Arlo Gilbert’s Blog

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 

-Jack London

Recently I have been engaged in working with a charitable organization… this organization provides a superior education to our children at a very reasonable cost but convincing people to give money has been an arduous task.

I think that many people feel that Charity is giving a few dollars to make themselves feel good, but real charity in my opinion is giving so much that you have to either sacrifice something or you have to worry and hope that more money will come your way in the future.

I’m often skeptical of the word “karma” but sometimes, just sometimes things come back on you two-fold and make you say “whoa”.

In the past 6 months the following events surrounding charity have happened to me:

1. I donated a sizable amount of money to a charity, put in time and served on a few comittees. At the same time I was purchasing a new house. The new house was substantially more expensive and left me carrying two mortgages… two VERY BIG mortgages.Literally the day that we closed on our new home purchase, a random family out of the blue contacted us about our existing house (our existing house was not on the market). They had been looking for a home for over a year, drove by our house, fell in love with it and absolutely “had to have it”.

   We paid no brokers and walked away from what could have been a burdensome financial obligation. An amazingly random turn of events. 3 weeks later we closed on our old home at 10% over what we had paid for it only a year prior. In this market, many people would call that a f**king miracle!
    

2. I agreed to donate $200,000  to the same charity… the following morning an extremely wealthy individual whom I had never met or corresponded with contacted me and offered me $300,000 for something that had cost me only a few dollars (a domain name) several years ago.Not only is the donation tax deductible, but the profits on the name are long term capital gains on intangible property which means we get to take advantage of the 15% tax rate on those profits.

   I am not foolish and have received many offers on this particular domain, so I took it. Truly an unbelievable turn of events.

I’ve learned that money is a lousy way of keeping score. 

-Anonymous

Til later…
-Arlo

Mitzvot dot com is my new project… no it’s not live, in fact it’s not even in development yet, I bought the domain for a few thousand dollars recently (what a steal), but after having a few conversations with my wife about problems that day schools and other small/non-technically savvy organizations have, I decided that me owning mitzvot dot com must be more than a chance… it’s an opportunity to perform a mitzvah!

Not only does the name define exactly what we will do, but it’s a really cool way to help! I’m not 60 with 10 billion dollars (yet) but I am pretty sharp and I do know more about billing credit cards online than pretty much anybody else on the planet… not patting myself on the back, it’s just something I’m exceptionally good at.

So since it’s not exactly a top secret business plan, I envision mitzvot dot com as being a one stop shop for jewish fundraising activities online. We will provide organizations with a single link that they can send to potential donors to collect from $5 to $5000 at a time… we’ll help them manage their silent auctions and charity fund raisers for almost nothing… and the fact is that what we do charge will surely be meaningless when they increase their fundraise significantly.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this is a cool idea, one of the richest and most successful guys on the planet today told me that he thought it was interesting as well. Who could it be? Eh… name dropping is so 2007… but it was definitely my biggest brush with fame.

I’ll try to keep blogging more regularly, when life gets busy sometimes things like blogging fall by the wayside.

-Arlo Gilbert