Bye Bye Loius Vuitton

You've heard of living boldly?

Try "giving boldly."  Boston suburb philanthropists Anne and Christopher Ellinge created "The 50% League," for people who have given away more than half of their salary for three years in a row.  Many of the 120 club members are millionaires, but not everyone.

Take  Tom and Bree Hsieh, for example.  According to this article in the OC Register, they make $200,000, and give away all but $48,000:

Tom's dad had been a successful businessman in Taiwan. Here, they had to start over. They were lonely. Hotdogs were disgusting. But there was a payoff: "My children will get an education in schools that are the envy of the world," Tom says his dad thought. "God will reward me for what I've endured."

In eighth grade, Tom decided the high school he was about to enter was not good enough to get him into Cal Tech. So he put together a chart for his parents, showing other school districts with better college admissions rates and SAT scores, as well as median home prices in those areas. His parents agreed to leave West Covina for the more affluent South Pasadena so he could attend high school there.

Tom did get accepted into Cal Tech. But a friend of his happened to be heading off to Harvey Mudd. Tom visited the smaller private college, fell in love and enrolled.

"It was there that my faith came alive," he says. He joined the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship and soon came to a conclusion: "First, that God had love and passion for the poor. And, second, that I did not."
He began working at soup kitchens and doing laundry at shelters to try and change his heart.
This was not what his parents had in mind.

"We kind of had a pact," Tom says. "And instead of being focused on studies and making career my first priority, I was talking to them about God and homeless people."

They disowned him.

After graduating in 1993 with a degree in physics he was offered some lucrative jobs. But fearing they would "move me in a different direction," he turned them down, instead taking a low-paying tech job.
Again he made a spreadsheet of possible neighborhoods where he and a few like-minded friends could live; this time of poor neighborhoods that needed help.

"We weren't just gonna come in and be saviors; but where we could become neighbors." They rented an apartment in south Pomona.

And for the last 13 years, Tom has lived in the same three block radius, despite two stolen cars and a gun fight in front of his apartment, even as his income steadily climbed.

"When I cracked $100,000, I sat my parents down and told them: 'I'm not the Chinese son who buys you the Mercedes,'" he says.

It's an interesting idea, no?  Tonight, I was at a Christmas program at a church, and the singer told of how he saw an impoverished child up close and it changed his life.  He and his wife sold their large house (with jacuzzi and bonus room), started mowing their own grass, and now buy clothes when their others wear out, not when the styles change.  This is so they can afford to sponsor children in impoverished nations on a monthly basis.  This just got me thinking about these kinds of issues... as the Christmas season invariably tends to do.

At any rate, read more about Tom Hsieh's story here, including a story about his lovely wife Bree... who agrees with this philosophy and has given up designer bags to live by it.