By David Field


With interest rates on the rise and the cost of living in general going up, taking stock of and regulating your household income and outgoings has become as important as it ever was. Everyone except the super-rich needs to work hard at budgeting in order to keep themselves in the black, and often it's the small amounts spent here and there that can be the difference between living within your means and falling into the red.

With this in mind, then, there seems little room in the modern household budget for a more altruistic and ethical form of expenditure - charity giving. With more and more people finding it difficult simply to meet their basic financial needs, such as paying the gas bill and making mortgage repayments, the idea of giving money to other people might seem far-fetched - even absurd. The sentiment grows when you remember that the government wants us to save any spare cash we might come across, for fear of having to deal with a whole generation of under-saving old age pensioners in a few years' time. So where's the room to give to charity?

The truth is that there are plenty of opportunities to donate a bit of cash to charity, without breaking the bank or risking your financial security. The first, and perhaps most important, point to make is that the amounts we are talking about aren't astronomical. Giving £10 a month to a charity will not, in reality, make a huge dent in your wallet. We are talking about the equivalent of about £2.30 a week - only 33 pence a day. And while this will be little more than a slight inconvenience to most of us, it can make a huge difference to the charity concerned. The principle is that if everyone made a similar (small) sacrifice, the charity ends up with tens of millions of pounds.

And actually giving to charities is getting easier, too. For example, when you set up a direct debit to your charity of choice, the charity can actually claim back the income tax on your contribution from the government, meaning that they get more money.

And if even a direct debit seems like too much for you to think about, there are other options available to the charitable spender. Charity credit cards are beginning to gain in popularity in the UK, with more and more financial institutions starting to offer them to customers. They work by simply donating a percentage of what you spend on that card to charity, so that you can go on a shopping spree in the knowledge that you are doing your bit for world poverty, cancer research, or whatever your chosen charitable cause might be.

In fact, the ease with which you can donate now means that the most difficult decision you will make is simply which charity to give to.