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A transcript for our interview with Yield & Spread's Rebecca Herbst

Financial Independence to Philanthropy: Yield & Spread's Rebecca Herbst

We interviewed Rebecca Herbst earlier in the year about financial independence, improving financial literacy and effective giving. Rebecca is an early retiree and now spends her time working on her project to improve financial literacy, Yield & Spread, where 100% of the profits go to charity via The Life You Can Save. Rebecca is also on the board of directors for EA Salt Lake City. 

Rebecca Herbst

00:00 - Introduction and how Rebecca retired early and discovered effective giving 

03:51 - How Rebecca feels about retiring early 

05:01 - All about Rebecca's financial education project: Yield & Spread 

07:27 - Some commonalities between effective altruism and financial independence 

10:42 - What are some common mistakes people make with money? 

14:48 - What should people be spending more money on? 

15:44 - Different ways to think about managing money 

26:49 - How much financial advice is universal 

28:39 - Rebecca top financial tips related to giving 

33:30 - Rebecca's thoughts on ethical consumption and ESG investing 

G'Day folks, and welcome back to Giving What We Can, where we explore how to use our resources to do the most good. Today I'm speaking with Rebecca Herbst from Yield & Spread, a not-for-profit personal finance course for beginning investors where all proceeds go to charity. After 10 years working in commercial real estate, she reached financial independence at age 32 and formally left the traditional corporate world. She's a believer in financial literacy for everyone that investing and financial planning are key to our own financial wellbeing and unlock the superpowers that enable us to do more good in the world. Rebecca is an early retiree and part of both the financial independence and effective altruism movements. And finally, I'm proud to say that Rebecca is also a member of Giving What We Can. Rebecca, welcome.

To start off with, it'd be great if you can tell our listeners a little bit about your story, how you ended up retired early, discovered effective giving, and now why you're spending your time doing financial education.

I'll start with the financial independence story. Like you mentioned, I worked in the real estate industry for over a decade as like a researcher and a city's economist of sort. And I really liked the contents of my job. I loved exploring new cities and why people wanted to live there and why investments were going there and all the like. But the constraints of the job, the operational structure of the job was tough. Sometimes it would be long hours or rather challenging clients with specific needs. And often I felt like the passion for the job had some sort of conflict with what the reality of doing the everyday job was like. I knew deep down that maybe something wasn't totally right, but it didn't seem like moving industries or moving jobs was the answer. It was more just about how we live our everyday 9:00 to 5:00 sort of lives if you have that structure.

I didn't learn about financial independence or the concept that you can save up enough money and invest that money to live off your investments comfortably until I met my now partner, Joe, and he introduced me to this movement, which its fundamentals are being not just frugal, but spending thoughtfully on things that are important to you and investing thoughtfully as well, and then building a life that's important to you. I didn't realize how close I was to reaching financial independence until I met Joe and I realized I was actually a couple years away. Most people discovered this concept and they may be 20 years off or 30 years off from actually reaching a comfortable retirement date, but I was maybe only three to four to five years away from that. I quickly approached and I started preparing for the future.

And around that time when I learned about financial independence, I had also begun actively meditating, which was helping me think a little bit more about others and loving kindness to other people and not just necessarily that my emotions are the most important emotions in the world, and that they're often fleeting. Then also I learned about effective altruism in this timeframe too. And I was introduced to it actually through the FI community via Mr. Money Mustache, who is one of the original pioneers of the movement. And he recommends the book, The Life You Could Save. I read it and immediately thought this concept, donating effectively, that it's our moral obligation to do that was a no-brainer and it made sense almost immediately and kicked into gears some major life changes.

And before we get into things, what's it been like being retired early?

There's this book called 10% Happier by Dan Harris and he talks about how meditation doesn't completely change his life, but it makes him about 10% happier. I would say that's sort of similar for financial independence. Maybe I'll give it 20% happier. It's pretty good, right? I wake up and I decide what I want to do every day and what's important to me and how I want to spend my time, and that's extremely freeing. At the same time, it's also a unique level of pressure. There's no one to blame when you have a bad day or, "Oh, my boss made me do this" or, "My commute stunk." I'm really the arbiter of my own ship. Sometimes I feel like I should be doing a lot or being super productive, but on the whole opportunity to be able to plan and fully live your life in a way that you want to is pretty amazing.

Yeah, and many people see retirement for however old they are when they retire as the next chapter. And with that chapter, you've been focusing and one of your projects is on the financial education Yield & Spread. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Financial literacy is really important to me and there are a lot of resources out there ranging in quality and type and structure. When I first went on my financial independence journey and my friends and family saw the types of changes and shifts that I was making, they were excited by it and pretty open welcoming to these concepts and wanted in. I started suggesting books or podcasts or blogs that were really awesome and resourceful. But most of the time the feedback was, "Can you just sort of teach this to me quickly because I need to be on my way to do all these important things I have to do?" From that birthed this extremely condensed learn to invest course that is rooted in the same investing principles that are commonly used in the financial independence community. Mostly the Boglehead strategy, which was created by Vanguard's founder.

However, it's not super focused on being frugal and budgeting and all the kind of tougher stuff that comes to the financial independence side. It's really focused on how to build wealth with what you have. Now that, or that course used to be live, it still is, but now there's an online self-paced version in which you can take the course. It's about six plus hours of content. Currently it's really all about growing your wealth, learning how to take care of yourself, investing thoughtfully in a low risk manner. And in the future I really want to be growing Yield & Spread to talk more about donation strategies and a lot of the similar ideas that we talk about in the EA community. Then of course, one of the most important things that I should point out about Yield & Spread is that all profits go to effective charities via The Life You Can Save. It's my way of saying, "Hey, I want to give back some of my time in a way that I know how to do and can do thoughtfully" while also raising funds accordingly.

Speaking of which, what are some of the commonalities that you've seen between the financial independence and effective altruism movements?

If anyone is part of either one of these communities right away will notice that they are people who are optimizers. People in the financial independence community are investing their money in the most thoughtful, most optimized ways possible. They're not wasting a cent. They're also spending their money in ways that are maximizing their quality of life and forgetting the rest. The effective altruism community's the same. When people are setting aside a portion of their money towards good causes, they are focusing on causes that are most impactful and effective. Financial independence is like the mirror to oneself where you're looking at how to help yourself in the most effective way. And effective altruism is the opposite. It's turning that mirror around and showing that towards others.

The thing I've noticed is that it's come both in FIRE and effective altruism is encouraging people to be more mindful about their decisions, especially in relation to thinking about what they value. And one thing that's come across both of them is things like how you're spending money. Can you maybe talk a little bit more to that? We've spoken about that in the past.

Sure. When I think about how I spend my money on myself, I think about the things that generate either the most value for me and that might come in the form of joy and contentment, physical and mental health and wellbeing or my community or family and friends that I care about. I think about leaning into those experiences and not necessarily being frugal on those, really spending on those with intent and then forgetting the rest. For example, if I buy a shirt that needs dry cleaning, maybe I really like that shirt and I like the way it looks on me, but that commitment to dry cleaning it for the rest of time is not exactly valuable.

I have the ability to take a step back and say, "Okay, that's not the shirt for me." Whereas in the effective altruism community when we are doing this thoughtful thing to set money aside and give to others, spending time to think about not only what's important to us, but what's the most impactful thing that we can do, that's critical to being a successful sort of member of the effective altruism community. I think of these things in the same way because donating to effective causes does bring me joy. I feel like it does bring me personal health and wellbeing as well. I am personally benefiting from that experience while also giving others and doing something more meaningful than maybe just buying that shirt that needs to be dry cleaned.

I'm going to have some questions now about money, which is something I'm sure you talk about every day with Yield & Spread or the days that you work on it. What are some of the biggest common mistakes you see people making with their money?

Well, the biggest mistake is really not doing anything with their money. I think many of us who come out of school and are looking for a job are taught to look for a quality job, work hard, and maybe do your best to get salary increases along the way and earn money. But we're often not given the tools to learn how to build wealth in other ways such as forms of passive income, whether that's investing in the open stock market or bond market, or whether that's businesses that generate you passive income. The idea that as you grow wealth, you can earn wealth without having to actively work for it, is this foreign concept to many people. I would say the biggest mistake that most people make is, and I wouldn't even say mistake because it's usually simply access to what this world is like of passive income, but that comes in the form of really not doing anything outside of working their everyday jobs.

That's the biggest mistake I would say that most people make. The next mistake is that people often listen to others and gather advice from others without actually looking at the research or the science behind it. They might have a friend or a cousin or a colleague who appears very wealthy and successful and follows their lead, but as we know, appearances aren't always everything. We become products of our environment that we're in, where we are following those that seem successful rather than taking a step back and thinking about what does success really mean to me? Instead of taking the time to think about how much money do I actually need to live a happy and healthy life, we look at the people around us and think about how much money they have and then we determine that's what we want.

You mentioned in our event that we did, The Personal Finance For Generous People, the example of buying a car and not just the cost of the car but the type of car and the associated ongoing costs and the stress that that increased costs also can bring. Yeah, that's something that people are find that ongoing costs and the cost of a certain appearances as well can be quite something, that keeping up with the Joneses in a sense.

Right, and some of those things are sometimes a little more obvious like the car, right? Someone drives a fancy car or someone drives a car with the missing hubcap, but sometimes they're actually smaller things that we don't even realize. For example, when my fiance proposed to me, we used my great-grandmother's ring and she's a survivor of the Holocaust and it was her ring from before the war. I could theoretically insure that ring, and it's actually in this scheme of things, not too much money to insure a piece of jewelry, but what would the insurance be for, right? The insurance would be to replace something. And that actually is irreplaceable to me. If I were to lose that, I wouldn't actually replace it with something. Had I not really thought about that, I might have just been like, "Oh, I have a ring, I need insurance now. This is what I do." But taking a slight step back to think about what that really means actually in turn helps me value that peace and that gift for my great-grandmother even more. And also I'm not spending money in ways that aren't meaningful to me.

We often think about what we might cut back on if we're thinking about finance, but what is something that you think people should be spending more money on?

Anything that I think relates to health and wellbeing. It could be paying for a gym membership or a Peloton membership if that means something that helps you get up and take care of your physical health and wellbeing. It could mean hiring a babysitter, so it gives you extra time to do something that you love and you care about personally. Then of course, I think for those people in the financial position who are able to do so, setting money aside, and we could talk about that a little bit more, to create regular donations or to fuel regular donations either on a regular, consistent basis and what that means looks different for people.

In our previous event, you went through a few different standard budgeting methods you'd recommend for people. I'd love it if you could just give a quick take of the different ways that people might approach managing their money, and particularly for people who are trying to not spend too much effort on this. I have been the victim of trying to reconcile every transaction and that is not a way to live.

My favorite budgeting method is actually the I don't budget at all method. I think actually some people are surprised to find out that I don't ... I do budget, but it's not something I consistently think about. But obviously that's something to work towards, that comes out of building habits over a consistent period of time. If you've never, ever budgeted before, if this is something you've never thought about before, the first thing that you'll want to know is your ins and outs. Most people, if you ask them how much money do you save each year or what's your savings rate? Most people can't really answer that question with a real number. They might say a range or something like that, but they don't actually really know after taxes, what do they put in their pockets each year unless they are really focused on it.

The first step to budgeting is simply having a way of knowing how much you actually spend versus how much you earn. You can use resources like Personal Capital or Intuit's Mint that will upload all of your credit card information and checking and savings account information and it will determine how much you're spending each year. Or you can simply just go into your bank's website and download that information and you could even say download the last three months and then approximate for the full year by multiplying that by four. I think the first step to budgeting is what do you actually spend? Then that's kind of the mathy side behind it. There's other math formats too, like the 50, 30, 20 budget where 50% goes to necessities, 30% goes to wants, 20% goes to savings. That's extremely popular, but I don't feel is really rooted in very much, it's not rooted on what do you need?

It's just saying 50% goes to necessities, but what if you make $30,000 a year versus $200,000 a year? Those things really change versus it being rooted in where do I live? What are my interests? Do I support my family members? What's my donation strategy? I have to say that I think that 50, 30, 20 budget isn't ideal. There's also the envelope system. I think a lot of people think of this, they set a spending limit for each expense category. Say it's groceries or entertainment or healthcare and then they only use money for that purchase. A lot of people find success with that. Some people find it stressful because it could feel very constrained. I think if you were to use that type of system, you would want some flexibility to be able to evolve it over time based on what your values are.

There's also the pay yourself first method. First you just simply decide how much you want to set aside for your savings and investment goals and then just use the rest for expenses. This is a very goal-oriented way of budgeting. If your goals are, "I'd like to have a down payment for a house, I want to pay for my kids' college and I want to donate 2% of my income every year to effective causes," those are your goals, right? Then in addition to that, you're thinking about, "Okay, I want to save 50% and I want to invest 20%, what's left over?" In that method you're thinking a little bit more about what is important to you and why you want to deliver on those things. In all those strategies for me, and there was an exercise that Joe and I did separately as a couple sitting down and thinking about what are the 10 most things that are important to you that you would want to spend your every day doing?

Not like I want to take a trip to the Maldives, which sounds really wonderful and sounds lovely, but more if I have to spend my day doing things that I love, what do those look like? And maybe that's eating chocolate and having a nice glass of wine and being with my parents and taking care of my child. And then thinking about, okay, well what are the financial things that I actually need to do to support those goals? Then I say forget the rest because that's how you end up spending in a way that's meaningful to you. And this process for me changes and evolves each year, but that's okay because I know my ins and outs, I know how much money's coming in and I know how much is leaving.

When I say all this, I probably make it seem really easy. I don't think that changing the way we spend money or budgeting is an easy thing to do for many people, especially because how we learned about money has really driven us to who we are today. But if you can surround yourself with people that are emulating those behaviors that you want to exhibit and learn from them, I think it's much easier to be in that environment and to easily soak all those strategies in if you're around other people that are behaving similarly.

The method that I've found has worked pretty well for me and my wife over the years is just a living allowance. Just everyday expenses that are somewhat fungible. Choosing to spend on a taxi, a nice meal out or a new book or something like that. All of those expenses, groceries, transportation, all that just comes from an amount that we get into our account each week and donations come out pretax, investments and savings and mortgage payments are kind of in an account that we just don't see and it's out of sight, out of mind. All we ever really interact with is an allowance.

And how do you feel that about that allowance amount? How did you come up with that number in the first place, Luke?

We finessed it over the years. Yeah, and it's something we revisit. Also things, inflation, things do get more expensive. Certain lifestyle things change. You have a commute and then you work from home and things change. We kind of have a rough spending categories that kind of summarize what we have been spending on. And I used to reconcile this and I'm very glad I don't now. My bank app doesn't automatically, roughly puts things into categories and you're like, "Okay, does this seem like a reasonable amount? Okay, let's keep it at this or let's bring it up or down." But yeah, it does keep it relatively easy just to know, "Okay, do I have money? Okay, I'll spend it" and then have a short term savers. I'm going to not spend a little bit for a while because I want to get new climbing shoes or something.

Right, right. Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head, right? Because you're combining awareness with the concept of flexibility. Knowing what's happening within your portfolio and knowing that life changes, preferences change and shift. And I think just simply being aware is a huge first step. And you also mentioned this concept of grit, right? I'm saving up for the next few weeks so I can buy these climbing shoes. The reality is a little bit of grit is always sort of necessary to make big life changes, but there are a bunch of small changes that we can do that don't impact us greatly such as maybe switching grocery stores from the really high cost grocery store that's a half mile away to an extremely low cost grocery store that's a mile away. Just pushing yourself a little bit more out of that comfort zone to make that change can actually save you hundreds or thousands of dollars each year.

The funny thing is both of us have worked in marketing in the past and you manage just such extraordinarily large budgets sometimes and then even when we bought a house and had a ... You're getting all these legal fees and all these things and you're just like the deciding not to spend money on a coffee or something like that just feels so insignificant, even though over time that actually makes a big difference, a lot of our everyday decisions. Having that, okay, when I look at my bank account, that's my anchor, not a large marketing budget, organizational budget or when you have a purchasing a house or something like that.

The coffee example is actually a good one. There's a lot of raging memes about coffees and the financial independence community. Like me not buying coffee isn't going to bring me out of poverty, which is often right, true, for in a lot of instances. But when I think about coffee as this example, I don't know what the cost of a cup is right now in Australia, but here in Utah it's about ... It's actually much cheaper, which is nice compared to some of the other places I lived. And yes, I live in Utah now, which I haven't shared yet.

It's about $3 a cup of coffee. If I did have that every single day of the week, it really would add up. Now if I do have a cup of coffee, I actually go out for it maybe once a week and I just really enjoy that cup of coffee. I relish the coffee and I go to a fancy place and I get a delicious cappuccino or whatever I'm feeling for that day versus trying to maybe make ends meet and buying lower quality coffee and having it in my home and it's not as sexy and yummy. There are ways that we can take these mundane experiences and make them really special.

Even just things back to mindfulness, if you've ever done the exercise of just really focusing on what you're eating and really just noticing all of the flavors and the texture and stuff like that. They can be very small things about the way that we engage with our experiences that can really change how those experiences feel and the quality of them.

And I think that's so true for multiple forms of consumption. Coffee, food, the things we buy. It's so true.

How much of what you teach people applies universally across the world versus is quite location dependent? Because that's something I can see comes up a lot.

In a perfect world, I would love for the teachings in Yield & Spread to be globally applicable on so many fronts. The principles of being more frugal and saving and investing to build wealth are generally widespread principles that are applicable across countries. To fully optimize how you invest, and that includes what you invest in and taking advantage of your in country's investment and tax structures, such as tax advantaged accounts that give you perks for using them or local pension systems and the like. It then requires really the hard stuff, the hard stuff that sort of scares us to navigate does become quite local. I would say it's like 40/60.

40% of the teachings are global in nature, how to begin thinking about investing, how to think about wealth in different ways, how to build a financial plan, but the meat of it, the kind of harder stuff, the detail-oriented bits are very US focused because of course that's what I know and it's the nitty gritty things that will really sort of make that difference over time. I would love a world in which there was a Yield & Spread Australia or a Yield & Spread Germany, and really about half the teachings need to be updated and rooted in that local country's tax and investment system.

Now turning to looking at doing good with our money for others, what are the top financial tips you have for people related to giving?

US focus or globally focused, I'll say two things. The first is start. I think habits are real and uphill habit formation can be friction filled at first, but after a while, like you said, you don't even notice when you create these buckets, they just sort of happen. I think just simply starting to give on a more regular and consistent basis and using programs like Giving What We Can that help pave the way and have a lot of educational materials on how to do that, I think take all of our questions out of it because they're giving us the answer. I think starting now is a good first step. With that said, there's all these optimized ways of giving and I'll specifically speak for the US here. For example, if you are a high income individual who's looking to make significant donations, your options are donating on a regular and consistent basis, say I'm donating 10% each year, but your other options could be say contributing a larger amount to say a donor advised fund in one given tax year and then giving an amount that's above and beyond the US standard deduction.

In that manner you're consolidating your donations all at one time and also getting a tax benefit from that because you're giving a large amount. That's one thing that high income individuals do here in the US. Another option could be say if you are trying to control the effective tax bracket that you're in, you could choose to donate stocks or bonds to those charities that accept those. That's actually the strategy that me and my partner Joe take because we don't earn a significant income anymore because we are early retirees. Instead of selling stocks and bonds just to then go around and turn it and sell it and be taxed on those, instead we donate those stocks and bonds directly to effective charities. That's another form. Then obviously just donating a portion of your income on a more consistent and regular basis is very real and a very strong option and really creates good habits.

There are lots of tools. One more that I should probably mention is you can donate from tax advantaged accounts like your individual retirement account here in the US and you won't face the same taxes that you would if you donated directly from your regular income that's coming in. There are lots of ways to optimize, right? Because if you're already in the effective altruism community and you're already thinking about the most money that you can contribute to effective organizations, why not do that a little bit more effectively by avoiding taxes? And I don't say that in a bad way, I say in a healthy way, in a way that we're allowed to do it legally and that's very appropriate for our tax system.

What are your thoughts between the trade-offs between donating and saving?

Forrest Wells 

Member Profile: Forrest Wells

The following profile is provided by Forrest Wells, a doctor in Colorado. He explained his commitment to helping people through medicine and effective altruism and provided helpful advice to fellow healthcare workers. Thank you Forrest for your commitment to Giving What We Can!

I have been blessed with many gifts—growing up in a developed country, having supportive parents, and doing well in school, to name a few—and have long felt that I should use those opportunities to good in the world. This belief helped lead me to a career as a physician, where I felt I could do beneficial work while playing to my academic and interpersonal strengths.

Both of my parents are doctors, and that influenced my career path in a very roundabout way. Growing up I wanted to do something different, to set myself apart—and medicine was the one path I was sure I wouldn’t take. But with time I grew to recognize that the same factors that inspired my parents could motivate me as well. They are both general practitioners who have worked their entire careers in safety-net clinics primarily serving people who might not have otherwise had access to medical care; I got to see first-hand how intensely challenging and rewarding that was. Walking around town we’d occasionally run into their patients and I’d hear about the ways my parents made a tangible difference in their lives, which was pretty powerful. During my university studies at University of Oregon, I found myself very successful in science courses but pretty uninterested in spending time in the lab, and I realized that a career in medicine would allow me to leverage my aptitude for science in a very human-focused way that involves a lot of teamwork and interpersonal interactions. I went to medical school at Oregon Health & Science University, where I decided to specialize in Emergency Medicine: it was a good fit for my personality, an opportunity to set my own path, and a chance to provide a sort of social safety net in a different way. I did my residency training in Emergency Medicine at University of Utah and now practice at St. Mary’s Medical Center in Grand Junction Colorado.


Throughout my medical training, I grew to understand the importance of cost-effectiveness of interventions and realized that while I could use my profession to do good, it wasn’t the way to do the most good. With over seven years of effort and six figures of student loan debt invested into becoming a doctor, I didn’t feel that I could make a career change, but I wanted to do more for the world than just care for the patients in my emergency department.

At around the time, I started making a modest salary as a resident physician, my wife and I listened to the Sam Harris interview with Will MacAskill and were inspired by the ideas of donating a fixed portion of income and critically evaluating the effectiveness of charities. We started donating 5% of our shared income right away.

Within a few months, we realized that we didn’t miss the money in our budget. We actually felt more financially secure while making donations, so we increased to 10% and decided to make additional donations to account for inflation-adjusted “missed philanthropy” from our earned income prior to making the pledge.

I think the key truth here is that people tend to spend whatever money they have. As our incomes increase, so do our expenditures: both on things that feel obviously discretionary (I’ve got a nasty habit of buying skis and bikes) and on things that seem like bare necessities (such as food and housing.) Those fixed expenses really are necessities, but we often spend more on them than is necessary. For example, the house I’m living in right now is much nicer than the one I lived in throughout university, but is a far cry from what people would think of as a “doctor house”. I could buy a new house, a new car, and more expensive groceries, but I don’t think those things would make me truly happier and if I let my lifestyle creep up to my income then I too would start living paycheck to paycheck. The secret to financial security isn’t making more money, it’s spending less money relative to what you have. Setting aside 10% of my income for philanthropy helps me keep my personal spending in check without feeling like I’m deprived of anything truly important to me, and provides a sense of stability when I recognize that if I were to experience a financial catastrophe I could essentially increase my income 10% overnight by not donating. Finally, there is an important psychological piece concerning relative income. Most of what makes us feel like we have “more” or “less” is relative to who we are comparing ourselves to, and in an era of social media and wealth inequality it is easy to find people who look like they have “more”. Donating 10% of my income each month is a tangible reminder that I have “more than enough”.


I’m generally sympathetic to longtermist views and interested in environmental causes. I believe that most non-human species deserve moral weighting and that there is an intrinsic value to natural systems and non-human species’ right to self-determination—but we pretty quickly get into some moral grey areas here and I still have a lot of uncertainty around how these things should be weighted. There is also significant instrumental value to preserving our environment. Climate change is a key cause area for me because mitigating its effects has positive impacts across a wide range of values: improving human and animal well-being in both the short and long term, preserving natural ecosystems, and reducing existential risk to name a few. The funding space is obviously pretty crowded, but I think Johannes Ackva and his team at the Founders Pledge Climate Fund have been doing a good job of applying a scale/tractability/neglectedness framework to target important interventions missed by mainstream funding; they’ve been receiving about half of my philanthropy and will continue to do so. I’m a little unsure of where the other half will go in the future and am currently saving it while researching options. I’d be very interested in ways we could apply an effective altruist framework to goals of ecosystem preservation: conservation groups attract a fair amount of philanthropy globally (albeit much less than humanitarian philanthropies), but I suspect that there are important interventions that are being missed by mainstream nonprofits.


It has been very fulfilling to incorporate philanthropy into my life. The approach of taking the pledge has unburdened me from a lot of the cognitive and emotional work that might otherwise have come with deciding how much and where to give. It has left me with a framework for giving that has been very helpful and that I intend to build on over the years.

To my fellow healthcare workers: our work is hard, emotionally draining, and often all-consuming. We’re burning out left and right from the moral injuries of working in a system that often separates the services we can provide from the reason we chose our careers in the first place: to help people. We have to find ways to connect our work to a sense of doing good in the world if we’re going to keep giving so much of ourselves to it. For me, philanthropy is the answer. We can all agree that at least 10% of what we’re forced to do has no bearing on helping people, and it’s that part of our job that makes us question whether we want to keep doing it sometimes. If you can mentally connect the 10% of the time you spend jumping through administrative hoops with the 10% of your income you donate to charities that you care about, you can feel like everything you’re doing is important. Do yourself that favor, because we can’t afford to lose you.

One of the things that I love about the effective altruist movement is the range of possible levels of commitment. From donating a tiny portion of one's income to an EA-focused fund to donating the majority of one’s income and making a career out of researching key issues, there are so many ways to contribute. I’m not yet sure where I’ll fall on that spectrum, but I think it is really important that the EA community remain open to a wide variety of individuals and ideas. It is really encouraging to see the work and the resources people are putting into this. Sometimes I get discouraged when I look at all of the bad ideas and atrocities still circling the world in the 21st century. Yet, when I think about how far we’ve come as a species, it gives me hope that we could continue to improve if we set our minds to it—and that is exactly what the effective altruism movement is doing.

Forrest Wells, a doctor in Colorado, explains his commitment to helping people through medicine and effective altruism and provides helpful advice to fellow healthcare workers.

Meera Bradley

Meera's story about finding effective giving and taking the Giving What We Can Pledge.

Member Profile: Meera Bradley

Portrait photo of Meera holding a sign that reads: We can save the world together!




We recently spoke with Meera Bradley, a computer science undergrad at UW Madison, who wants to do direct work on preventing global catastrophes using the power of software engineering.

Tell us about yourself. What keeps you busy and what makes you tick?

I love reading, puzzles, and generally overthinking the universe, whether that's physics or philosophy.

Tell us about your effective giving journey.

Ever since I can remember, I've been curious about donation. I wondered, why didn't people give more money? What was the point of having a big house if some people didn't even have houses? When I found Effective Altruism and GWWC, it felt like magic. I'd been thinking, "why doesn't this exist?" and then someone said, "it already does!"

Why do you give? (What motivated you to give originally and what keeps you motivated now?)

Originally, before learning about GiveWell or GiveDirectly, I planned to give all my donated money to low-income and homeless people in my local community. Giving money to people who need it, to me, seemed like common sense. My thinking went something like: “These people are hurting, studies say I can help, I will help.” In other words,  I've felt pain, I have empathy, so I will prevent others from feeling pain where I can. Learning about GiveWell made me realise that I could do exactly the same thing — help people — but do so much more effectively by giving to organisations focused on helping people in other countries, rather than just my local community.

I consider myself a utilitarian, and have always been motivated by the basic drive of doing what I can to reduce suffering and increase joy. Discovering effective altruism and talking to people within this community has actually allowed me to broaden my thinking around morality a bit; the diversity of viewpoints within EA and its acknowledgment of moral uncertainty made me realise that I can sometimes take utilitarianism too far in my moral thinking. (I would say I am still motivated by utilitarianism, but with a dash more moral uncertainty!) This has led me to shift my focus towards reducing existential risks and suffering risks without getting bogged down in obscure ethics questions like trying to compare average utility and total utility!

Why did you take the Giving What We Can pledge?

I have been planning to donate a large percentage of my income since a few years ago when I first seriously thought about how I wanted to help others and what I wanted to do with my career. I decided to take the pledge to publicly demonstrate my commitment.

What are the issues in the world that you care most deeply about?

Reducing suffering and increasing happiness. More broadly, I care about total utility. I want every sentient being to have as many positive experiences in their lives — and as few negative — as possible. I hope that humanity will continue for a very long time and find more and more ways to create joy and meaning.

Which organisations do you give to (and why)?

 because I want to help the possible trillions of people in our future. When I first thought about donations,  I only thought about global health and development. However, I don’t currently give to any global health and development funds because since then I have learned about existential risks and decided that these are larger scale and more neglected issues.

I sometimes get paralyzed by indecision — where should I give? How much? That's one thing I love about GWWC. Even if the questions still remain about where I want to end up as a donor, I can take one step in the right direction, right now. Taking the pledge helps me to remember to donate a small amount now to a cause that I care about, and knowing that all of the causes listed are highly-impactful means I can start making a concrete difference now without having to do time-intensive financial planning or many, many hours of research into where to donate. I can still do those things later if I want to when I have more time, but I really like being able to feel like I’m still making a concrete difference now.

Do you try to effect change in any other way?

I plan to use my career to reduce existential risk or help animal welfare. I also enjoy telling my friends and family about my adventures in philosophy and Effective Altruism.

What effective giving tips would you like to share?

Giving a little is better than not giving at all. I think this applies to a lot of areas in life. It can be easy to feel paralyzed by how much suffering is going on or how much good you could do, but it can also be easy to just save one life (or save several more in expected value) right now.

What suggestions do you have for other people considering the pledge?

I suggest just jumping right in. The recommended pledge amount is pretty low if you're in a situation such as being a student and having no income, like me. It feels good to help and the worst that can happen (for most people) is that you have slightly less spending money.

I want to see a world where we have moved past conflict and live in harmony. Non-human animals are no longer suffering and sentient beings no longer die by violence or disease. We use our new, powerful technology to find new heights of happiness or to find out what really defines good and how to achieve it. I would also love to see humans spread across the galaxy!

Have any books, documentaries, articles or studies significantly changed the way you see giving?

 have influenced me heavily. After reading those books, I kept seeing things that seemed to line up really well with what I’d read there!

Have you found anything to be helpful in talking to people about effective giving?

I try to be open and honest about my beliefs, but also non-judgmental.

Are there any other concrete ways that Giving What We Can has helped you?

Recommending the EA funds. With the EA funds, I don’t have to do a lot of research about where to give. I can simply donate to a cause I care about and trust that there are experts doing the research.

Simon Celinder

Giving effectively by hacking your psychology

This article is about using psychology to make it easier to do good through effective giving. An overview is provided below.

Introducing effective altruism, effective giving, intended audience, scope and background

2. Convince yourself giving effectively is a good idea

By appealing to the opportunity of doing good, considering the 100x multiplier

By appealing to your sense of morality, using rationality and intellectual honesty

By appealing to the notion that it’s in your self-interest to give, leading to a more meaningful life

3. Use psychological mechanisms to give and to continue giving

By identifying and questioning your conditional assumptions about giving

By framing giving as exposure therapy to make it less scary

By mitigating endowment effects, reducing attachment to “your” money

By using stories and rituals to increase motivation to save “statistical” lives

4. Use other mechanisms to balance your focus on doing good

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