Giving for Good - Counting My Pennies

The other day, I was talking to a friend who was thinking of making a donation to charity in his brother’s name as part of his Christmas gift. I asked if he had thought about giving a gift card for such a donation. He hadn’t heard of such a thing, so I offered to send him an e-mail with some links that I knew about. And I thought I would repost that here. I like to give gifts at the holidays, gifts that have meaning to the recipient. What a great way to put meaning behind a gift.

(And for those of you wondering, aside from Kiva, if you buy a gift card through the other two sites, you do get the tax deduction – though that shouldn’t matter at all.)

Network for Good – http://www.networkforgood.org

Great central location for charitable donations, and you can do a gift card. I found out about this site through charitynavigator.org, which is my favorite place to research charities, see how they’re spending their money and find charities dedicated to great causes that maybe don’t get the attention that they should.

Global Giving – http://www.globalgiving.com/

Similar idea, only this is specific projects. I’ve seen more and more references to them lately, but can’t say that I know all that much about them. They also offer gift cards.

Kiva – http://www.kiva.org/

Microlending in the developing world. I’ve made a few loans through here and I really like it. It’s lending, so you get paid back, but can re-lend or donate the money to Kiva’s overhead or, if you want, withdraw the money. Doesn’t earn interest like normal loans, of course, and there’s no guaranteed payback, but that’s not a huge issue, since you want to do something good with your money, plus the default percentage is insanely low. They also offer gift certificates, but one downside that I know of is that last year, so many people gave Kiva gift certificates that right after Christmas, it was almost impossible to find a loan to fund. Which really, isn’t much of a downside, if you really think about it. Of course, after a few weeks, that changed, but it might be something to note. I do think they are working to increase their lending portfolio for the after Christmas rush.

So there you have it. Some great ways to give a gift and make a difference.

Megan Smith

Megan is a 40-something government employee in the Washington, DC area. She got interested in Personal Finance when she got out of college and realized that her paycheck wasn’t going to go as far as she had hoped. Since starting this blog, she has managed to buy a house and make a solid start on her retirement goals, and hopes to help others do the same. Here is her story:

In 2007, I was a gainfully employed 20-something with no debt but not a lot of knowledge about personal finance. It was a co-worker’s comment about Roth IRAs that sent me to the internet, searching for information. It was then that I realized that I really didn’t know a whole lot about personal finance and that my current financial situation was due a lot to inherent frugal tendencies, generous family members, a fear of debt, and good luck. While that was working for me, clearly I needed a better plan.

While I had no debt, I was also pretty much living paycheck to paycheck and not worrying about going over budget (I say this as if I had a real budget) because I had an emergency fund set aside to cover any overages.

Except that’s not what an emergency fund is for.

So I did a lot of research, read a lot of blogs, and decided that I needed a plan. I needed to budget. I needed to know what I was spending my money on. I needed to prepare for the future.

I decided to create a blog not only to make myself accountable to others but also to share the knowledge that I gained along the way. I’ve learned so much from my fellow bloggers, and I hope that my readers can find something useful in what I have to share as well.

Comments

dawn says
December 11, 2008 at 6:13 pm
I found this cool website to help me sort out charitable organizations (the good from the bad.)
http://www.charitynavigator.org/
It can help to make sure your money truly goes where it’s needed!
🙂
Megan says
December 11, 2008 at 11:51 pm
Yep! I’ve written about it before and even mentioned it in this post! I’m a fan.
Cheryl Mahoney says
December 15, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Giving to charities as a gift is a great idea, and those are great resources you’re providing! Thanks for that. I thought you might be interested in another resource: I work for UniversalGiving, a charity-networking site connecting potential donors to NGOs all over the world. Our partner organizations have to pass a rigorous Quality Model to appear on the site, and we don’t take any cut on donations. For the holiday season, we’re also offering gift packages.
If you want to find out more about us, our website is http://www.universalgiving.org, or our blog is http://www.philanthrobuzz.wordpress.com. Thanks again for an excellent post!