Donating 80% While It Still Counts

By Jeff Kaufman 🔸 @ 2026-05-26T11:11 (+221)

Julia and I had been giving half since 2014, but in 2025 we drew on our savings to donate 81%. It looks to us like we're in a critical window for keeping the introduction of very powerful AI systems from being disastrous, and we want to do what we can while we still can.

Here's what that looks like in the context of our overall spending:

We've been prioritizing donations for a long time, but it feels very different now because of the AI boom. Some of this is that people who've made money in the boom will likely be giving more soon, and so money spent now can help set up organizations to spend future money more effectively. But more importantly, this is a key window of opportunity: transformative AI is coming very quickly, for better or worse. We want to push hard for "better".

If you compare to previous years (2024, 2022, 2020, 2018, 2016, 2014), we're donating a lot less than we used to in absolute terms:

Until mid-2022 I was working at a big tech company, optimizing to maximize donations, and now I'm at a non-profit. This means we're giving a larger fraction, but of a smaller amount:

I feel good about this change. I'm now building an early warning system for engineered pandemics, which is urgent and important as AI increasingly substitutes for advice from expert virologists. It does mean donating much less than I would have if I'd continued in big tech, but I think this was well worth it. While money can enable important work, I see a lot of projects that primarily need dedicated people to bring them into existence, and I'd be excited for others to switch to direct work.

Even 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:

Now, 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:

• Things go very poorly, long-term savings are mostly useless, and we really wish we'd done more.
• Things go very well, the world is very wealthy, we don't need the additional money.
• Somehow, AI ends up being not that big a deal, and the world is still pretty normal financially.

It's really only in that last world where our savings translate into us having a better life, and as AI continues not hitting a wall I see the chances of ending up in a basically normal world getting pretty small. While we shouldn't donate to where we'd be destitute if we're wrong, we're not in danger of that. [1] So I think we should continue to draw down our non-retirement savings to donate more during this critical period.

Writing this post also got me thinking about our retirement contributions. We're both contributing the maximum, which I think often makes sense even if you don't expect a normal retirement, from a perspective of protecting savings. Since we're in a good enough position financially and donating seems very urgent, I now think we should stop contributing to have more to donate going forward.

Evaluating Predictions

Back in 2024 I made a list of what I expected to write in 2026. How did reality differ from expectations?

2024: 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.

I did this for a little while. I started at a 10% reduction, and then when Julia's work decided to no longer support voluntary salary reductions I went to 75%. Then a few months ago I decided to stop since I wanted more flexibility in targeting donations.

2024: 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).

Yup, 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.

2024: 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.

My prediction that I would be lazy was correct. This post represents zero accounting improvements, only more data due to the passage of time.

2024: 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.

The world is appreciably different from two years ago, but not in ways that strongly impacted our spending.

Making New Predictions

Let's try and make some similar predictions for 2028:

• My 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!
• Childcare costs will be down a lot, because all three kids will be in school. But we'll still need to pay for afterschool, holidays, and vacations. Our oldest will be in 8th grade, so no college costs yet. Back in 2018 I was thinking that sometime around 2028 I might be moving from earning to give to direct work (due to the effective 100% marginal tax rate), but I ended up doing this earlier and for non-college reasons.
• We 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%.
• We don't have any expensive house projects. With how much the world could change soon I want to keep options open, and not lock up money in the house.
• We're still living in the same house, and our housing costs will have gone down slightly because rents will have gone up a little (in a combination of real and nominal terms) but our mortgage is fixed-rate.
• Our shared car is a 2013 Honda Fit, and while these are great cars there's a decent chance it won't last much longer. Might need to make a substantial payment here.

Details

I've used the same approach as last year, which was unchanged from 2022 and very similar before then. Numbers below are monthly, based on 2025 spending.

• Donations: $11.9k (81% of 2025 adjusted gross income)
• Taxes: $3.0k
  • Income tax: $500
  • State tax: $500
  • Social Security tax: $900
  • Medicare tax: $200
  • Property tax: $800
• Childcare: $3.6k ($150/workday, three kids)
• Housing: $2.0k
  • Note: this is tricky; see details below on how this is calculated
  • One time expenses (all time)
    • Purchase and all one-time expenses up through the 2024 update: $1.1M
    • Major one-time expenses since the 2024 update: $31.8k:
      • Solar: $30k
      • Additional insulation: $1.2k
  • Ongoing expenses, covering the whole house including the tenants' unit:
    • Electricity: $92
    • Gas (Heat): $257
    • Water/Sewer: $179
    • Other: $83
  • Rent income: $4.8k
• Retirement saving: $4.3k (all pre-tax)
• Other savings: -$6.4k (see below)
• Medical: $218 in pre-tax health insurance, ~$400 in post-tax co-pays etc
• Food: $964 (two adults, and three kids 11y, 9y, 4y)
• Other: $1k
  • Includes phone bills, taxis, car rentals, clothes, vacation, stuff for the kids, and other smaller expenses.
  • Because we are no longer tracking our expenses to the dollar, the distinction between "Other" and "Savings" is an estimate.

[1] Our house is 2/3 paid off, if we used savings to finish it off that would leave ~$1M saved. At a 4% safe withdrawal income this would be $3.3k/month. We also rent out several parts of our house, totaling $4.8k/month, which brings us to ~$100k/y of raw income. This would need to cover taxes, health insurance, utilities, house maintenance, food, etc, but almost everyone lives on far less. I think the largest risk is that we get a non-extinction future that's still quite bad, but I have trouble seeing moderately higher savings making a large difference there.