TL:DR — I donated more absolute dollars year over year and less relative dollars given the growth of my portfolio. I was kinda pissed at myself.
Check the discrepancy between the two you might find what I found, on an absolute basis I was more charitable, on a relative basis I was less. You might be like me, but you gotta be willing to look at the numbers to find out.
Here are two posts that will help you understand more about my relationship with money.
When life changing money, isn’t & Living a life of enough
Every year my financial adviser comes over and we go through my portfolio. They show me the charts. The numbers. The gains. We talk about what worked, what didn’t, where things are headed. High fives all around.
This year I had a feeling, that while I was “giving more” that relative to my gains it was a joke. So I asked them to pull up something else: my charitable giving from my donor-advised fund over the same period.
And there it was. Confirmed, I was giving more in absolute dollars and less in relative.
The Math Wasn’t Mathing
For years, my portfolio had been growing. Compounding. Doing what portfolios do when you leave them alone and the market cooperates.
Meanwhile, my charitable giving was growing too. I’d gone from giving what felt like meaningful amounts to giving even more. The absolute numbers were going up by thousands. I felt good about that. (This is separate from what the company gives away).
In the years before 2025, I was giving away somewhere between 2–4% of my annual portfolio gains. Some years a bit more, some years a bit less.
My returns were compounding exponentially. My generosity was growing linearly.
I Love a Good Scoreboard
Here’s the thing about me. I love winning, losing. I love outperforming, underperforming.
I love being better than I was yesterday. Give me a scoreboard and I will find a way to move the numbers.
And portfolio returns? Perfect scoreboard. Clean. Quantifiable. Always there on the app whenever you want to check it.
But without an offsetting metric (charitable donations) – without something to balance against those returns, you end up on the treadmill of life.
How Did I Become That Person?
I dind’t grow up with a lot of “extra” money…
So the me who grew up lower middle class, is so engrained in the me of today, that giving 100 dollars still feels like a TON, because old me is still in there.
Holding the mirror up to myself…
I asked for a specific report. Portfolio gains for the year. Charitable giving for the year. Side by side. As percentages.
And look what happened, by asking the question and looking at the numbers I knew what to do.
This year I gave away 20% of my returns. I think that sounds right and will continue to do that, it is a good counterbalance to that lower middle class kid at the private school who just can’t sort this out.
I finally have a system that keeps me honest with myself about how old me (writing a 100 dollar check to a charity) doesn’t serve the new me (that 100 dollar check should have been 1000).
If my returns compound, my giving needs to compound at a similar rate. 20% it is.
It’s not about giving all my returns away. It’s about having a metric that keeps me honest about the “enough” I claimed I already reached.
Big ups to Professor Galloway who talked about hitting a number then saying once he hit it, everything above that had to go to charity or to making memories for other people. I love that idea and it inspired the self reflections I had that made me even hold the mirror up to myself.