LW - AMA: Earning to Give by jefftk

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Earning to Give, published by jefftk on November 7, 2023 on LessWrong. This week the Effective Altruism Forum is running an Effective Giving Spotlight, and they asked if I could post an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on my experience earning to give.
Some background:
I was earning to give from 2009 to 2022, except for a few months in 2017 when I worked on expanding access to the financial system in Ethiopia and looking into AI risk disagreements.
I've been a Giving What We Can member since 2013, making a public pledge to continue with effective giving.
For most of this time my wife and I were donating 50% of our pre-tax income, for a total of $2.1M. This has been about 50-50 between trying to help the EA community grow into the best version of itself and funding global poverty reduction (details, thoughts, more recent but still obsolete thoughts).
In 2016 I gave a EA Global talk (transcript) on earning to give, which gives more background on the idea and how I've neen thinking about it.
That's a lot of links, and it's fine to ask questions even if you haven't read any of them! I'm happy to take questions on earning to give, or anything else within EA. Here are some example questions I'd be happy to answer if there's interest:
Where do individual donors earning to give have an advantage over foundations and funds?
How should you decide whether to use a fund?
How have I thought about how much to donate? How much is enough?
Why did I stop earning to give?
Why am I still donating some even though I'm funded by EA donors?
Feel free to comment on any platform, but if you're having trouble deciding then the EA Forum post is ideal. Comment via: the EA Forum
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