We were living in New York in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy hit the city. It was a crazy time. Everything was fine in our apartment in Astoria, Queens, but many parts of the city were not okay.
Fog Creek’s office at 55 Broadway was completely without power, as was our data center at 75 Broad St. To make matters worse, while the backup generator for our data center was in good shape—located about a dozen floors above ground—the fuel for the backup generator was not fine. The fuel storage tank had been ripped from the ground when storm water flooded the basement. Fog Creek had literal hours to consider shutting down our servers and making our products unavailable to customers.
I’ll have to save the complete story of how we came together to keep the business alive for another day1—hint: it involved hauling buckets of diesel fuel up a dozen flights of stairs and a backup plan to drive hard drives to an Amazon data center in Virginia—but I’ll share one anecdote.
Fog Creek had a fancy office with a fancy saltwater fish tank that had lots of pumps and filters to keep the fish alive. When the storm surge in lower Manhattan knocked out the power, there was a backup battery to keep the fish tank operational until the power came back on. The problem was that this was going to be an unusually long power outage. A message went out to the company chat asking if anyone had an extra car battery that could be used to keep the fish alive.
Oddly enough, I did have an extra car battery.
When we moved to New York in early 2011, we could barely afford it. Yes, I was making more money, but the cost of living was much higher than we were used to in the suburbs of Atlanta. Knowing we wouldn’t be driving much in New York, we sold one of our cars to save on insurance and pad our emergency fund.
The car we kept was my wife’s Toyota Corolla. Because we were on a tight budget, we almost always traveled by car rather than by plane, which meant a lot of miles in the small car when we would go home to Atlanta for the holidays.
In the summer of 2012, a friend was selling their Honda CR-V and we decided to “upgrade” into the slightly larger vehicle to make the long road trips home a bit more bearable. The problem was that part of my justification with buying the CR-V was selling the Corolla, but I never quite got around to going through the hassle of actually selling it. So for a while, we had two(!) cars that we parked on the street outside of our apartment in Astoria, which was for all intents and purposes, totally ridiculous.
That’s why, when the message went out asking if someone had an extra car battery lying around, I was able to say yes. I removed the battery from the Corolla, loaded it up into the CR-V, and drove my car to work for the first and only time of my three years living in New York.2
The fact that the most important function my car served was donating its battery to a fish tank was a stark reminder that it was time to get rid of this thing. This is when I was struck with a crazy idea: what if we just give it away?
Budgeting
My wife and I have always kept a budget. One of the most important categories was the emergency fund. The problem was that we hadn’t really updated the emergency fund since moving to New York. When factoring in the higher cost of living and added risk of being on a single income, we decided in 2012 to focus on saving and doubling our emergency fund.
When I looked at the actual cash in the bank account, things looked okay, but a big part of our bank balance was the money set aside for the “generosity fund”. But the generosity fund was sacrosanct, not to be touched.
For as long as we’ve been budgeting, we’ve been putting money into the generosity fund. Five percent of our monthly income would go to our church and another five percent would go into the generosity fund to be donated to charities or other worthy causes.
If months went by without making a donation, the generosity fund would grow and become a sizable portion of the bank account. Although we were never pressed to the point of having to think about dipping into the generosity fund to cover emergencies, the thought made us both uneasy. That money wasn’t ours. It was supposed to be given away. That’s where the crazy idea to give away the car came from.
Giving away a car
Shortly after lending our car battery to the Fog Creek fish tank, I remember being on the subway thinking about giving away the car, but not sure how to do it. An idea popped into my head to text my friend Larry and ask him to be on the lookout for someone who needed a car. Larry was a pastor at a local church and was spending a lot of time in Rockaway Beach helping the community there try to recover from the storm. If he met someone who needed a car, I asked him to let me know.
Larry called me on Thanksgiving saying that he had found someone. A woman he had met had lost her means of transportation and desperately needed a car to be able to keep her job. We were thrilled and made arrangements to drop off the car the following week.
I’ll never forget the feeling of driving the car as I was about to give it away. The thought enter my head, “this car isn’t really mine anyway.” I mean, sure, I legally owned it, but it was like there was a line item on the cosmic balance sheet that moved the car from someone who didn’t need it to someone who did. I was just the person assisting with the transaction. I was slightly terrified to think about how long I could have held onto the car when someone else needed it far more than I did.
Having donated the car, I turned my gaze to our personal balance sheet. I double checked with my wife before moving some of the money from the generosity fund to our emergency fund.
Plan for giving
I’m sharing this story to encourage you to have a plan for giving. Consider setting aside a portion of your budget each month to be given away to a worthy cause or someone in need. It doesn’t need to be for religious reasons. Having a portion of your budget that is not “your own” changes how you think about money in a healthy way.
It’s kind of funny. Why did I need to lend my car battery to a fish tank to have an “aha” moment of generosity? And why all the financial engineering to pad the emergency fund? These moments occurred because of constraints we put upon ourselves. But they’re constraints that got us to think about giving, and that’s entirely the point.
We’ve used a number of ways of to implement the generosity fund over the years. At one point it was in an actual cash envelope and at other times it was a line item in YNAB. Now it’s a combination of a shared pocket in our One account for smaller donations and a Vanguard Charitable donor-advised fund for larger donations. It could be as simple as a separate checking account.
This time of year is a season of giving. As you consider making donations to worthy causes and people in need, also consider creating a plan for ongoing giving throughout the year. You’ll create an opportunity to be prepared to give when someone needs it most.
Oh look, I found this article!
Kinda funny side story: I had never driven to work since living in New York, so I had no idea where to park. But lower Manhattan was a ghost town. Literally zero cars on Broadway, which was virtually unimaginable. I figured I’d just park in front of the building because who was going to care? As I was about to unload the car battery, a NYPD officer asked me to move my car. When I explained the (odd) situation, he mercifully compromised and let me park across the street from the building. Still illegal but I guess a better version of illegal?