NerdWallet's Smart Money Podcast
Travel Smart, Give Smart: Southwest Companion Pass and Charitable Giving Strategies
Mon, 02 Dec 2024
Learn how to maximize Southwest Companion Pass benefits and how to plan effective charitable giving to make your donations count. How can you get and use the Southwest Companion Pass? What’s the best way to plan charitable giving to make the most impact? Hosts Sean Pyles and Sara Rathner discuss travel savings and effective philanthropy to help you understand how to maximize rewards and make thoughtful donations. Sean begins by talking to travel Nerds Meghan Coyle and Sally French to discuss the Southwest Companion Pass, with tips and tricks on earning it through points and flights, timing it for maximum value, and using it strategically for travel savings. Then, Sean and Sara talk to Grace Nicolette, Vice President at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, about planning and optimizing your charitable giving. They discuss how to align donations with personal goals, avoid common pitfalls like over-focusing on nonprofit overhead costs, and ensure your contributions have a meaningful impact. More information on how to earn the Southwest Companion Pass and which credit cards might help you earn it: https://nerdwallet.com/southwest. In their conversation, the Nerds discuss: Southwest Companion Pass strategy, charitable giving tips, holiday travel tips, maximizing travel rewards, effective philanthropy, Giving Tuesday ideas, Southwest Airlines perks, earning travel points, best travel credit cards, Companion Pass requirements, year-round giving strategies, maximizing donations, family travel savings, tax-deductible donations, nonprofit giving tips, planning holiday flights, Companion Pass benefits, travel rewards strategies, frequent flyer perks, credit card offers, holiday travel deals, donor best practices, saving on flights, using credit card rewards, domestic travel discounts, maximizing nonprofit impact, and credit card signup bonuses. To send the Nerds your money questions, call or text the Nerd hotline at 901-730-6373 or email [email protected]. Like what you hear? Please leave us a review and tell a friend. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the Southwest Companion Pass and why is it valuable?
I think that effectiveness really has many dimensions. One major dimension is, is the money that you are giving having its intended effect? Is it being well used by the nonprofit that you're giving it to?
And I think that here is an area where, without realizing it, donors actually pick up a lot of quote-unquote conventional wisdom that actually may not serve their goals very well in giving effectively. You want to be as generous as possible to nonprofits. You want to do your homework in advance. and then give so that you can kind of unleash the nonprofits to do their best work.
That means, you know, if you can, research nonprofits in advance. It's hard to make a really big gift to a group that you don't know very much about and you don't know whether their goals and strategies align with yours.
What's an example of a common rule of thumb or convention around giving that might not actually be in people's best interest?
But the biggest one that we see is that donors really over focus on overhead administrative cost ratios of nonprofits. There's a sense in which nonprofits should have some sort of percentage of their operating costs that should be as low as possible. we think about it, I know where that comes from, but actually it doesn't really serve a nonprofit well, right?
You want to make sure a nonprofit has all the resources that it needs to attract the best talent, to have up-to-date systems, to be able to do their best work. And it's really hard to also just have one metric across multiple nonprofits, right? Like if you're comparing a school versus like a animal shelter, those numbers are going to be really different. So instead of
Looking at that one thing, because I think donors are often looking for like profit for a business. What is that one thing that I can look at that can just tell me whether a nonprofit is good or not? And I think that it requires a lot more nuance and a lot more education to say, no, there actually isn't one thing you have to really fully understand.
On a practical level, someone might be disinclined to give to a nonprofit or a charity if they hear about how much executives or the C-suite might be earning versus how much they're actually making a difference at the organization's goals. Is that right?
That's right. Every holiday season, I see a meme going around on social media with different nonprofit CEOs' pay levels. And the lowest CEO salary of this one organization was purported to be $13,000. And that was supposed to be a good thing. And I look at that and I'm like... How does someone survive on that? Exactly. Like, I'm not sure that that person is able to survive.
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Chapter 7: What tips can maximize your travel rewards?
Thanks, Sean.
Now let's move on to my conversation with my co-host, Sarah Rathner, and the Center for Effective Philanthropy. We've got loads of tips to help you give better this year. That's coming up in a moment. Stay with us.
We're back, and this episode, we are all about giving. Philanthropic giving, because Giving Tuesday is coming up. We know a lot of people are feeling generous this time of year, but what's the most effective way to donate to the causes that you care about?
To help us explore how to be better and more intentional about our charitable giving, we are joined by Grace Nicolette, Vice President of Programming and External Relations at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, an organization which works to help individuals and organizations make their charitable contributions go further. Grace also hosts the Giving Done Right podcast from CEP.
Grace, welcome to Smart Money.
Thanks for having me.
This time of year, many are hoping to maximize their charitable giving, but they might not be sure the best way to go about it. Since you are VP at the Center for Effective Philanthropy, I'm hoping you can start by explaining what it means to give effectively.
Does it depend on what you want out of your charitable giving, or are there common themes across all kinds of giving that make it effective or not?
I think that effectiveness really has many dimensions. One major dimension is, is the money that you are giving having its intended effect? Is it being well used by the nonprofit that you're giving it to?
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