I have made an “informal pledge” on this basis but looking to make a formal legally binding version so my signal of virtues becomes even hard-coded in the law.
I am running quite a few impact-focused ventures. My Ai timelines are short, and I believe the currency will be worth nothing by 2050, so I want to pledge away 100% of my wealth. My view on life is that all material things are tools for us to help build towards a world where there is more than enough materials for everyone. I like to identify as a ‘good karma farmer’. I fully believe that the task of crafting a better world is bigger than any person or group and it is a focus on mine to help spread this positive mindset of valuing good karma as the only scarce resource in the world.
Sites I have published relative to the spread of these ideas include Redefine Status, Effective Vibes, Prodemic.
GivingWhatWeCan has what they call the Further Pledge. This is mainly about income rather than wealth but seems customisable, so might be worth looking into it and contacting them.
Yeah, a version of this is covered by the Further Pledge. If you pledge to live on no more than $X (adjusted for purchasing power) then any wealth accumulated is allocated for giving. We are also exploring a wealth pledge right now if you’d like to get in touch but I think it is less matched to what you have in mind. Further Pledges are much more customised to the individual.
You may want to join the Giving Pledge (depending on your personal net worth, to join this one, you would need to own at least $1B USD). https://givingpledge.org/
Quick thoughts, which are further questions rather than answers. I don’t have a good answer off the top of my head, but these are the kinds of questions I’d think about to kick off my research if I were looking into this:
- pledge that you give to a particular legal person in the future might be enforceable by that person (but, depending on the rules in your particular jurisdiction, you might be able to evade such a pledge on the basis of how one-sided it would be);
- not sure whether you could make a more open ended pledge (to a particular cause but not a particular org, or cause neutrally), because it wouldn’t really be clear who would have standing to bring a claim to make you go ahead with the case;
- a slightly different approach could be to put assets you have already into a non-profit.
I would like to know the answer to this question too, but don’t have time to look into it right now. If someone else doesn’t chime in, I may come back to this in the new year.