How it started
I came across Acorns a while back. It’s an app that rounds up whatever you buy and invests the extra, so a $4.62 coffee becomes $5.00 and the 38 cents goes into the stock market.
I tried it for fun, and honestly I laughed. You end up with a couple hundred dollars a year sitting in an index fund. That is not retirement money. That is not even a vacation. As a plan for getting rich it’s kinda silly.
But I kept thinking about it, because the mechanism is smart. Money you do not feel leaving. It’s the pushka sitting on the counter, and we have been doing that forever. They took a good idea and pointed it at the stock market.
Your change is only small by yourself
Rounding up costs most people around $14 a month. That is under fifty cents a day, and it’s money you basically already spent.
- By yourself
- $167 a year
- A hundred people
- $16,700 a year
- A thousand people
- $167,000 a year
Nothing here is a promise about what anyone gives. It is one number multiplied out.
Every time counts, not only the total
As taught by the first Chabad Rebbe, there is a special virtue and benefit for the giver not just in the amount of charity given but in the multiplicity of times given, even if every time is only a small amount.
Your change is counted every time you spend and sent once it reaches ten dollars. The counting is the part that repeats, and it repeats whether or not you think about it.
The tzedakah gets the change, not us.
Questions, or you want to talk: chunonbartfield@gmail.com
Round up, give it away, forget about it.
Takes about three minutes to set up. Your first donation goes out as soon as your change reaches $10.
Start rounding upFree to use. We take nothing from your round-ups. RealChange is software, not a charity.