I think something to consider when deciding on the time point of giving is not only the investment in your own financial future, but the investment in the cause your donation is contributing towards. A donation today/this decade may have a smaller overall absolute value compared with a delayed plan for donating, but the effect of that donation today compounds over time as well.

For example, giving $1000 to a high impact charity working in extreme poverty cause areas may mean that in 10 years from now a community that benefited has a marked alteration in trajectory. Less malaria disease burden today in their younger members may have substantial further reductions in suffering in a decade, more than a larger donation at that time point might be able to achieve.

Another example is giving money towards high impact research today which may have positive benefits in a decade from now from helping enable a field. The value of starting research earlier, giving it time to produce value, may be much greater than investing a larger amount at a later point in time.

I wrote this post a while ago and my thinking has moved on a little since then so I thought it would be worth adding further thoughts as a comment;

1) In the original post I suggest people should save more when they are young rather than give, but I don't offer an explicit rules based alternative. I think rules based giving makes a lot of sense, and helps to compartmentalize so that we don't spend time and mental energy weighing up every spending decision we make vs opportunity of EA donation. I now have thought about how to solve this problem in my own life, which is to switch from 'I aim to donate x% of my income', to 'I aim to donate x% of my spending, until I reach level Y, at which point I donate all income above my consumption level'. I like this rule because it is simple and robust from lifestyle creep. If I want to save money for buffer building etc. my EA goals won't get in the way. However, if I'm willing to pass on saving to spend money now, then I should be willing to donate in proportion.

2) I wish looking back that I had not mentioned the thing about saving for a house. As was mentioned by others in the comments this is a very specific issue and doesn't apply generally. A much more generalisable point is that savings allow us to take greater risks, especially with our career. I think there are a lot of employers who understand that some of their employees are risk averse and react to this by paying them less. I also think people who are career risk averse do not develop as far or as quickly. From the people I have dealt with in my life so far (which I appreciate is a very small sample), very few seem to get to retirement with the 'right' amount of money for their level of consumption. People either have too little or way too much. I think a good use of money is making sure you fall in to that latter category, and once you are confident you'll end up there start donating to the point that your excess above desired consumption is minimal.

3) The title Giving Later; Giving More has (I think) led many people to conclude that I'm suggesting investing money with a view to donating the original amount plus the investment returns later. This is not at all my point and I am generally of the opinion that the discount rate for donations, especially in the area of global poverty / health is much higher than one could feasibly expect to make by investing. My point is that having a buffer may allow you to have a much more productive (and therefore financially rewarding) life, and therefore the return on investment of this buffer (I believe) is far in excess of this discount rate.

I think this claim is often true if someone wants to stay in the same location - however, that is very expensive for someone’s career.

Considering EA’s focus on ‘having a good career’ for which the willingness to move is important, buying a property seems much less likely to be a good call compared to the average person. Unless being willing to move whenever a better opportunity arises is not something you’re willing to do anyway, of course.

I think there is fair consensus that providing oneself financial security is desirable before making altruistic efforts (charitable or otherwise) (cf. 80k)

I think the question of whether it is good to give later is more controversial. There is some existing discussion on this topic usually under the heading of 'giving now versus giving later' (I particularly like Christiano's treatment). As Nelson says, there are social rates of return/haste considerations that favour earlier investment. I think received (albeit non-resilient) EA wisdom here is the best opportunities at least give impulses that outstrip typical market returns, and thus holding money to give later is a competitive strategy if one has opportunities to greatly 'beat the market'.

The main reason why I am glad I waited 12 years before donating in a big way is that I switched from being global poverty focused to animal welfare and then to long term future. So now I believe what I am donating to is many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than what I would have donated to 15 years ago.

Hey Thomas, I have a spreadsheet to highlight the disparity rather than a source, I can send it to you'd if you like? As an illustrative example though let's imagine we have a 30 year old person with $50k saved up. They can either donate this to charity and continue to rent, or use it as a deposit (down-payment) to buy the same house, which let's say is valued at 500k. The numbers will depend by city, but let's assume mortgage interest rate of 4.5%, rental yield of 3% and an average house price increase of 3% per year.

If you have a 450k mortgage on a 30 year schedule, you will pay a total of $773k in mortgage repayments (450k in capital repayments and 323k in interest) and at the end of the 30 years you will own a house worth $1.21 million. If you choose to rent, you will pay $713k in rental payments over the 30 years and obviously at the end you will not own anything. The most difficult part of this calculation is the amortization schedule for mortgages, but there are websites that will do this work for you such as this one;

http://www.amortization-calc.com/

Does this mean that housing is mispriced? I don't think so. Firstly there is a huge tax advantage to owning your own house vs renting. This is because you don't pay any tax on the rent you avoid paying. However, if you buy an investment property under the same terms and rent it out, you will have to pay income tax on the rent received. Second, in my example investors make 6% a year (pre-tax) owning housing in the long run. This compares with 8-10% by owning stocks in the long run. In general property is considered a safer asset than stocks, so a lower return makes sense, but given government bonds usually return 3-4% and they are much safer than property, a return of 6% or even higher seems reasonable.

Do people make a lot of money by investing in housing? This is a separate question to that of inefficiency and the answer is generally yes they do! One of the huge drivers of wealth inequality (Piketty) is that wealthy people have their money invested in long term assets like property and stocks, where the return is 6-10%. Meanwhile most working and middle class people have a substantial amount of their capital sitting in current (checking) and savings accounts earning 0-2%.