Donate to Charity With Capital One Credit Cards

RSF Social Finance reports that “Capital One credit cards provide an innovative rewards system where you can donate to any charity of your choice that uses Network for Good. Capital One will pay the fees, you get the tax benefit, and your favorite charity has more funding!”

Give cash or donate No Hassle Rewards with a Capital One credit card and 100% of your donation reaches your charity.

What a great collaboration. Instead of vilifying credit card companies, as many of us do, you can partner with one to do good.

It’s too easy and convenient to blame our economic problems on the “bad guys” and avoid asking ourselves how our own choices contribute to the current financial crisis. It’s not us against them, whoever “they” happen to be. When we look for common ground, and let go of labeling some people as good and others as bad, we create changes that everyone can buy into.

Why Look At Conflicts With Money and Work?

You may have no need to look more deeply into your feelings and beliefs about money and work. If you have little tension, resentment, sadness, or other flavors of unhappiness in these areas, more power to you. If not, keep reading.

My friend, Kyle, is surprised and grateful at how much his life has improved since he started looking at his job and money issues. Creative and smart, he still couldn’t figure out why, by his 45th birthday, he’d never landed a good job, didn’t have enough money to live comfortably, and was phobic about having children despite enjoying them. These issues were brought home to him all the more when his girlfriend handed him his birthday present, a book called The Seven Stages of Money Maturity by George Kinder. Kyle has an aversion to anything that resembles a self-help book. But sensing that his girlfriend really wanted him to to read it, he sat down that night, sighed, and began to read.

By 6 a.m. the following morning, he was nearly finished, and thinking hard about his father. A loving but unhappy man, Kyle’s father made a decent living in work he was not suited for and thoroughly disliked. Either he communicated, or Kyle believed he heard, the message that dads make good money, dislike their jobs, and live this way because they have children.

Kinder gets you thinking about what you learned early in life regarding money and work, and how these messages shaped your view of yourself and what is possible. Pretty soon, you start to realize that your former rock-solid truths about what you must do with money, what you cannot do in your work life, are ideas that you can keep or discard. This prepares you to make changes in how you work and handle money — not how your sister, the people you graduated with, the Greenpeace activist, the conservative businessperson live out their time and energy in this world.

“So,” you say, “Kyle finished this book, got a great job he loves that pays $150,000 a year, got married to that incredible woman and now they have a houseful of adorable children!” Well, not exactly. But he is following the suggestions Kinder offers in the book, earning more money, working at a much more interesting job — and coming to appreciate and respect his irritating, puzzling, wonderful father.