{"slug": "donating-80-while-it-still-counts", "title": "Donating 80% While It Still Counts", "summary": "Jeff and Julia Wise drew on their savings to donate 81% of their income in 2025, up from their previous 50% giving rate, citing a critical window to prevent catastrophic outcomes from the introduction of powerful AI systems. The couple, who have prioritized charitable giving since 2014, donated $142,488 while drawing down $20,436 in net savings, with Jeff Wise now working at a nonprofit building an early warning system for engineered pandemics.", "body_md": "[Julia](https://juliawise.net/) and I had been giving half\n[since 2014](https://www.jefftk.com/p/giving-half), but in\n2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're\nin a critical window for keeping\n[the\nintroduction of](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-from-power-seeking-ai/)\n[very\npowerful](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/extreme-power-concentration/)\n[AI\nsystems](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/catastrophic-ai-misuse/)\n[from](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/gradual-disempowerment/)\n[being\ndisastrous](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/), and we want to do what we can while we still can.\n\nHere's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending:\n\n| Category | pre-tax | post-tax | total |\n|---|---|---|---|\n| Donations | $0 | $142,488 | $142,488 |\n| Taxes | $0 | $35,808 | $35,808 |\n| Housing | $0 | $24,264 | $24,264 |\n| Childcare | $0 | $42,636 | $42,636 |\n| Medical | $2,712 | $4,800 | $7,632 |\n| Food | $0 | $11,568 | $11,568 |\n| Other | $0 | $12,000 | $12,000 |\n| Savings | $51,564 | -$72,000 | -$20,436 |\n\nOn savings, there are two things going on. We're drawing down our regular post-tax savings to donate more (-$72k) but we're still putting money into retirement accounts (+$51k). It nets to -$20k, though mixing pre- and post-tax numbers into one sum isn't really correct.\n\nWe've been prioritizing donations for a [long\ntime](https://www.jefftk.com/p/my-effective-altruism-timeline), but it feels very different now because of the AI boom.\nSome of this is that people who've made money in the boom [will\nlikely be giving more soon](https://www.jefftk.com/p/front-load-giving-because-of-anthropic-donors), and so money spent now can help set up\norganizations to spend future money more effectively. But more\nimportantly, this is a key window of opportunity: transformative AI is\ncoming [very\nquickly](https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-is-publicly-known/), for [better or worse](https://ai-2027.com/).\nWe want to push hard for \"better\".\n\nIf you compare to previous years ([2024](https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2024), [2022](https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2022), [2020](https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2020), [2018](https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update-2018), [2016](https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-update), [2014](https://www.jefftk.com/p/spending-over-time)), we're donating a lot less than\nwe used to in absolute terms:\n\n| 2026 | 2024 | 2022 | 2020 | 2018 | 2016 | |\n|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|\n| Donations | $142,488 | $77,088 | $440,004 | $294,000 | $183,900 | $197,832 |\n| Savings | -$20,436 | -$28,128 | $86,664 | $115,500 | $23,376 | $24,324 |\n| Taxes | $35,808 | $42,504 | $186,672 | $66,000 | $64,680 | $67,140 |\n| Housing | $24,264 | $34,920 | $49,332 | $48,456 | $42,852 | $30,324 |\n| Childcare | $42,636 | $53,436 | $73,332 | $41,256 | $26,496 | $56,268 |\n| Food | $11,568 | $9,156 | $9,168 | $11,256 | $11,688 | $3,732 |\n| Medical | $7,632 | $8,052 | $9,480 | $9,756 | $11,628 | $5,136 |\n| Other | $12,000 | $12,504 | $13,332 | $7,500 | $17,460 | $4,788 |\n\nUntil mid-2022 I was working at a big tech company, [optimizing](https://www.jefftk.com/p/optimizing-looks-weird)\nto maximize donations, and now I'm at a non-profit. This means we're\ngiving a larger fraction, but of a smaller amount:\n\nI feel good about this change. I'm now [building an early warning\nsystem for engineered pandemics](https://securebio.org/detection/), which is [urgent\nand important](https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/preventing-catastrophic-pandemics/) as AI [increasingly substitutes for\nadvice from expert virologists](https://www.virologytest.ai/). It does mean donating much less\nthan I would have if I'd continued in big tech, but I think this was\nwell worth it. While money can enable important work, I see a [lot\nof](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hRnoGze2FuhHpFTrh/) [projects](https://catalyze-impact.org/blog/ai-safety-resilience-founding-opportunities)\nthat primarily need dedicated people to bring them into existence, and\nI'd be excited for others to switch to direct work.\n\nEven though we're drawing down our savings to donate, our net worth rose 18% over the last year (adjusted for inflation). This was driven by stock returns on our retirement savings:\n\nNow, retirement savings growing via stock returns is how it's \"supposed\" to work: if we give away all the gains then we'll have much less at retirement. But I see ~three futures as AI becomes rapidly more capable:\n\nThings go very poorly, long-term savings are mostly useless, and we really wish we'd done more.\n\nThings go very well, the world is very wealthy, we don't need the additional money.\n\nSomehow, AI ends up being not that big a deal, and the world is still pretty normal financially.\n\nIt's really [only in that last\nworld](https://www.jefftk.com/p/personal-ai-planning) where our savings translate into us having a better life,\nand as AI continues not hitting a wall I see the chances of ending up\nin a basically normal world getting pretty small. While we shouldn't\ndonate to where we'd be destitute if we're wrong, we're not in danger\nof that. [1] So I think we should continue to draw down our\nnon-retirement savings to donate more during this critical period.\n\nWriting this post also got me thinking about our retirement\ncontributions. We're both giving the maximum, which I think [often\nmakes sense even if you don't expect a normal retirement](https://www.jefftk.com/p/retirement-accounts-and-short-timelines), from a\nperspective of protecting savings. Since we're in a good enough\nposition financially and donating seems very urgent, I now think we\nshould stop contributing to have more to donate going forward.\n\n2024: I think there's a good chance we'll have switched from giving 50% to some form of[salary sacrifice]. If we do, our pay, donations, and taxes will all be a lot lower.\n\nI did this for a little while. I [started at\na 10% reduction](https://www.jefftk.com/p/voluntary-salary-reduction), and then when Julia's work decided to no longer\nsupport voluntary salary reductions I went to 75%. Then a few months\nago I [decided\nto stop](https://www.jefftk.com/money#:~:text=In%20March%202026%20I%20decided%20to%20stop%20taking%20a%20voluntary%20salary%20reduction) since I wanted more flexibility in targeting donations.\n\n2024: Childcare should be similar: the nanny share is working and I expect we'll do something similar at least until our youngest starts kindergarten in Fall 2026 (and will show up in the 2028 update).\n\nYup, still doing a nanny share with our former housemate. While there was a bit where our nanny left and it took us a few tries to find someone who worked out, this is now going well again. We haven't decided what we'll do for afterschool when our youngest starts school in the Fall.\n\n2024: I'd like to hope I have a better way of accounting for housing and savings in general and have gone back and redone all my previous numbers under the new system, but since that sounds like a ton of work I doubt I'll have done that.\n\nMy prediction that I would be lazy was correct. This post represents zero accounting improvements, only more data due to the passage of time.\n\n2024: I put about a 10% chance on AI, war, or other major events in this timeframe changing things enough that everything is weird in hard to predict ways.\n\nThe world is appreciably different from two years ago, but not in ways that strongly impacted our spending.\n\nMy odds that the world has changed substantially are up significantly, maybe 55%, primarily due to AI. I'd put about 10% on futures where things go very badly, where I'm not here to write a followup and you're not here to read one. Then maybe 10% on really good futures where there's no need for me to work on biosecurity and I can do music, dance, and blogging full time. And 35% on weird futures where we're not dead but it's not clearly good either. Don't put a lot of weight on these numbers!\n\nChildcare costs will be down a lot, because all three kids will\nbe in school. But we'll still need to pay for afterschool, holidays,\nand vacations. Our oldest will be in 8th grade, so no college costs\nyet. Back [in\n2018](https://www.jefftk.com/p/college-and-earning-to-give) I was thinking that sometime around 2028 I might be moving\nfrom earning to give to direct work (due to the effective 100%\nmarginal tax rate), but I ended up doing this earlier and for\nnon-college reasons.\n\nWe won't be pulling from savings to fund donations because we'll have finished giving away our remaining non-retirement savings. But with so much lower childcare costs we'll probably still be able to give over 50%.\n\nWe don't have any expensive house projects. With how much the\nworld could change soon I want to [keep options\nopen](https://www.jefftk.com/p/personal-ai-planning), and not lock up money in the house.\n\nWe're still living in the same house, and our housing costs\nwill have gone down slightly because rents will have gone up [a\nlittle](https://www.jefftk.com/p/rents-are-high-but-not-skyrocketing) (in a combination of real and nominal terms) but our\nmortgage is fixed-rate.\n\nOur [shared car](https://www.jefftk.com/p/shared-car-one-year-in)\nis a 2013 Honda Fit, and while these are great cars there's a decent\nchance it won't last much longer. Might need to make a substantial\npayment here.\n\n[1] Our house is 2/3 paid off, if we used savings to finish it off\nthat would leave ~$1M saved. At a [4%\nsafe withdrawal](https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/05/29/how-much-do-i-need-for-retirement/) income this would be $3.3k/month. We also rent\nout several parts of our house, totalling $4.8k/month, which brings us\nto ~$100k/y of raw income. This would need to cover taxes, health\ninsurance, utilities, house maintenance, food, etc, but almost\neveryone lives on far less. I think the largest risk is that we get a\nnon-extinction future that's still quite bad, but I have trouble\nseeing moderately higher savings making a large difference there.\n\n*Comment via: facebook, mastodon, bluesky*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/donating-80-while-it-still-counts", "canonical_source": "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mAhCkK5iBuZvCbFey/donating-80-while-it-still-counts", "published_at": "2026-05-26 01:30:31+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-05-26 08:16:11.516628+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": ["Julia Wise", "Jeff Kaufman", "80,000 Hours"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/donating-80-while-it-still-counts", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/donating-80-while-it-still-counts.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/donating-80-while-it-still-counts.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/donating-80-while-it-still-counts.jsonld"}}