Hope for your financial life and beyond

How to Easily Protect Yourself When Giving to Charities

Are you someone who loves giving to charities? My wife and I sure do. We make it a practice to give at various times during the year. But our interest really peaks during the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas.

There are so many charitable organizations that do great work at these times of year. It is true that people are in need year round. However, the depth and seriousness of focus seems to peak during the holidays. I think that’s because we have an innate – some would say God-given desire – to help those in need. Many of us have been blessed through the holidays and we want to pass those joys and blessings on to others.

giving to charitiesOf course giving to charities doesn’t have to be only about money. You can give of your time and talents as well. But for most, the easiest path is to donate money and let the charities put that to use the best way they know how.

But how do you know if your money will be used wisely? Perhaps the better question is how do you know if you are not getting ripped off or taken advantage of by a rogue charity or a scam artist?

[Read more…]

5 Reasons to Shift Charitable Giving Away from the Holidays

When do you usually conduct your charitable giving? As we see in today’s post, one company learned the holidays might not always be the best time to give.

donate to charityMid-October was plenty early enough to put together a holiday charity drive for a local homeless shelter … right? My co-workers and I thought so. We had dozens of willing hands and a substantial amount of money collected to buy food, gifts, and personal necessities for shelter residents.

Caught Up in the Giving Season

Visions of doing good works danced in our heads. We saw ourselves buying gifts, hauling in food, and serving dinner to shelter residents. We figured that the shelter’s director would do a happy dance when we told her how we wanted to help. How often did donations of this size just drop in her lap?

[Read more…]

4 Large and Small Nonprofits I Support Who Are Doing Incredible Work

Hidden Nuggets Series #63 – “Go and do likewise.” – Luke 10:37

When my wife and I developed a giving plan in an effort to be more intentional with our giving, we committed to do more than give regularly to our local church. Our first step was to discuss what each of us valued. We then tried to find non-profit organizations whose mission and execution of that mission connected with our values.

give In those discussions we concluded that one of our goals would be to always give to something locally or at least within our region. These donations would help keep us in touch with the needs of our community. They would most likely be to smaller organizations who could definitely use our support.

At the same time, we also wanted to support organizations with a global reach that would have the potential to impact tens of thousands of people. By doing this we felt some of our money could be leveraged by these bigger organizations so that it could have the greatest potential return on our giving investment.

As we enter the heart of the holiday season of the next couple of months, I’d like to encourage you to consider your year-end giving strategy. Non-profits everywhere will be serving people in need and none of that can happen without the support of donors like you and me.

To that end, I’d like to share some non-profits my wife and I have been connected to in our giving and ask you to consider how you might be able to help them, or one’s like them in your local community, fulfill their calling.

Samaritan’s Purse

[Read more…]