Sorry if I’ve mentioned this before, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the top 5% of high earners worldwide. Perhaps top 2-3%.
If you’re not sure, you can look it up via this handy calculator.
In the absence of a global wealth taxation scheme to fund global public health – it’s just around the corner I’m sure – it’s up to you do the right thing and donate to some effective health charities.
What’s that? You haven’t possibly got the time to investigate such charities yourself? Well, here they are, it’s all been worked out for you. You give to one fund, it divides it up into donations to some hot charities.
I’ve been giving 10% of my pre-tax salary since about 2013*. You don’t have to give 10% (you can give more!).
There’s a useful guide to all of this here, which explains why you might want to join a club of fellow givers, and why you might do it publicly.
Recently the team at Giving What We Can have added this great graphic of problems we could solve if the top 1% all gave 10%:
I’m actually going to read through the footnotes, it’s very exciting.
Anyway, money where mouth is and all that. Last calendar year, I earned about £40k (worldwide top 3.5%!) and I’m donating £4k. Gift aid then boosts that to £5k. I give to the ‘Global Health and Wellbeing’ fund, so that money goes to charities like those that: “save lives and prevent illness by distributing insecticide-treated nets or vitamin A supplements, as well as initiatives that could lead to huge improvements in illness and death prevention, like studying the impact of certain water quality interventions.”
Wahoo!
Get in touch if you’d like to chat about it.
*I missed last year, due to buying a house. Oops.
Photo: Wolfgang Hasselmann
Update: Giving What We Can just put out this rather good video:
Joe blogs. 