The rich niche (opens in new tab)

I think the explanation is even simpler: People don't like adding yet another monthly expense unless it's truly necessary.

Even for financially comfortable people, a one-off donation to a charity is easier to reason about than taking the same amount of money and dividing it into 24 bi-weekly payments. Then I'd have to remember where to get the end of year receipt for those payments when I do my taxes. I'd also burden myself with the decision of when to cancel the donations, which is something the charity probably makes as difficult as possible to increase their retention numbers. If I did decide to cancel, I'd have to invest potentially an hour or more to track down the information, maybe call someone, deal with their retention pitch over the phone, and then remember to check in a few weeks to confirm it actually ended.

It's all a lot of hassle that I really just don't want or need. Far easier to just donate once at donation time and then file the receipt in my tax folder. I can always decide to donate again next year.

I already have probably 20 or more monthly recurring payments from my mortgage to all of the insurance payments and internet, gas, water, electric, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, all of the software services I use and so on. Running a business can easily add 10-30 more monthly bills. I really, really don't want to add anything else to that list if I can avoid it.

Office charity drives are already bad enough in that they socially pressure employees to give money. I would be furious if the company I worked for asked me to start recurring donations out of my paycheck. Keep employer-employee relationships to strictly business. I can donate to charity on my own time.

This took a lot of my mental energy when I was a teacher. I didn't have any of my bills on autopay because I had to constantly manage when I would have enough money in my account to pay any given bill. Even now that I'm much more comfortable I only have about half of my bills set to autopay just in case, e.g., one bill comes due the day before my paycheck lands in my account.

Even if I could, I wouldn't sign up for workplace giving, because I know it's just a ploy to get tax breaks for the company. I'd much rather donate directly, and get the max tax breaks for myself. Same with giving donations in the checkout line. Amazon Smile is the only one I use, because it doesn't cost me extra.

I'm not in any immediate danger of being overdrawn, and I still detest automatic billing in general. (I do it for one bill where there's a significant upcharge for not doing it and switching providers isn't easy.) If I'm spending or giving away my money, I want to sign a check or at least tap a button every time. It's insulting to me for a charity to say, "Here, giving what you want is a bother, let us just take care of it."

I don't mind subscriptions as they're more valuable to the organizations I support than a similar dollar-value of one-time-gifts. Though I do get why people in precarious positions (e.g. low paid workers, founders, or many people in high cost-of-living areas) would prefer not to use them.

But the only reason I can imagine routing charitable giving through work is to take advantage of company matching. At a past company that did 100% dollar-for-dollar matching (up to something like ten thousand dollars) I was happy to shift as many of my donations as possible through work to direct more of the company's giving towards my preferred charities. At my current company that does 0% matching there's no reason for me to involve work in my charitable giving.

I see a lot of people at my place of work giving from their gross income via salary sacrifice simply because they've maxed out their pension allowance and would rather see a charity get it than pay the government another penny in tax.

Once I reach that level of income I'd probably do the same, even if on a take-home basis I didn't feel "rich" due to high CoL.

Right now though, my primary concern is having a big enough pot in retirement, so my tax advantaged contributions go to pension (401k equivalent)

Really great insight. I have absolutely seen this in my own approach to subscriptions. I cancel them when I work for startups and sign up for them when I work for big stable companies.

For my book, I did a ton of historical research, mainly the LA Times (via newspapers.com). You can get a free trial of that without paying, but the subscription price is pretty nominal. You can probably get a paper from where you grew up, too.

Anyway, it's pretty eye-opening to see how much of the paper in the late 70s was ads. Like, 3/4 of most pages in the front section, after the first three. The Sunday paper was 300+ pages. They were raking it in. They could afford to subsidize some foreign bureaus.

Why was that? There was no other good way to reach the Southern California audience. I got my job at Xerox by answering an ad in the Sunday Times.

So they had a monopoly, and now it's gone.

The newspaper price was heavily subsidized by ad revenue. If the paper had to depend solely on the sales revenue, the price would have had been much higher than a quarter, and consequently, much fewer people would buy it regularly.

> does anyone find it ridiculous that a combined household income of $100k is supposedly “affluent?”

It's 150% of the median household income[0] in the United States, so no I don't think it's that ridiculous.

[0] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...

Depends on where you are and who you are. Housing costs vary dramatically across the U.S.: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388.

In addition, most zoning regulations reduce the supply of housing and thus raise prices as demand go up. Someone who bought a place in California or New York or Boston 30 years ago may have seven figures in a primary asset and relatively low earnings.

Reading the news is, in my opinion, nearly diametrically opposed to investing in yourself. You will get a better understanding of current events (upon hearing of them from others, the best filter that money can't even buy) by reading history books exploring the past couple hundred years. The news is an entertainment product where personalities are constantly making statements or predictions that never pan out, and they never face any penalty for it. Look at how nearly everyone involved in the media push for the Iraq war still has a career and is seemingly respected by their peers. Look at how half the media lost their heads over the Trump/Russia thing, leading people on for three years straight, never amounting to anything. Someone who completely ignored that entire thing would be massively better off intellectually (and be better informed about the world) than someone who hung onto the daily "the walls are closing in" predictions.

Daily or even weekly, maybe monthly reading of the news is over 95% noise and is a pure negative for personal development.

A better quote:

> Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.” Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good.

Paywall does not automatically mean luxury? I think the actual problem is the average internet user expects everything to be free, independent from his/her income.

Anecdotal: I have friends with iphones of whom I wonder how they can spend so much on a mobile. It is about making choices.