What to do when you can't give money
Rees Calder · 18 April 2026 · 5 min read
There is a particular kind of guilt that lives in effective altruism literature. It tells people on tight budgets they could still give, if only they looked hard enough. It's usually wrong and always counterproductive.
A household servicing debt, renting, and raising kids doesn't have 10% to spare. Telling them otherwise is a great way to turn them off the whole conversation. So let's do the other conversation. What if you genuinely can't give meaningful money right now?
The honest answer is that a few of the non-money things stack up surprisingly well. Most don't.
Time is worth less than people pretend
There's a persistent narrative that volunteering substitutes for giving. The data doesn't really back that up.
The average US nonprofit values volunteer time at roughly $33.49 per hour (Independent Sector, 2024). That sounds generous until you notice that well-targeted cash to a GiveWell top charity does the equivalent of hundreds of dollars of developing-world labour per dollar given. A middle-income professional who volunteers at a food bank for an afternoon has generated perhaps $100 of in-kind value; the same person giving $100 to the Against Malaria Foundation averts roughly one DALY, per GiveWell's 2024 cost-effectiveness numbers.
The gap is two orders of magnitude, and that's before you account for the fact that most volunteer shifts displace paid work the organisation would otherwise do, rather than creating net new value.
Volunteering has other payoffs. Social connection. Exposure to issues you'd otherwise read about. Local embedding. Those are real, just not "impact" in the QALY-per-hour sense.
Career capital is the sleeper
If you can't give money now, the single highest-leverage move is making your future self able to.
80,000 Hours has written about this at length under the label "career capital." Skills, credentials, networks and reputation you build early that later enable high-impact work or high-income giving. A year spent getting seriously good at something useful, in your twenties, compounds for forty years.
The quiet version of this: if you're in a season where giving isn't realistic, the useful question isn't "how do I squeeze out $20 a month?" It's "what am I building that makes the next ten years of my earning curve steeper?"
That's not an excuse to defer indefinitely. Plenty of people reach their forties and never start. But it is a legitimate answer for someone with young kids and a mortgage.
The three things that genuinely move the needle
Three categories of non-financial action hold up under scrutiny. Everything else is decoration.
Choosing a higher-impact career path. Same qualifications, different deployment. A teacher who spends a career in under-served schools; a nurse who works in tropical disease rather than elective cosmetic work; an engineer who builds clean energy infrastructure rather than ad-tech optimisation. The delta between the median and the top of the impact distribution within a profession is frequently 10x or more.
Pledging your organs and your body. Roughly one organ donor can help up to eight people after death. The queue in most countries is long, the supply is short, and opting in takes under a minute. The UK's Organ Donation and Transplantation 2024 report shows a gap between registered donors and actual deceased donors of roughly 4:1, mostly due to family override. Talking to your family about it is arguably the single most impactful five-minute conversation you can have.
Blood donation, regularly. Each unit of whole blood can be split into three components, helping up to three patients. In the UK, regular donors give every 12-16 weeks. The WHO estimates global blood shortfall at roughly 100 million donations per year. No money, no career change, no expertise required. Just turning up.
The things that don't really work, kindly
Signing petitions. Sharing awareness campaigns. Wearing ribbons. "Raising awareness" in contexts where the issue is already well-known (climate change, cancer, starvation). Boycotts, mostly, outside of narrowly targeted campaigns with clear corporate counterparties.
None of this is actively harmful at a personal level. It's just that the research consistently shows these activities function more as identity signals than impact mechanisms. If they bring you joy or community, keep doing them. Just don't count them in the "impact" column.
The ask, for this season
If you're reading this and giving isn't on the table right now, the useful ask is small.
Register as an organ donor, if you aren't already. Tell your family. If you're eligible, book a blood donation for some time in the next month. And somewhere on a piece of paper, write down what you're building toward career-wise, because the version of you in five years is the one who can do most of the giving the current you can't.
That's it. No guilt. No 3% of your already-stretched budget. Just the three things that stack up when cash doesn't.
Sources used: Independent Sector Value of Volunteer Time (2024), GiveWell Cost-Effectiveness Analysis (2024), 80,000 Hours Career Capital framework (2020-2024), UK Organ Donation and Transplantation Annual Report (2024), WHO Blood Safety and Availability Fact Sheet (2024). Full links in the planning doc.