuing to spend basically the same amount to run my life as I did during college. It doesn’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. I still did my month-long Europe trip after graduation, I still see my long-distance girlfriend more-or-less once a month, I still have my metal credit card (admittedly, that pays for itself, but still).

I sometimes ask myself if 20% is enough; I could easily pack my lunch instead of buying a $12 salad and donate the difference; I could bike more to work, not pay $6 in parking, and donate the difference; I could choose to stop buying clothes from Lululemon and donate the cash I would have spent. It’s an incredibly asymmetric choice: $1 for me is nothing, and yet $1 is the cost to deworm a child. Perhaps I’ll adjust the 20% upwards in the future — for now, I’ll not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.