On the feeling good about yourself: One way that helped me is to separate the donation money out while saving up for my runway—so I ‘donated’ 10% to a budget in my personal finance spreadsheet, whilst saving about the same percentage in my savings budget—basically committing the money to donations whilst keeping it as a backup for rainy days on my bank account. Once both budgets add up to a 6 month runway (or however long someone thinks they need), you can start donating from the donation budget (+the extra 10% each month). Personally this helped me a lot with the psychological “but I said I would donate 10%” and stopped me from spending the money on other things—whilst being able to take the donation money for runway if I would have needed to do so. The percentages might be too high for some people, but overall I’ve found this way of framing my savings quite useful psychologically.
On the feeling good about yourself: One way that helped me is to separate the donation money out while saving up for my runway—so I ‘donated’ 10% to a budget in my personal finance spreadsheet, whilst saving about the same percentage in my savings budget—basically committing the money to donations whilst keeping it as a backup for rainy days on my bank account. Once both budgets add up to a 6 month runway (or however long someone thinks they need), you can start donating from the donation budget (+the extra 10% each month). Personally this helped me a lot with the psychological “but I said I would donate 10%” and stopped me from spending the money on other things—whilst being able to take the donation money for runway if I would have needed to do so. The percentages might be too high for some people, but overall I’ve found this way of framing my savings quite useful psychologically.