Unlike a few other blogs, TAR doesn’t do fundraising drives. (That’s entirely because we don’t need the money – the overheads are still very low, though that might change in the future.) To make up for this, I sometimes make a pitch for charitable donations to Oxfam, and now is one of those times.

It is very hard to come up with general principles about how much one _should_ give to charity. I’m sure my readers fall on a very wide range of income levels and expenses. An amount to be donated (either in dollars or percentage of income) that was relatively painless for one person could be extremely difficult for someone else. Having said that, here’s one suggestion that might be pertinent at this time of year, when many of us are finding out what (if any) pay raises we are getting for next year.

If you were living reasonably comfortably last year, and you received a pay raise for next year, it probably won’t cause too much difficulty to donate, say, 10% of the raise to a charitable group. One thing I’ve found as I’ve moved from living off a graduate stipend to an associate professor’s income is that every time I get a pay raise, I can’t figure out how I lived on my former income. If you’re like me, agreeing to donate some of the raise before it is spent might encourage appropriate frugality as well doing some good.

If you got a larger than expected raise, so giving away 10% of it right now would be a burden, you can always sign up for Oxfam’s “Pledge Partner Program”:https://secure.ga3.org/02/monthlypledge, where you automatically make a donation every month.