Most of us like to think of ourselves as being kind and considerate, and we often demonstrate this best when we make donations to our favorite charities.  What about when times are hard and you feel like you cannot afford to give sizeable donations to charity any longer, but you still want to think of others?  The answer is to give only what you can afford.

Why Give at All?

No matter how hard up or bad you feel, you know deep down that there is always someone worse off than yourself.  Many people in some of the toughest parts of the world are significantly worse off, unable to feed their children, and without access to even basic sanitation.  In comparison, you might be living a life of luxury.  When it may only take a few dollars to make their lives even a little bit better, can you argue that you have nothing to spare?

It may be only a few dollars for you, but there are others, of course, who are better placed to make the larger charitable donations.  Jennifer Atiku, for example, is the wife of Nigeria’s former vice-president and is involved in a Washington-based charity for African people suffering with HIV/AIDS.  She makes donations in the region of many thousands of dollars – donations that have the potential to relieve suffering on a larger scale.

Faces Helped By Charity:Water by Sacca, on Flickr.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic License.

You may only be able to afford a few dollars each month, but perhaps there are other ways you can demonstrate your consideration for others.  Money is certainly the easiest way to donate, but you probably have items in your home that have become obsolete or are worth little to you.  Items such as old cellphones can be recycled either for re-use or for their parts.  Glasses with out-of-date prescriptions often have perfectly good frames that can be donated to eye charities who will put new lenses in them for people in developing countries with no access to optometrists.  Your old printer cartridges can be recycled with the proceeds going to charity, and your outdated computers and laptops can be donated to people who have a use for them.  You could even ransack your kitchen cupboards for food that you have bought but never got around to eating.  Providing it is still in date, food of this kind can be donated to food banks.

You could always donate your time rather than goods.  Volunteering is a great way to spend the occasional weekend or evening helping those less fortunate who live in your local community or in the wider world.  You could, for example, help the homeless by providing food at shelters, or help the aged by simply sitting with and talking to a senior citizen for an hour.

Living frugally does not mean you have to be miserly when it comes to giving to charities.  In fact, many people realize how important it is to give to charity when they are trying to watch the pennies because there is always the realization that there are people worse off than them.