Just How Tight Is Your Money?
A new Harris poll reported here by Mediapost indicates that the number of people taking measures to reduce their everyday spending is still on the rise.
Leading the list of money-saving measures are buying generic brands (#1 at 62% in October), taking a brown bag lunch instead of buying (#2 at 47%), and fewer visits to the hairstylist/barber (#3 at 43%).
Most interesting to me are these two: cutting back on magazine subscriptions at 34% (up from 29% in June) and cutting back on newspaper subscriptions at 21% (up from 17% in June). In particular, cutting back on magazines strikes me as very analogous to cutting back on donations … "which of these are really the most important to me and which can/must I live without, at least for now?"
This data, indicating that significant belt-tightening is still underway, indeed increasing a bit, suggests that fundraisers shouldn’t get TOO optimistic about 2010 projections.
Tom
Behavioral Science Q & A
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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