jdennon

It also meant we bought a house at age 29 instead of probably 26, which still is not bad at all.

(I'm the OP's wife.) There was one year we didn't meet our goal - it was our first year out of college and we forgot about taxes. We made up the rest of the donations the following year. I'm sure we would try to do the same if we couldn't make the budget due to some unforeseen expense.

First, I'm going to recommend 80,000 Hours, which does career advising to people who want to use their careers for good, either directly through their work or by "earning to give." They suggest some careers that may not be high-earning but that can do a lot of good, like working at a foundation moving money to more effective causes, doing biomedical research, or doing marketing for nonprofits.

I had a crisis about this midway through grad school (in social work) because it's not exactly a top-earning career. In the end, I couldn't think of any high-earning career that I didn't think I would be miserable in, so I kept going with social work. In the end, I think that was fine - not everybody has the skills or interests to do the few top-earning jobs.

Jeff could have gone into linguistics instead of computer science, or become a professional folk dance musician (currently a hobby/part-time job). But because he enjoys being a programmer, that works fine for him and it allows him to help other people way more than the other job options.

The first thing we did was test our daughter (and me, since I'm pregnant) and get appointments with a toxicologist. No one in the household had measurable levels of mercury, so there was nothing to do except stay out of the house until it was cleaned up (now levels are no higher than background levels you would expect in any building). Thanks, though!

It gets easier with practice :-)