Why Ten Percent?

Many years ago, when I was 21, I decided that I would give ten percent of my income “to the world” – to people or groups that I thought were doing good work. At the time that wasn’t much, about $100 a month, but I found it an enormously liberating decision.

I was living in a dense urban neighborhood. Many people around me were visibly needy, and people and organizations constantly asked me for money. It was easy to feel overwhelmed by all the reaching hands and worthy causes of the world.

Having set aside a fixed amount of money for this purpose helped me relax a bit. Under the circumstances (that first year I was living in a 6 × 9 foot room), I felt like giving away 10% of my income was pretty generous. If it wasn’t enough to solve everybody’s problems, so be it.

Each month I felt some pride as I decided where the money would go this time. I gave to organizations I cared about, obviously, but I also knew that there was some arbitrariness to my decisions. Because I was committed to keeping giving, I worried less about the inadequacies of this month’s choices. Every little bit helps, I felt. And I was doing my part.

As the years have gone by, my household income has grown, and so, without having to think about it, has the amount of money I give. My life partner, of his own accord, embraced this ten percent approach before we combined finances, and for many years we have made decisions together about where the money might be best used.

Knowing how much I am going to give means I can focus on where the money is likely to be best used, rather than worrying about how much to give. Because the ten percent is set aside from the very beginning, it doesn’t really feel like “my” money – it feels like money I am the steward of, to be used for another purpose, and my job is to figure out how to use it well. What problems am I most concerned about? Which organizations are doing good, effective work? I prefer to put my time and energy into these questions, rather than feeling guilty about not giving enough or wondering whether I’m giving too much.

The ten percent figure is, of course, arbitrary. It has cultural roots in the Christian practice of tithing, but there’s no good reason not to give 9% or 12% instead, except that the math is easier with 10%.

Over time my definition of “income” has changed. For a few years I was desperately sick, and living on loans and gifts. During that time I gave away no money, and felt profoundly grateful that I wasn’t hungry and homeless myself. I know viscerally that luck plays a large role in our lives, and that sometimes people truly can’t afford to give away money. There were people in worse circumstances than I was – there always are – but I was too close to the edge myself to do anything about it.

More recently, my household has been blessed by the complications of investment income. A few years ago we decided that the simplest way to define our income was by using the previous year’s tax form, specifically the Adjusted Gross Income figure. Each year we give away 10% of the previous year’s AGI. Again, there’s some arbitrariness in that approach, but our goal is to have a simple formula that works for us.

How do you decide how much to give? Does that approach work for you? Do you even know how much you give?

If you often feel, or often push away, guilt for not giving enough, you might want to get some hard numbers to work with. How much did you give away, to everything, last year? How much did you earn? How much did you save? What percentage of your earnings did you save and give away? It may take you a little research to figure out these numbers, but they are worth knowing!

Once you have them, sit them down and look at them. How do you feel about them? There are no right answers here. Only you can decide how your money handling fits with your circumstances and your values.

Would it help you, as it has helped me, to have targets to aim at?