‘Tis the season to be…charitable

I love the holidays. Cold weather, spending time with family, pie, cookies, 8 straight weeks of Christmas music on the radio, presents. What’s not to love?

A few weeks ago, as I was thumbing the pages of one of my magazines, I stumbled across this great little giving calendar:

My first thought was, “how cool – I’m going to do every single one of these, and then I'm going to blog about it” followed very closely by, “I wonder how much that would cost.” ($451 in case you’re wondering.)

Now, while I love the idea of giving something back, I’d still like there to be a little something left to take care of the rest of my holiday gift list.

So I did what any good (nerdy) accountant would do – I dragged out my trusty calculator laptop, opened up excel, set a scope, and got to work. Here’s what I did:
1. Any day where the financial commitment is over $5, I reduced it to $5.
2. Any cause that I feel more strongly about, where the financial commitment is under $5, I increased it to $5 - $10.
3. The one cause I feel most strongly about, I allocated $50. (Coincidentally, this is on the last day of the month. Nothing like going out with a bang!)

Here’s how the month will play out for me, financially:

All in, I’ll be contributing $150 to a variety of worthy charitable causes throughout the month of December, and I’ll be blogging about it here.

Tune in daily, for posts about each organization and links to their websites. Maybe, hopefully, you’ll feel compelled to donate a little something too.