Money on the Brain: These two websites make it easy to find, donate to charities

Giving should be part of everyone’s budget.

Even if you can’t give a lot of money, giving something to charities and people in need is the right thing to do.

But what if you can’t seem to find the money in your budget to give, or you’re not able to give as much money as you’d like? There are ways to “donate” to charities without actually, you know, giving them any of your money.

Goodsearch is a search engine that donates a portion of any money they make from searches to a charity of your choice. Every time you search for something, your chosen charity has a chance to receive a donation.

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And you don’t need to worry about the quality of the search engine. It is powered by Yahoo!

When you go to Goodsearch.com, you’ll need to set up an account. Then comes the fun part: you get to choose the “cause,” or charity, you’d like to support.

Passionate about pets and animals? You can support the World Wildlife Fund, American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Friends of the Asian Elephant Hospital in Thailand, or The Humane Society.

If those don’t interest you, there are more than 114,000 other causes you can choose from that help sick children, military veterans, schools, doctors, and other groups of people.

If you’d like to help an organization based here in Springfield, again, you have lots of choices.

I did a quick search to see which Springfield organizations you can support with Goodsearch. In just five minutes, I found four schools, three churches and three charities.

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This was not an exhaustive search by any means. I have no doubt there are many other Springfield organizations you can choose from.

And if you don’t see your favorite nonprofit? Just click on the appropriate link to get it listed.

Goodsearch also donates money to your cause if you do your online shopping at its Goodshop site.

It’s really easy to support your cause through Goodshop. First, go to Goodshop.com. Then select an online retailer. Click on the link to that store, and order your items.

Goodshop will then donate a percentage of your purchase to your chosen charity.

For example, if you order from Kohl’s via Goodshop, your cause will earn 1.5% of your purchase. Old Navy earns 2%, Petco earns 1% and Best Buy earns .25%.

Those are small percentages, but it all adds up. Goodsearch and Goodshop have combined to donate over $21 million to nonprofits since 2005.

There are also ways to help charities when you shop at Amazon.

I have written before about the importance of buying local whenever possible. I still urge you to shop at a Springfield-area business first before considering an online retailer.

Having said that, I understand that consumers are not going to stop buying things online. So if you decide to buy something from Amazon, at least do it in such a way that a charity will benefit from your purchase.

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It’s very easy to do: All you have to do is add the word “smile” to the beginning of the website address, like this: “smile.amazon.com.”

The first time you do this, you’ll be asked to choose a charity just like you would with Goodsearch. Then you shop like normal. That’s it.

Every time you buy something, Amazon will donate 0.5% of your eligible purchases to the charity of your choice. Half a percent doesn’t sound like much, but when you are an online behemoth like Amazon, 0.5% can add up to a lot of money.

Amazon says it has donated almost $356 million to over one million non-profit organizations since the program launched in 2013.

I encourage you to keep (or start) giving some of your money to a worthy nonprofit. But you should also bolster your donations by using Goodsearch and by shopping at smile.amazon.com anytime you buy something from Amazon.

It’s too easy not to.

Dave Kinzer is a music teacher and a financial coach in Springfield. Contact him at www.davekinzer.com. His column will appear here every other Wednesday.

This article originally appeared on State Journal-Register: Goodsearch, goodshop websites help users donate to charities