Giving > Receiving: How Giving & Being Thankful Can Increase Your Happiness

Join our weekly #CreditChat on Periscope, YouTube Live, Twitter, and Snapchat every Wednesday at 3 p.m. ET.  This week, we talked about ways to give back to our communities.

Our featured guest on Twitter was: Brady Josephson, Principal at Shift Charity, Professor and Writer.

The panel included: Sloane Keane: Chief Development Officer at Big Brothers Big Sisters of OC and Mike Delgado: Director of Social Media at Experian.

We also featured financial tips all week on Snapchat.

Some stats about giving to charities from nptrust.org and charitynavigator.org:

  • The average annual household gives $2,974 per year to charities
  • 64.5 million adults volunteered 7.9 billion hours of services (value of $175 billion)
  • There are more than 57,000 charitable organizations in the U.S.
  • Americans gave $373.25 billion to charities in 2015
  • Majority of charitable dollars goes to religion (32%) education (15%), human services (12%), grantmaking foundations (11%) and health (8%)
  • Historically, charitable giving rises about 1/3 as fast as the stock market

Questions We Discussed:

  • Q1: Have you ever donated your time or money to help a cause you believe in? How?
  • Q2: Why is giving back important?
  • Q3: What are some ways you’d encourage others to start helping others?
  • Q4: How can parents get their kids involved in charitable giving?
  • Q5: How can you find out about organizations in need?
  • Q6: Before donating money, how can you verify the organization is legit?
  • Q7: What are some ways to support our military families?
  • Q8: How can we do a better job helping the homeless and hungry in our communities?
  • Q9: How can giving to others increase your happiness?
  • Q10: Do you have any final tips for others to pay if forward?

View the Entire Discussion via Storify

If you’ve never heard about #CreditChat, here is a brief overview:

Recent chats on YouTube:

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