This was basically my thinking. I think it is reasonable to keep an emergency fund to cover things like (in particular) unexpected healthcare bills, and that giving away 10% would make this hard to do. My anecdotal experience of high cost of living cities in the US is that it would be challenging to live there on $35k of take home salary.
Of course, in a strictly utilitarian sense, I guess it isn’t “reasonable”, because it’s not more “reasonable” than protecting someone from a deadly case of malaria—but then none of us lives out that maximalist thinking in reality anyway. (E.g. everyone commenting on this post spends at least some money on themselves in a way that could be redirected elsewhere.)
I’m really quite interested in how much disagreement my original comment got, even as a professional promoter of effective giving myself. It’s informative!
This was basically my thinking. I think it is reasonable to keep an emergency fund to cover things like (in particular) unexpected healthcare bills, and that giving away 10% would make this hard to do. My anecdotal experience of high cost of living cities in the US is that it would be challenging to live there on $35k of take home salary.
Of course, in a strictly utilitarian sense, I guess it isn’t “reasonable”, because it’s not more “reasonable” than protecting someone from a deadly case of malaria—but then none of us lives out that maximalist thinking in reality anyway. (E.g. everyone commenting on this post spends at least some money on themselves in a way that could be redirected elsewhere.)
I’m really quite interested in how much disagreement my original comment got, even as a professional promoter of effective giving myself. It’s informative!