Until recently I thought Julia and I were digging a bit into savings to donate more. With the tighter funding climate for effective altruism we thought it was worth spending down a bit, especially considering that our expenses should decrease significantly in 1.5y when our youngest starts kindergarten.
I was surprised, then, when I ran the numbers and realized that despite donating 50% of a reduced income, we were $9k (0.5%) [1] richer than when I left Google two years earlier.
This is a good problem to have! After thinking it over for the last month, however, I've decided to start earning less: I've asked for a voluntary salary reduction of $15k/y (10%). [2] This is something I've been thinking about off and on since I started working at a non-profit: it's much more efficient to reduce your salary than it is to make a donation. Additionally, since I'm asking others to fund our work I like the idea of putting my money (or what would be my money if I weren't passing it up) where my mouth is.
Despite doing this myself, voluntary salary reduction isn't something that I'd like to see become a norm:
I think it's really valuable for people to have a choice about where to apply their money to making the world better.
The organization where you have a comparative advantage in applying your skills will often not be the one that can do the most with additional funds, even after considering the tax advantages.
I especially don't think this is a good fit for junior employees and people without a lot of savings, where I'm concerned social pressure to take a reduction could keep people from making prudent financial decisions.
Still, I think this is a good choice for me, and I feel good about efficiently putting my money towards a better world.
[1] In current dollars. If you don't adjust for inflation it's $132k
more, but that's not meaningful.
[2] I'm not counting this towards my 50% goal, just like I'm not counting the pay cut I took when I stopped earning to give.
I suppose this is only tangential to your post, but seeing it reminded me of something I was just recently reflecting on. I wanted to look into whether anyone has written on here in support of reducing their cost of living so that they can sustain themselves on fewer work hours in order to volunteer more of their time. It seems like a variation on Earning to Give—in the sense that by lowering costs you make it easier to earn what you need so that you can give more of your time. I'm interested in reading some of the links you included because even though not directly tied to my own reflection they seem relevant in a way that I find stimulating.