Donating 80% While It Still Counts
Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like weāre in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can.
Hereās what that looks like in the context of our overall spending:
Weāve been prioritizing donations for a long time, but it feels very different now because of the AI boom. Some of this is that people whoāve made money in the boom will likely be giving more soon, and so money spent now can help set up organizations to spend future money more effectively. But more importantly, this is a key window of opportunity: transformative AI is coming very quickly, for better or worse. We want to push hard for ābetterā.
If you compare to previous years (2024, 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), weāre donating a lot less than we used to in absolute terms:
Until mid-2022 I was working at a big tech company, optimizing to maximize donations, and now Iām at a non-profit. This means weāre giving a larger fraction, but of a smaller amount:
I feel good about this change. Iām now building an early warning system for engineered pandemics, which is urgent and important as AI increasingly substitutes for advice from expert virologists. It does mean donating much less than I would have if Iād continued in big tech, but I think this was well worth it. While money can enable important work, I see a lot of projects that primarily need dedicated people to bring them into existence, and Iād be excited for others to switch to direct work.
Even though weāre drawing down our savings to donate, our net worth rose 18% over the last year (adjusted for inflation). This was driven by stock returns on our retirement savings:
Now, retirement savings growing via stock returns is how itās āsupposedā to work: if we give away all the gains then weāll have much less at retirement. But I see ~three futures as AI becomes rapidly more capable:
Things go very poorly, long-term savings are mostly useless, and we really wish weād done more.
Things go very well, the world is very wealthy, we donāt need the additional money.
Somehow, AI ends up being not that big a deal, and the world is still pretty normal financially.
Itās really only in that last world where our savings translate into us having a better life, and as AI continues not hitting a wall I see the chances of ending up in a basically normal world getting pretty small. While we shouldnāt donate to where weād be destitute if weāre wrong, weāre not in danger of that. [1] So I think we should continue to draw down our non-retirement savings to donate more during this critical period.
Writing this post also got me thinking about our retirement contributions. Weāre both contributing the maximum, which I think often makes sense even if you donāt expect a normal retirement, from a perspective of protecting savings. Since weāre in a good enough position financially and donating seems very urgent, I now think we should stop contributing to have more to donate going forward.
Evaluating Predictions
Back in 2024 I made a list of what I expected to write in 2026. How did reality differ from expectations?
2024: I think thereās a good chance weāll have switched from giving 50% to some form of salary sacrifice. If we do, our pay, donations, and taxes will all be a lot lower.
I did this for a little while. I started at a 10% reduction, and then when Juliaās work decided to no longer support voluntary salary reductions I went to 75%. Then a few months ago I decided to stop since I wanted more flexibility in targeting donations.
2024: Childcare should be similar: the nanny share is working and I expect weāll do something similar at least until our youngest starts kindergarten in Fall 2026 (and will show up in the 2028 update).
Yup, still doing a nanny share with our former housemate. While there was a bit where our nanny left and it took us a few tries to find someone who worked out, this is now going well again. We havenāt decided what weāll do for afterschool when our youngest starts school in the Fall.
2024: Iād like to hope I have a better way of accounting for housing and savings in general and have gone back and redone all my previous numbers under the new system, but since that sounds like a ton of work I doubt Iāll have done that.
My prediction that I would be lazy was correct. This post represents zero accounting improvements, only more data due to the passage of time.
2024: I put about a 10% chance on AI, war, or other major events in this timeframe changing things enough that everything is weird in hard to predict ways.
The world is appreciably different from two years ago, but not in ways that strongly impacted our spending.
Making New Predictions
Letās try and make some similar predictions for 2028:
My odds that the world has changed substantially are up significantly, maybe 55%, primarily due to AI. Iād put about 10% on futures where things go very badly, where Iām not here to write a followup and youāre not here to read one. Then maybe 10% on really good futures where thereās no need for me to work on biosecurity and I can do music, dance, and blogging full time. And 35% on weird futures where weāre not dead but itās not clearly good either. Donāt put a lot of weight on these numbers!
Childcare costs will be down a lot, because all three kids will be in school. But weāll still need to pay for afterschool, holidays, and vacations. Our oldest will be in 8th grade, so no college costs yet. Back in 2018 I was thinking that sometime around 2028 I might be moving from earning to give to direct work (due to the effective 100% marginal tax rate), but I ended up doing this earlier and for non-college reasons.
We wonāt be pulling from savings to fund donations because weāll have finished giving away our remaining non-retirement savings. But with so much lower childcare costs weāll probably still be able to give over 50%.
We donāt have any expensive house projects. With how much the world could change soon I want to keep options open, and not lock up money in the house.
Weāre still living in the same house, and our housing costs will have gone down slightly because rents will have gone up a little (in a combination of real and nominal terms) but our mortgage is fixed-rate.
Our shared car is a 2013 Honda Fit, and while these are great cars thereās a decent chance it wonāt last much longer. Might need to make a substantial payment here.
Details
Iāve used the same approach as last year, which was unchanged from 2022 and very similar before then. Numbers below are monthly, based on 2025 spending.
Donations: $11.9k (81% of 2025 adjusted gross income)
Taxes: $3.0k
Income tax: $500
State tax: $500
Social Security tax: $900
Medicare tax: $200
Property tax: $800
Childcare: $3.6k ($150/āworkday, three kids)
Housing: $2.0k
Note: this is tricky; see details below on how this is calculated
One time expenses (all time)
Purchase and all one-time expenses up through the 2024 update: $1.1M
Major one-time expenses since the 2024 update: $31.8k:
Solar: $30k
Additional insulation: $1.2k
Ongoing expenses, covering the whole house including the tenantsā unit:
Electricity: $92
Gas (Heat): $257
Water/āSewer: $179
Other: $83
Rent income: $4.8k
Retirement saving: $4.3k (all pre-tax)
Other savings: -$6.4k (see below)
Medical: $218 in pre-tax health insurance, ~$400 in post-tax co-pays etc
Food: $964 (two adults, and three kids 11y, 9y, 4y)
Other: $1k
Includes phone bills, taxis, car rentals, clothes, vacation, stuff for the kids, and other smaller expenses.
Because we are no longer tracking our expenses to the dollar, the distinction between āOtherā and āSavingsā is an estimate.
[1] Our house is 2ā3 paid off, if we used savings to finish it off that would leave ~$1M saved. At a 4% safe withdrawal income this would be $3.3k/āmonth. We also rent out several parts of our house, totaling $4.8k/āmonth, which brings us to ~$100k/āy of raw income. This would need to cover taxes, health insurance, utilities, house maintenance, food, etc, but almost everyone lives on far less. I think the largest risk is that we get a non-extinction future thatās still quite bad, but I have trouble seeing moderately higher savings making a large difference there.
I find this quite moving! Sometimes people wonder ādo those folks talking about imminent AI risk even take their beliefs seriously?ā. Well, here we go!
I should note that a few months ago, I also massively front-loaded my donations such that I have very little in liquid assets. Though I have never met Jeff, him and his family have been an inspiration to me for many years.
Itās very impressive to donate 80%. For other EAs who are pursuing āearn to giveā as a main strategy, I think itās a model to learn with. Although the default is to donate 10%, but I think most EAs could aim for a higher value. However, thereās also a case for saving money. I think EAs could use āearn to give+saveā as a metric, we can aim for āgive+save 50% every yearā
Iām interested in advice on retirement savingsāmine are far smaller than Jeffās and reading this gives me slight anxiety haha. It would be action-guiding for me as maybe I should just not push myself to donate more and instead have a more solid retirement plan. Kudos to you Jeff on being transparent and generous!
Out of curiosity, where did you donate? (apologies if you already have this written up somewhere else!)
The full list is on our donations page. Lately weāve been prioritizing political donations (argument, mechanism).
Thank you for donating and sharing this with the community!
Impressive!
Of course returns vary, but if you gave away 80% of your income and your net worth still increased, that means you are close to retirement, so I agree it doesnāt make sense to continue to contribute to retirement.
As per your comment on LW, biorisk is a large proportion of the risks in the next 2 years. Are you personally preparing to protect yourself and family from mirror bio or to relocate?
On mirror biology, my impression is the risk there is mostly more than two years out, because itās really very hard. Do you think this specific biorisk is coming sooner?
On relocating, I donāt think it would make sense for us to move in response to a bio incident. Instead, Iām more focused on preparations we can take at home.
No, I donāt think mirror bio is coming sooner.
I would like to know why you donāt think it would make sense to relocate to a place like New Zealand or Australia. My thought is that they demonstrated that they had the will and the functioning government to suppress COVID, and can take advantage of their isolation. You may be able to prevent your family from getting the disease in the US, but then you may have to deal with no electricity or water or fuel if the vital employees are unable or unwilling to show up to work. Australia could likely keep industry functioning conventionally, but even New Zealand might be able to improvise biofuels or go back to animal power.
My top reason for not relocating is that Iām working on preventing this kind of bad outcome, which I think I can do most effectively from Boston.
But even if I were doing work that could be done from anywhere, I donāt think Iād relocate: that only helps in a small fraction of the doomy futures, I think there are also a lot of good futures, and I really like living in Boston.
To be clear, my relocation post was for getting ready to relocate quickly in response to a trigger such as a new infectious, fatal disease being discovered.
Hi Jeff.
Do you see any bet we could make about transformative AI (TAI) timelines, or what they supposedly imply, that is beneficial for both of us?
On thinking about the āworld got weird because of AI but we are all aliveā scenario, I would consider withdrawing from savings to finish paying for the house.
If AI causes something to go terribly wrong on financial systems(lets supose, all banking systems are now easy to hack with AI or something with similar consequences) seems good to not have to prove in legal battles that you actually pais for that % of your own house.
Also, thanks for sharing, I always admired you two very much!
I would be pretty surprised if things failed in that particular way? We do legally own the entire house, and that wouldnāt be in dispute. Having money left on the mortgage means that we owe money to the bank, secured by the house. In most kinds of kind of disaster, if ownership becomes unclear, I expect it to be primarily resolved by possession.
I think things are unlikely to fall apart in this particular way, but to the extent that they do, I think it mostly argues for renting over owning, over being an absentee landlord.
I see now. Here in Brazil it works differently. You only own the house after paying full for the bank, before that the bank is the proprietary.
Useful to see, thanks!