24 Hours of Free Money Finance: Make Me Give a Boatload to Charity

Here's where we stand on my big event coming up:

• It's called the 24 Hours of Free Money Finance and is on Monday, October 2
• There'll be one personal finance-related post per hour from 12:01 am on October 2 through 11:59 pm that same day. Yep, that's 24 money posts in 24 hours.
• Every hour, on the hour (i.e. 12 am, 1 am, 2 am, etc.) I will be giving away a FREE item. Yep -- 24 giveaways in all! All you'll need to do is leave a comment on the post within an hour of it going up to be eligible to win it. I will then select a comment at random as the winner.

Today, I want to complete the details of the event by telling you about the charity portion of the day.

It starts with Hurricane Katrina. Last year I did a fundraiser where I matched people's donations to Hurricane Katrina relief and we raised over $10,000. I gave my portion to Samaritan's Purse, a humanitarian organization that specializes in international relief (and rates four stars out of four from Charity Navigator). This year, we haven't had anything as bad as Hurricane Katrina (thank God!) but I still wanted to make a contribution. That's when I came up with the idea to make it part of the 24 Hours of Free Money Finance.

I wanted to come up with a way that everyone that was part of the 24 Hours of Free Money Finance could contribute to this effort -- and that the people who were a bigger part of the event could contribute more. I thought about doing another matching effort, but decided that the participation would be limited (people gave a lot for Katrina relief, but that was very unusual). I also wanted to make it easy (and transparent) to track. So here's what I've decided to do:

For every visitor I have here at Free Money Finance on October 2, 2006, I'll donate $1 to Samaritan's Purse up to a maximum of $5,000. I'll make my donation by December 31, 2006.

There's one big caveat to all this: these need to be legitimate visits. If I get the sense from looking at my stats that people are simply refreshing their browsers over and over again to run up the "visits", I reserve the right to give nothing. So, yes, a cheater can ruin it for everyone.

I'm going into this assuming you all are honest and will be visiting as many posts, links, and giveaways as possible as well as leaving comments, linking to FMF that day, telling friends to visit, etc. to drive lots of traffic. If a bunch of people do that, we'll have no problem reaching $5,000 for that day. (By the way, I get about 2,000 visitors on a normal Monday, so even if nothing unusual happens traffic-wise, there will still be a $2,000 donation.)

Remember, every visit is $1 donated. If you simply visit every giveaway that day, you've made me give away $24. Visit every giveaway and every post -- that's $48. If you get 9 friends to do the same, that's $480 for the 10 of you. See how it can add up?

Ok, a couple final things to add. First of all, you can track progress on that day by looking at my Site Meter stats in the lower right hand portion of Free Money Finance. Click on the visitors number and it will tell you how many visitors we've had so far that day.

Second, you may be wondering "how can I be sure you'll give $5,000 away?" Well, first of all, hopefully all of you know me by now and trust that I wouldn't lie on this issue. But there will probably be many new visitors that day who don't know me yet and may be wondering the same thing. So this is what I'm going to do: I'll send an electronic receipt of my donation to any one of the five other guys that are part of the MoneyBlogNetwork and ask them to verify (on their blog) that the donation was made. And I'll leave it up to you to decide who I should send it to. Simply vote in the comments below, and the one with the most votes gets the nod. Here are the choices:

• AllFinancialMatters
• Blueprint for Financial Prosperity
• Consumerism Commentary
• Five Cent Nickel
• Mighty Bargain Hunter

Any questions? Thoughts?

I hope you all can come to the event -- and come often. It should have lots of great personal finance information, 24 great giveaways, and the chance to give away $5,000 to charity. Oh, yeah. I'll have virtual clowns and elephants to complete the fun, circus-like atmosphere -- you just won't be able to see them. ;-)

Comments

[Blaine Moore (First Time Homeowner)]

My vote goes to five cent nickel!

Looking forward to this; good luck with it all.

[More Bread]

I think it's a great idea. My vote is for AllFinancialMatters.com

[emily]

I vote for allfinancialmatters. I am looking forward to your posts!

[jim]

I vote for me to double check you... haha, nah, I trust you buddy. :)

[jim with a mustache]

I vote for Blueprint too!

[jim with a hairpiece]

Blueprint rocks!

[Quazie]

a vote for blueprint, if you please

[FMF]

Jim --

I think you've been watching too many Peyton Manning commercials! ;-)

[julie]

Blueprint