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.)
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.
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!
🙂
Yep! I’ve written about it before and even mentioned it in this post! I’m a fan.
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!