Butterflies
Use Gift Aid
You’ll be 25% more noble.
Having agreed to Actually Give To Charity, our next Butterfly will be significantly less sore: We’re going to use Gift Aid.
Gift Aid is a tax relief thing introduced by the otherwise evil Tories [cue thunder] that allows charities to reclaim the tax we paid on the bit of our salaries we gave them. They can get back the basic rate of tax, so for every £10 we Actually Give To Charity they get an extra £2.50 – and at no extra cost to us generous Zeroes. As with all Butterflies, this gets more amazing when you imagine the scale of the thing. For every £100 a charity gets, it gets another £25. For every £1,000, it gets £250. For every million, in tiny chunks from all us Zeroes, it gets another £250,000. It’s incredible how it adds up. In the 2018-19 tax year, charities claimed £1.35 billion in Gift Aid, all for free, all because we took two seconds to tick a box.
That’s all it takes. You tick a box to say you want to Gift Aid your donation, the charity does all the work of wrestling it from HMRC, and you become one of the all time great people. You can only use Gift Aid if you’re a UK taxpayer and if you’ve paid enough in the tax year to cover the amount claimed, but that’s the kind of small print we refuse to find interesting.
The point is it adds up. To about a billion quid. And then it goes off and does good in the world that otherwise wouldn’t have been done. Let’s butter this fly til we can’t butter it no more.
Use Gift Aid
Charities will get more money
And they’ll do more good with it!
Photo credit: HM Revenue & Customs
Zeroism
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