After a later-than-usual bout of year-end charity supporting, I started thinking that I really need to start the new year by setting up the donations that I'm committed to as monthly, rather than annual, contributions.

There are good reasons -- such as not hitting your own account / credit card all at once, when there's a chance some irregular purchase (e.g., plane ticket to January FOSS conference) puts you near your limit, or having sudden transactions trigger the credit card company's anti-fraud AI thus forcing you to explain in detail to some loser on the phone what the obscure tech project with the terrible name is and why you really did want to give them money.

But there are even better reasons, the first of which is that spreading an annual contribution out over monthly installments is far better for the charity. It gives them a steadier income, and I can tell you as somebody who worked for a charity for 5+ years that that is a phenomenal stress-reducer. When all your budget comes in during one month and then slowly leaks out, as the end of the year approaches you get really nervous and (to a degree) risk-sensitive.

It also helps you put the cost of donating to a cause into a drastically different perspective. Sounds cliche, I know. But $20 a month to the EFF (or to the local Goodwill or to Habitat for Humanity or whomever) takes way less energy from your brain than $250 all at once does. And I don't mean that you compare it to your other monthly utility bills or your Starbucks refills or whatever (although that may be true). I just mean that it is easier to justify doing it *right now* when it's a small commitment.

Of course, the other benefit is that monthly donations can become habitual, which is good discipline in and of itself, but also has the side effect of reminding you on a regular basis that this cause exists and that someone, somewhere, is spending their time working on it. That helps remind you that it's something you believe in, and it helps the cause itself bubble up higher in the stew of your daily thoughts. The more often you're reminded of the cause that you find important, the more often you'll act in ways that support it -- ways other than the financial.

So that's the pitch. I myself am going to try to do better about it this year, so feel free to hold me to that. But there are, alas some complications. When I looked into the various non-profits that I chose to donate money to last year (a list that has been fairly static for a few years now, although the amounts vary), I was surprised by two things.

One, a suprisingly nonzero number of non-profits don't have a monthly option. I think it was 15% or so.

Two, and more importantly, if you donate money to a lot of the non-profits I found via credit card online, the non-profit gets charged the transaction fee. So if you pay them twelve times, they pay twelve fees. I'm still looking into this, but it does sort of seem like some online payment processors (PayPal, most notably), treat donations as a different type of transaction, and may reduce the fees. I found at least one NPO that allowed you to voluntarily pay the fee for them. But still, it's something to look out for.

In any case, consider getting an early -- but incremental -- start on 2016's charitable donations. The dividends are not just a smaller bill at the end of the current year.