I’ve always been a big proponent of using smart personal finance to be able to do great things in your life (that’s the point, isn’t it?), including donating to charities that fit your view of how to make the world a better place.

Plus, if you have income in the United States, you are eligible to deduct charity donations (to registered 501(c)(3) charities) on your taxes. If you’re planning to donate this year in order to deduct on your upcoming 2012 taxes, you only have a few more days to do it!

So quick, donate now to my charity: water campaign! Or, just sit back and watch the live broadcast and participate in the chat room below – we start broadcasting tonight (December 28th) at 7pm EST and going as long as the donations go. There will be giveaways and prizes, so tune in!

Watch live video from upickvg on www.twitch.tv

Donate here: U-Pick Video Game Marathon for Charity
Like the fundraiser on Facebook!

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2. Charity: Helping Those Poorer Than Me!
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How to Give Textbooks as a Gift

Logistically, this gets a little tricky. There are a couple ways you could do it:

1. Give the student a handwritten (and signed!) IOU for one term’s textbooks. Put instructions on it that the student must email or give you a complete and accurate list of the textbooks they need as soon as possible. Once you have the textbook list, you can go ahead and purchase the books through your preferred textbook retailers, or hit up some of the ones in my textbook buying guide.
2. Send the student a gift certificate to Chegg so that they can purchase or rent their textbooks from there. Chegg is my personal favorite textbook service, and I rented at least one textbook from them every term since their debut.
3. For more flexibility, go with a gift certificate to Amazon and write out that it’s for textbooks… or anything else the student might want or need.
4. I guess you could also go out, buy some random textbooks, gift wrap them, and hope for the best. I meant, who doesn’t love getting a pile of heavy books that may or may not be relevant to your classes?

And don’t feel like the lame friend or relative for giving textbooks instead of something fun. The fun gifts they may receive from other people will be more enjoyable without the cost of textbooks hanging over their head. Trust me.

*Disclosurery stuff: I have affiliate relationships with Chegg and Amazon. I don’t know if I get an sort of commission for gift certificates sold through Chegg, but the link does include a coupon code embedded in it, so it’s win-win. I receive a 6% commission for Amazon gift certificates. As with all of my affiliate relationships, I recommend these sites wholeheartedly with or without commission.

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3. Chegg Introduces text-a-licious Textbooks

Thank you! I know that all you did was walk out of the Metro station and find the first person who looked like she was going inside to give your Weekly Fast Pass to. Good for a whole week’s worth of Metro rides, you probably bought it to save money on a few days of Metro trips that would have added up to more than the $39 cost of the pass. But done with whatever it was that brought you onto the Metro, and with three days left on the card, you decided to give the pass to whomever you could find that could use it.

That startled-looking blonde girl with the backpack was me. I managed to eek out a “Thank you!” as you handed off the pass and walked away, but it wasn’t until the pass worked in the Metro turnstile that the full force of my gratitude hit me. Of course, you were long gone by that point.

You saved me $16 this weekend, which may not seem like a lot of money to most people, but it is to me! Money is tight in my life right now, but I hardly expected a stranger who knew nothing about me to walk up and hand me the equivalent of $16, right on the street! I truly am at a (hopefully short) period in my life where $16 is a huge difference in my budget.

Maybe this story will reach you, but most likely, it won’t. So this is really a letter to everyone. And it’s not just about Metro farecards. It’s about paying it forward. It’s about finding ways to just help people. And knowing that it may mean more to the people you help than they can express at the time.

Again, thank you!
- Stephanie

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Now you could try getting crafty and reliving your childhood, but macaroni necklaces probably won’t go over as well as when you were five. And ornaments made from maxi pads? My mom may find them funny, but she’s probably an exception rather than the rule.

Never fear! There are gifts you can give that are tasteful, cheap, and will even be appreciated! All you have to do is give the gift of what you know.

Giving Away Experience

In your time on this planet, you’ve surely managed to pick up a few skills, maybe even some skillz! Through careful study, or trail by fire, you’ve learned to accomplish at least a few tasks more complicated than tying your shoes. But did you ever think you could use your talents as free/cheap presents?

This concept is best communicated with examples:

Computer Knowledge

We college students have learned how to navigate the web (and Web 2.0), bother people on Facebook, move all of our contacts between different email providers and software, and do a ton of other things that we just take for granted. A lot of this stuff can be foreign and difficult to older members of your family. Even my mother, an early adopter who was programming in Basic in the 80s (yeah, really), hasn’t really gotten the hang of things like RSS yet.

Write up an I.O.U for a computer session and give it as your gift. You can sit down and teach someone how to accomplish a task that you know would make their life easier. Or, you can gather the feeds for the sites they like into Google Reader. And, for the sake of all of us, install Firefox and make them stop using Internet Explorer!

Gettin’ Crafty

Again – no macaroni necklaces! But maybe you have picked up some craft skills that you can use. Knitting and crochet are quite popular among my friends, even some of the male ones! But we knitters have learned that knitting presents for your whole family is both expensive AND time consuming, which pretty much knocks it out of the "frugal gifts" category.

Instead, teach the craft that you’ve learned. Wrap up some yarn and needles (or a crochet hook), or maybe a beginners needle-point set. Some people, upon receiving this gift, will demand that you start teaching them right then and there! That’s one way to get out of the holiday small talk for a few hours: "Sorry Uncle Phil, I’d love to talk fishing with you, but I’m trying to teach your daughter to knit. It’s her Christmas present!"

Bonus: people love to have good stories about how they learned a craft. Mine is kind of boring (I taught myself, from books), but it’s nice to be able to say "Someone really close to me taught me as a Christmas present!"

Juggling

I can juggle! Barely. But I can certainly juggle better than my brother, and that’s the point, isn’t it? Fun skills like this are great gifts for the children in your family. In a few years I hope to teach my niece how to juggle (she’s 4), although I’ll probably have to wait a while to teach her infant brother. And yes, maybe I can teach my own brother a thing or two at the same time!

Installation and Assembly

Every family has that thing. You know that thing? That thing that’s in the basement! It was given to the family a few years ago, and it would be totally sweet to get it out and use it, but no one has taken the time to put it together or install it yet. (In my family, it was a jungle gym.)

If you’re capable, go down into the basement or out into the storage shed, find The Thing, and put to together so that people can finally get some use out of it. It might seem too hard, but maybe you can wrangle some siblings into helping you. And remember, most Things come with instructions! (If not, you could also Google it.)

The Key to Making This Work

There are hundreds of ways you can turn your expertise into a gift. But what you really need to do is make sure the gift will be appreciated by the recipient. Find and need, and fill it. Computer help probably won’t be wanted or needed by a teenage sibling or cousin. Listen to your friends and family talk for clue about what you could help them with.
"That darn computer never seems to work right!"
"Wow, that’s a great scarf, did you make that yourself?"
"I always wished I could juggle…"
"If only we had That Thing from the basement put together, I could really use it!"

Even when they don’t mean to, people will tell you what they need.

This post is a part of the College Money Network’s Frugal Holiday Ideas series. Check out these other posts in the series:
Holiday Gifts: Thoughtful is > Expensive
The Best Frugal Christmas Gift Ever
Frugal Gift Ideas

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2. Holiday Gift Giving on a Student Budget
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But I already know how rich I am, because of the quality of the education I’ve received. I’m not even talking about the fancy college education that I’ve gotten into way too much debt for – although that certainly could be used as an indicator.

Rather, I can tell my relative wealth simply by looking at my elementary and high schools. Textbooks, teachers, computers, music classes, science classes, drama club… all courtesy of the New York State public school system.

Most of the nearly two–billion children in the developing world are inadequately educated, or receive no education at all. One in three does not complete the fifth grade.

-One Laptop Per Child, www.laptop.org

Is poverty a cause of poor education, or is poor education a cause of poverty? As best I can tell, the answer is: Yes. Both. It’s a vicious cycle. Poor schooling means little economic opportunity, and struggling economies can’t afford to build schools.

Many of you already know that I lead a group on my college campus called Students for Cambodian Schools. I haven’t been able to donate much money to the cause, thanks to my debt and all that. But debt – being "poor" in America – is no excuse for ignoring the real plight of others. Just because I can’t give money doesn’t mean I don’t have something to give.

Time.

Call this what you want: bleeding heart liberalism, white guilt, "#62 Knowing what’s best for poor people" … it is what it is. I implore you today, on Blog Action Day, to take a look at people that truly are Poorer Than You. And think what one hour of your time or one bill out of your wallet might mean to someone living in poverty.

The floodgate – I mean, the comments section – is open.

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So, uh, what does this have to do with personal finance, exactly? Look, there’s more to money than hoarding it away in a high yield savings account or index funds. What good is money to you, if you can’t use it to do good?

So today, I’m here to shill for the charity of my choice. But really, I’d just be happy to know that you guys are donating to something that you believe in. And donations don’t always have to be monetary – clothes, time, effort… you can donate to a cause just by doing something that helps raise awareness.

That’s what I’m going to do right now: raise awareness for my cause. (The following was written with help from my good friend Sam, who founded the club at our school and was the president until I took over.)

What do you know about human trafficking in Cambodia?

[50% Off by YouTube user tomate1990]

For a text explanation, see theyoutubeproject page for the video.

Human trafficking may seem like a long-gone problem to those of us who live in developed Western nations, but it’s a problem that is all too alive and well, especially in places like Cambodia. Children sold out of their homes by parents who need the money for food. People tricked into believing that they’re getting a factory job… only to be kidnapped and sold.

The past century has taken its toll on the country; the effects of war, rapid changes in government, and genocide are still playing out on the people who live there. Children have little chance of advancing economically in their lives because they have so few opportunities.

I don’t want to be doom-and-gloomy – it’s not my style. I prefer to cowboy-up and jump into the “how can I help?” portion.

And you can help.

The Rural Schools Project

“American Assistance for Cambodia (AAfC)/ Japan Relief for Cambodia (JRfC) are independent nonprofit organizations dedicated to providing opportunities for the youth and rural poor in Cambodia.” One of the major ways AAfC and JRfC have influenced the Cambodian youth is through the Rural School Project program.

This program builds schools in some of the poorest areas in Cambodia and, in the areas they are built, has drastically cut down on illiteracy, long-term poverty, and human trafficking. In order for a basic school to be built, $13,000 must be raised. This money is matched by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank and goes towards a school, teacher, and well. Additional money raised goes towards school enhancements such as solar panels and computers, books, and extra teachers.

Our club, Students for Cambodian Schools, is determined to raise this sum of money to build, support, and name one such rural school.

We’ve raised about 6% of the $13,000 needed to build the school through the Rural Schools Project. It’s a good start. If you want to help out, you can donate directly to our club using the widget below:

Raise money with ChipIn

(If you can’t see the widget, you can contact me to find other ways to donate.)

Your donation will help to fill out the bar a little (or a lot, if you so choose!). It might a lofty goal, but I am working as hard as I can to get the full $13,000 raised before I graduate one year from now – I really want to see us reach our this goal before I have to leave this school.

If you believe in this cause like I do, please tell someone about it. Whether or not you can find some money to spare for it, the real good you can do for any cause is just to raise awareness.

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