supporting friends and acquaintances in need

[loutfard]

Dear EREmites,

How does financially supporting friends in need fit into your ERE strategy? I know financial support is not the only help, but that is the focus here. Do you give money at all? How (do you decide how) much? Etcetera.

Most of our circle are upper (middle) class and well-off, but there are some exceptions:

- My wife's friend is a continent away. She's finally gathered the courage to divorce her alcoholic, gambling and violent husband. With three kids from him, her financial situation is dire. We support her financially.

- Our friends next door bought a home full of problems deliberately hidden by a real estate crook. All their savings went into that. Now they're paying a mortgage, rent and a lawsuit. Not easy. We're planning to support them financially.

- Friends of friends were Ukrainian war refugees on a bus heading west without a plan. This one turned out interesting. We initially spent time and money. Others noticed. Money flowed to us to cover our financial efforts.

I've noticed being able to give to these worthy causes has caused a mental growth process in my wife. She now not only knows we are in a safe spot. Each time we make a difference by giving, she can feel it too. She sees how my ERE turn to our spending has enabled us to give. Her appreciation and buyin grows. Quite useful when discussing our housing situation!

Kind regards,

loutfard

[Jean]

I just bought some audio tapes from a beggar in the train for 50.-
I'm usually quite stingy
It doesn't feel bad. I just hope the dude wont buy opioid, but he didn't have the heroin voice.

[Frita]

For me, each situation is unique so I want to understand what the needs are and address those. For example: If it’s food insecurity for an alcoholic family member, I prefer to give a giftcard to their local grocery that does not have a liquor store (This did piss said boozer off, do no more monetary help.). Ideally, I would like to consider the root cause without enabling irresponsibility (i.e., helping to budget versus paying off bills) or creating additional problems (i.e., sending big money transfer to someone in Mexican narco territory, triggering possible extortion or kidnapping). Second, I view the money as a gift, not a loan. If I am paid back, bonus. If not, I don’t completely lose the relationship like I would if a loan wasn’t paid off.

[Seppia]

Well, first loutfard, kudos to you. you have a big heart and I truly admire you for that.

Great points from Frita too!

We no not support anybody financially today, but we know nobody who is in a bad shape who doesn’t fully deserve it (sorry not a lot of empathy here) + has little kids that suffer for it.
In which case we would support the kids probably.

But who am I kidding? If I wanted to, I would easily find someone in need.
We have been giving meaningful sums in the past, we just, stopped I guess?
I need to find a “set and forget” charity that can be tax deductible from anywhere reasonable so that I don’t have to change up when/if we move again (which we hope not, but tends to happen).
If anybody knows a reputable one that is effective (ie good ROI in terms of lives saved) I’ll start donating asap.

[loutfard]

Thank you for your kind words, Seppia.

You may find inspiration in effective altruism. It's about leveraging donations into maximum social benefit.

[guitarplayer]

This is a good point to talk about so thanks for raising it up @loutfard. In my view it well shows the heavily individualistic based approach to life in the light of the environment and context one is in.

ETA: I re-read the OP + other comments and think what I write below is more to do with gifts to family or maybe friends who are really close friends, rather than acquaintances.

I think generally the statement from the ERE book that 'anyone in a country with democracy and market economy can pull it off' is an example of Dunning Kruger effect. In fact, I think many more circumstances need to fall in place to be able to do '5 years to ERE' sort of thing. Or alternatively, it can be done, bar all the external circumstances (i.e. if it was only about me - yes).

For me, like @jean I am generally stingy if it comes to financial hand outs and weight needs vs wants in these circumstances. Still, after finally recently doing a review of finances from the last 3.5 years it occurred to me that DW and I gifted around 4% of our gross pay across the years, or just over 4.4% of pay after taxes and social security contributions.

ERE is a good out of the box personal approach to life, then needs to be applied to circumstances. While there is a tendency to focus on the financial aspect due to its tangibility, in the grand scheme of one's life financial aspect is but a part of other stuff.

[jacob]

Supporting friends and acquaintances in need financially doesn't fit mine.

Humans make bad choices to different degrees. Some make many, some make few.

The higher the income/wealth, the more bad choices someone can afford. The rich can commit multiple crimes and pay lawyers to effectively keep them out of jail. The upper class can afford to carry gambling habits, drug addictions, or "dreamy" investments for themselves and their family and friends. The lower class can't afford many mistakes: A bad habit like poor health might send the ball rolling towards loss of job, loss of other people's jobs because they now need to take care of the first sick person, loss of opportunity, etc. as they start dragging family and friends into their problem-zone.

The left believes bad choices are structural (society made me do it/did it to me?) and should be alleviated with taxes, so that everybody can afford bad choices more evenly. The right believes that bad choices are personal (sins?) and should be alleviated with charity (or punishment) but that often comes with a certain power relationship in which the receiver is expected to show gratitude and make the donor feel nice about it lest the money dry up.

I'm kind of a hard-nosed hard-ass with little empathy for bad choices so I don't really believe in enabling preventable mistakes either way.

Where it does fit into my ERE strategy is that will offer time and suggestions to fix the [generating] problems which are practically always avoidable. I've noticed that when it comes to friends and family needing help, we are not the ones to send a check but we are the ones who are most likely to show up in person. However, I also recognize that I'm mean enough to expect those in need to make as much effort as I do when it comes to resolving their need.

However, often people don't really want the problem solved after all because that would require them to change their behavior. They just want a sympathetic ear (and some money would be nice too). Thus I also make sure I don't put in more effort than they're willing to put in themselves.

As I've gotten older I've become more accepting that some humans just gotta human and that "consequences" are a much better teacher than "I'm telling you" eventually followed by "I told you so". It's sometimes hard to watch the consequences play out but not so hard that I feel like spending money on enabling continued bad choices just so the person can avoid present consequences while creating new ones in the future because nothing was learned.

[Sclass]

I think my frugal lifestyle is repellent for this kind of thing. If people think you have nothing they may not ask for this kind of help. How can I possibly help when I don’t have anything to help with? Or perhaps I’m so tough on myself financially how generous could I possibly be with them?

I think these things start with a dance. Flirting. People size you up and approach you. They circle. You talk. They decide whether they’d like to engage. It can get cut short very easily. Must be the ERE repellent.

[Gilberto de Piento]

Be sure to think about how much you want to give not just of your money but also your time, emotional and physical energy, resource, and anything else you might have to offer. Factor in opportunity cost as well.

[Ego]

How does financially supporting friends in need fit into your ERE strategy? I know financial support is not the only help, but that is the focus here. Do you give money at all? How (do you decide how) much? Etcetera.

The series of Effective Altruism scandals continue to pull back the curtain on the motives underlying conspicuously giving. At best, conspicuous givers are buying status. At worst, they are purchasing the self-license to conduct immoral behavior elsewhere.

A potential giver should scrutinize their own temptation to make others aware of their generosity and hesitate to give if they are unable or unwilling to do so anonymously.

[chenda]

I was taught to never mix money with friends, as it's a good way to loose both.

I only give charity to a cats charity, which refurbish and re-home neglected cats. I generally prefer cats to humans.

[7Wannabe5]

According to sexual dichotomy theory, "frugality" as conventionally/narrowly/modernly defined* is an aspect of one's masculine energy, because it is towards "killing/fencing at the cold boundary" vs. "caring/welcoming at the central warm hearth." Thus, it would often be the case, as with Loutfard, that if one's primary partner tends towards carrying rmore of the feminine energy in relationship and/or core functioning, they may be more likely to "buy in" on frugality/ERE if they can see how it provides for altruism.

Studies over many cultures and times reveal that "gifting" clearly follows genetic kinship in due proportion with greater emphasis on maternal line. Your mother's mother is more likely to "gift" you than either your maternal great-aunt or your father's father. However, humans are a species that is much more on the "involved" end in terms of paternal participation in child care/support than most species, so this may be reflected in the fact that from most likely to least likely to occur, you have to delve through more than 67% of the female population before you hit a personality type which does not have either Fe or Fi in primary or secondary position, whereas you have to delve through 37% of the male population (ISTJ, ESTJ, ISTP) before you encounter a type, the ISFJ. which does. ISFJ (Si, Fe), The Nurturer, is also the most frequently found personality type for females. In terms of meeting/gifting the needs of others, Fi is more likely to be "sensitive/discerning" and Fe is more likely to be "warm/open." Therefore, if a female primary partner is chosen at random, the odds that something close to "maternal instinct" or "altruism" or "direct social responsibility" will be close to her core purpose is well over 2/3. IOW, the odds that you are randomly likely to find yourself in a relationship with a woman who will not sharply discount your value if her dog dies because you were unwilling to lend her the funds for the vet bill, are quite low. However, since long-term mating in humans tends towards the assortative rather than the entirely random, the odds that a somewhat rare male rational (NT) may find himself in relationship with a much rarer female rational type or mechanic/manager type may serve to somewhat improve the situation vis-a-vis the vet bill scenario with the trade-off being that the likelihood of finding himself the beneficiary of generous, patient, and/or romantic-reflexive motive extended to the sexual would also decline in due proportion. I'm sure that this rings true for those of you whom have ever found yourself still entangled at the hard light of dawn with a female ESTJ.




*When "frugality" is more "expansively/post-post-modernly/systemically" defined in terms of resource conservation, it becomes more evocative of both masculine and feminine energy with altruistic motive further abstracted from kinship towards complexity.

[chenda]

Humans make bad choices to different degrees. Some make many, some make few.

How would you delineate between bad choices and bad luck?

[jacob]

How would you delineate between bad choices and bad luck?

One is predictable, the other is not. In practice, it is often so that those who consistently experience bad outcomes make their [bad] choices based on a lacking or even bad understanding of cause and effect in reality. Failure to plan, failure to predict, failure to prioritize, failure to hedge, ... Someone who doesn't see "if-then" relations or is unable to follow that kind of logic will experience life in a way that seems like luck or in other mystical terms. I'm sympathetic up to the point where someone is warned about a bad outcome but choose to do it anyway.

[7Wannabe5]

This still leaves open the question of whether choosing the more predictable outcome is "good." For example, a drug is judged to be efficaceous if it beats the placebo at a ratio of 1.2: 1 with nutraceuticals showing even less promise, whereas the likelihood of a woman being murdered by her male partner vs. being murdered by anybody else is 100:1, with homicide being the third most likely cause of death for women under the age of 35, yet very many reasonably rational and well-educated young female humans still choose on a daily basis to consume nutraceuticals which they store in a medicine cabinet shared with a male of our species!?!?!

[black_son_of_gray]

How does financially supporting friends in need fit into your ERE strategy?

An apropos topic considering much of the forum discussion recently has been revolving around self-actualization.

I think the specifics of the question (providing money for support) ultimately point to the general topic of 'fairness' and how each of us decides 1) what that is for ourselves, and 2) how we would like to express the value we hold.

Life isn't fair, but humans often have the capacity to make some aspects of it more fair (if they choose to). (It's also possible to wittingly or unwittingly make some aspects less fair for other humans.)

Just in writing this, my brain is bringing up comparisons to, say, the concept of 'risk' and all its subtleties. People have different risk tolerances; life has some inherent, unavoidable risks; people that ignore risks and plow on often end up having it blow up in their faces; sometimes smalls risks still blow up in a careful person's face. And so on. In the end, one can adopt (wittingly or not) their society's attitudes on risk, usually stripped of all the subtleties and turned into rules-of-thumb or slogans, or one can muddle through their own thoughts and apply them as best they can. The most reasonable outcome to be hoped for (as far as I can tell) is to sleep well at night (SWAN). The same applies to fairness. If you sleep better with what you are doing, keep doing it! If you sometimes worry about whether you are going 'enough', perhaps try doing more and see how you feel.

[zbigi]

This still leaves open the question of whether choosing the more predictable outcome is "good." For example, a drug is judged to be efficaceous if it beats the placebo at a ratio of 1.2: 1 with nutraceuticals showing even less promise, whereas the likelihood of a woman being murdered by her male partner vs. being murdered by anybody else is 100:1, with homicide being the third most likely cause of death for women under the age of 35, yet very many reasonably rational and well-educated young female humans still choose on a daily basis to consume nutraceuticals which they store in a medicine cabinet shared with a male of our species!?!?!

We're missing the stats on how many "reasonably rational and well-educated young female humans" are murdered by their partners (vs the general female population). I suspect it's rare (as these women have access to men who are highly unlikely to ever murder anyone, and are also smart enough to weed out potential murderers), and thus it's not stupid for reasonable and well-educated women to live with men.

[jacob]

What we're missing here is the forest for the trees...

[loutfard]

How would you delineate between bad choices and bad luck?

One is predictable, the other is not.

I'm sympathetic up to the point where someone is warned about a bad outcome but choose to do it anyway.

Let me try to apply this test to both scenarios.

My wife's divorcing friend D. I don't know her husband J at all. I remember a worried question from D, relayed to me shortly after the birth of their third child. J wanted to earn a side income day trading. No alpha, no mathematical genius, no track record, ... In other words, "dumb gambler, best case" written on his forehead in capitals. My wife relayed my warning to D. If my wife is to believed, that opened D's eyes. Fast forward two years. She's escaped her conservative religious confinement, has taken her financial affairs in her own hands and is working hard to provide for her kids.

Our neighbours. Middle eastern christian refugees from a well-known war zone. Hard working people. Did almost everything right in life, except buying a house from a crook. Small support network, not enough active search for advice, naive trust in the notary, extending themselves a bit far and now in deep shit. They will win the lawsuit if they can survive the liquidity squeeze and the mental pressure that comes with that. They never ever asked for anything. With other neighbours, we conspired to help in strategic ways. Mostly our network and guiding them through the legal process, and just being there. Now also a one-time drop of financial support, in coordination with other mutual friends who also happen to be neighbours.

I doubt if trying to draw a clear line between bad luck and bad choice is always useful. Perhaps trust in these people's future choices might be more useful a metric?

[Henry]

The give a man a fish, teach a man to fish trope is annoying as a persistent ball sack itch but I think it provides a nice heuristic.
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