Ten brilliant charity Christmas gift ideas for 2015

What do you buy for the person who has everything? Please not another pair of socks. Say no to mindless consumer spending this Christmas and give a charity gift instead. Most people recognise that they have a lot more stuff than they really need, so maybe your friends and family would rather you spent your Christmas budget on something which helps the less fortunate. Here are 10 interesting ideas for charity gifts which do some good, don’t contribute to landfill, and should raise a smile around the tree this year.

• Pile of poo, £9, Oxfam

If you can bring yourself to literally spend your money on crap, this humorous gift will certainly be a talking point on Christmas Day. Oxfam’s pile of poo is described as “the ideal mix of manure, organic fertiliser and training in eco-friendly farming techniques to help a family grow a lot more crops.” The result? Poor families eat a better diet and get a more stable income. You get a bit of a giggle when Aunt Mabel opens her present.

 

• Hook, line and dinner fishing cooperative training: £13, Present Aid

Give the gift of fish! For £13 you can help fund Christian Aid’s Ethiopia programme, which teaches people how to set up fishing cooperatives and gives them relevant training and tools to improve the long-term prosperity of their communities.

 

• Liberty for lorises: £20, People’s Trust for Endangered Species (PTES)

Their cute and cuddly looks have sadly made Javan slow lorises a much sought-after pet. They are being snatched from the wild, treated inhumanely in terrible conditions and sold on markets around the world. But, for £20, PTES helps educate local communities about the reality of this cruel and illegal trade to try to reduce demand for lorises. Twenty quid seems a small price to pay to improve animal welfare. This gift is a great way to give an animal lover the feel-good factor on Christmas Day.

• Warmth through the winter, £74, International Rescue Committee

Rescue Gifts come in lots of shapes and sizes, allowing you to contribute to a range of disaster relief, health and education projects. For £74 you can supply warm clothing, boots and blankets to help displaced Syrian refugees make it through a cold winter.

• The Great Indian Bake Off, £25, Good Gifts

Good Gifts is the trading name of the Charities Advisory Trust. It partners with different charities to make sure your money always goes directly to the exact project you want to support. In this case, your gift funds a project to help low caste girls in India train as bakers to improve their employment prospects. This gift is perfect for fans of the Great British Bake Off.

 

• Protect 100 acres of rainforest, £5,250, Good Gifts

Working with a bigger budget? Gigantic Good Gifts has a lot of great ethical gift options for institutions or wealthier individuals. You can help restore British hedgerows, train eye surgeons in developing countries, or build a library for an underfunded school.

• Bee Saver Kit, from £15, Friends of the Earth

This present raises awareness of the importance of the UK’s bees, and should also brighten up someone’s garden in time for spring. For £15, Friends of the Earth offers a bee-saving kit which comes with bee-friendly wildflower seeds and a how-to guide to create a bee sanctuary in your garden. This gift also helps fund Friends of the Earth’s other environmental campaigns. Order by 7 December to guarantee delivery in time for Christmas.

• More than a Christmas dinner, £5, Centrepoint

Give a homeless young person a hot Christmas dinner and a sense of community at a time when they might be feeling especially lonely. Youth homeless charity Centrepoint offers a range of gifts across the price spectrum, whether you want to give a new saucepan, a bed for the night, or a helping hand back in to education.

• Two Fingers Brewing Co beer, £variable, available from Ocado, Tesco and Morrisons

If you want to give a physical gift, booze always goes down a treat. Give two fingers to prostate cancer this Christmas while enjoying an artisan ale. Ethical beer brand Two Fingers donates all its profits to Prostate Cancer UK.

 

 

• Designer undies, from £10, Pants to Poverty

Ok, I know I said no socks, but you might want to consider these fancy pants. Pants to Poverty aims to use fashion to change the world. It sells ethically made underwear which gives the Indian farmers who produce its cotton a fair wage and a safer working environment free of pesticides.

And here are two extra ways to give – neither of these ideas are for under the Christmas tree, but they won’t cost you anything and they could really help someone this festive season….

• Give food

A lot of us end up with excess food at this time of year, but there’s no need to waste it. Unwanted, in-date food is always appreciated at food banks, especially over Christmas. The Guardian has produced a handy interactive map showing many of the UK’s food banks and listing their website and contact details. Click here for the map.

• Give blood.

Every single blood donation you make can help as many as three people. Not just emergency cases but also those poor souls undergoing long-term medical treatment, which doesn’t stop just because it’s Christmas.

Links and resources:

Buysocialchristmas.org.uk – has lots of other great ideas for gifts offered by social enterprises.

MoneySavingExpert’s charity gift guide – a good roundup of charity Christmas presents.

Want2donate.org – a site dedicated to raising awareness of and driving supporters to top UK charities and ethical businesses.

Help to Buy…and a sad story for 30-somethings

It’s difficult not to be angry with the Baby Boomers. I recently read this great piece which really summed up for me the many problems now facing the Millennial generation. They are in a cruel situation, and it’s partly fault of the generation above them. Priced out of the housing market because every affordable property has been snapped up by greedy buy-to-let landlords, in a world where wages are not keeping pace with living costs, a lot of Millennials are being forced to stay in some sort of twilight Peter Pan world of perpetual adolescence. Ironically, their Baby Boomer parents are now seeing their ‘boomerang children’ back home living with them again in their 30s (or in depressing flatshares), and the only ones who can get on the property ladder now are those who have help from the Bank of Mum and Dad. A lot of them are also in debt.

Normal, grown-up ambitions like homeownership and parenthood now seem like an impossible dream for a lot of people, which is desperately sad and unfair. Because the roots of this problem can arguably be found in the property market, the government is throwing money at it with a number of new initiatives under the umbrella ‘Help to Buy’.

In the Autumn Statement and Spending Review, the Chancellor pledged to double the housing budget and create 400,000 ‘affordable’ new homes. Shares in housebuilders jumped as much as 6% as this news leaked ahead of the speech, so at least someone’s benefitting from this.

Osborne also recognised (in a muted way) the role buy to let has played in the housing crisis when he announced a 3% increase in stamp duty on second homes or buy to let properties from April 2016. But it doesn’t go far enough by any stretch, and won’t deter overseas cash buyers who want to invest in our soaring property market. As more evidence of the struggle facing first time buyers, Osborne unveiled a new Help to Buy scheme for London, and said he will extend the existing Right to Buy scheme to housing association tenants.

George loves to talk about how many new houses the government is building, but actually the problem is not the lack of housing stock, it’s that buy to let has got completely out of control and is changing the normal supply and demand dynamic which would see property prices fall back when they are so out of step with wage growth. You would expect that when first time buyers don’t stand a chance of affording the property there is, activity in the market would grind to a halt, and prices would be forced to come down in order for things to get moving again. But the government’s measures are helping to ensure this doesn’t happen, by keeping prices artificially inflated and encouraging people to stretch their finances to the max and struggle on to the lowest rung of the ladder with an overpriced property. These initiatives are great news for developers but, for everyone else, it feels a bit like sticking a plaster on a severed artery.

Having said that, I still think everyone who can should take advantage of one aspect of the government’s Help to Buy initiative, the Help to Buy ISA. The scheme launches on 1 December, and a number of banks including Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, NatWest, Santander, and Virgin Money have signed up to offer these ISAs. But, with less than a week to go, no-one wants to be the first to show their hand on the rates they are planning to offer. Undoubtedly, they will be rubbish rates as banks know savers will flock to these products regardless, because the incentive from the government is so good.

Help to Buy ISAs will allow you to put in £1k at launch, and then save, tax free if you are a basic rate taxpayer, up to a maximum of £200 a month. The government puts in an extra 25%. If you save the maximum allowed for five years, you should have £12k, and the government puts in a maximum of £3k, giving you a total of £15K to put towards a deposit. You can only access the government’s contribution through your solicitor once you begin the housebuying process. Also, you can’t have a Cash ISA and a Help to Buy ISA in the same tax year, you’re only allowed one, but you can transfer your money across from your Cash ISA. All the details can be found here.

Help to Buy ISAs are a positive thing because they encourage the savings habit and, of course, it’s FREE MONEY. So, although I’m sad about the housing situation in this country, I still think saving into the Help to Buy ISA is a no-brainer.

But unless Osborne clamps down harder on the rampant greed of buy to let so some of the heat comes out of the housing market, the sad truth is that many first time buyers will still not be able to afford a home, even with the government’s help.

Welcome to my blog

This is a blog about personal finance, designed to help you get out of debt, ramp up your savings pot, learn to invest, budget properly, spend smartly, and get on top of your financial affairs. I’ve called it Truly Madly Money to reflect the fact that you might love money but it doesn’t always love you back and, consequently, it’s tough to hang on to.

I used to be terrible at managing my own money, I didn’t open bank statements, never knew how much money I actually had and, unsurprisingly, I was struggling with debt. I found that obsessing about my budget and tracking my spending in detail gave me back ownership of my financial affairs and helped me escape the trap I was in. I still check all my accounts at least once a day so I know exactly what’s going on at all times, because knowledge is power.

Making efforts to simplify my life was also a big step towards escaping the consumer mindset which was keeping me in debt. Although I’m definitely not a fully fledged minimalist, I think we can learn a lot from those people who care less about ‘stuff and things’, since our society’s rampant consumerism is what has led a lot of us into financial trouble. Listening to what minimalists, declutterers, organised and productive people have to say has helped me think about my financial life in a different way, so I’ll also be bringing some elements of this into my blog. My aim is to give you some ideas to help you build a better relationship with your money.