Investing / Donating - Part II

In the previous post I was talking about various stages of investing your money. Investing your money with proper thought and hardwork would yield you more money. This is what we dealt in the last article. Now we shall think in a different perspective. The first part of it is going to be the same - spending your money with proper thought and care but the returns are different. By doing so, you can get fame and most importantly peace as a result. You just can't do this unless you have the generosity and self-lessness. But I guess everyone would have these qualities within them.

"GENTLENESS, SELF-SACRIFICE AND GENEROSITY ARE THE EXCLUSIVE POSSESSION OF NO ONE RACE OR RELIGION." - Mohandas Gandhi

I am sure every one of us possesses these inherent qualities. But we have other pressures and we expect much more comfort out of life, hence we tend to push these aside for a while. We think of charity only when we are bedridden or when we know that we no longer need that money. Yet we decide to give away our wealth only after our life through will. Why do you want to have all your money till you die? Have whatever is really necessary for you and give away everything else. Infact you can start giving even when you are younger say when you are in 20's or 30's. This is called as 'Giving while Living'.

There are a lot of advantages in giving while living. As I always say - you will have the satisfaction. Even otherwise you have some more benefits. You can keep track on the gifts you make and watch whether the money you give is being used effectively. Almost every country I know has a lot of tax benefits for any kind of donation. Of course these are all at the cost of your comfort. That's how the world rotates. You give away something to get something else in return.

Now that we understand philanthropy is an integrated part of our life, we get further into the ways of spending money in a useful manner. First thing that comes to my mind is helping people who suffer of hunger and diseases without medications. You can try helping them directly by giving them food/drugs or you can fund a research organization that tries to develop vaccines, cures for various functional disorders and diseases. When providing people with food be sure that you don't make them dependent on you in the future.

Next comes the education. You can fund children and educate them. Investing/Donating in the way of education is the best means to provide a bright future for the recipient. Giving the primary education to the children or funding deserving students for higher education are both appreciated. This will by itself be a motivation for them to study and learn more.

One can also think in the line of raising the people who are below the poverty line. Or increasing the standard of living of lower middle class people. You can't just keep giving the money to raise their standards of living. You need to target the root which causes their living to be less than the average population. By this way you can reduce the burden of the government and uplift the mass.

You can also help people to get their own house. This might seem difficult. Whatever I say is just the ways of donating and might not suite each and everyone. Not all of us are equally blessed. But helping people to get their own house is not that big an issue as it seems. Many people around have enough money to pay the EMI (equated monthly installments) still unable to get a home loan because the down payment is quite a big amount. So you can just give away the down payments and the rest is upto them to manage. Believe me there are people who would welcome these kind of offers.

If you don't want to help anyone in person but you want to do something for the community you are in, there are ways too. There are a lot of places where you can adopt a street/community or a highway and maintain it. You can grow grass, plant trees, keep it clean and green. This is infact a great step in having a close relationship with the nature which we are lacking right now.

I will explain different ways of proceeding in each and every one of the afore mentioned plans in the future posts.