Last year about this time I wrote a note on my Facebook page with some thoughts on poverty and my self-righteous hypocritical attitudes. I also laid out some plans to at least start heading my life in a direction to match my actions with my words. After a year the results have been mixed.
1.) Buy a Kroger reusable gift card from River City Ministries .
This one should have been easy to keep, nothing to it, add money to the card, use it to buy stuff at Krogers, River City gets a little money. No sacrifice on my part, have to buy groceries anyway. Failed miserably, I think I used it twice. Will do better this year.
2.) Self imposed poverty tax. I charged myself a 10% tax on money spent on eating out, golf, entertainment, etc and used that money to fight poverty. This one was actually kind of fun, still not much of a sacrifice (usually around $100 a month) . I did fund some loans thru Kiva.Org , gave some money to River City Ministries and a few other charities, but I didn't really change my lifestyle much. I still struggle with the need for and spend too much on the un-essential things in life.
I will increase the tax to 15% this year.
Still baby steps, but hopefully they are in the right direction. My hope is that some of y'all that read this will think "Hey, that's not a bad idea, I think I'll try something like that".
2 comments:
I love these ideas. I think I always get overwhelmed at all of the different organizations that need help and I wind up helping no one. And I love the idea of the self-imposed tax. It might really bring some light on how much unnecessary things I buy every month.
It is overwhelming, there are so many needs and so many good organizations. Last year when I started this I forced myself to pick two to concentrate on. My primary goal was to help people locally so I chose River City Ministries. I think it exemplifies what churches should be about. I also wanted to do something globally. I'd read Muhammed Yunnis book "Banker to the Poor" about micro-lending and liked the idea so I found Kiva.org and loaned small amounts to people worldwide trying to improve their lives. This year I'm going to continue supporting River City and I'm adding Haitian Christian Primary Schools. I won't be making new contributions to Kiva.org but I will recycle the money paid back from loans I've already made into new ones. I'm also working on another project (if I can get by my completion anxiety disorder,lol, and finish it) that I hope will help support some other charities that I like. I will be talking to you about this one to see if you are interested in participating.
Post a Comment