Don't do it.

Some credit cards/bank services will round up your purchases for you and save whatever extra in a savings account. See if you can do that for a 1 year and see how much money you've been giving away.

Do you like being asked at every transaction to add more money?

If no, then don't incentivize that behavior. Don't reward them for behavior you don't want to see everywhere.

The thing about the corporation paying less taxes is a myth. The extra contribution you make counts as revenue in their books, and that revenue is then offset as a donation, making no overall difference to their tax benefits.

That said, it does help them in other ways, mostly around marketing. They can then say they've made a massive amount of charitable contributions, when really it was their customers that did so.

As others have said, by making that donation at the checkout, you haven't really made an informed decision about whether the charity is one you would donate to otherwise, so if that's important to you you should stop doing so.

The way I look at it, if you are going to make a conscious decision to donate to charities you support, there's no real reason to round up at the checkout. But if you aren't really going to be donating otherwise and you're not struggling financially, you may as well make that small contribution at the checkout.

I wouldn't trust corporations.

Say you want to donate 10 dollars. How do you know they wont lie and pocket 5 dollars and only give the charity 5 dollars.

Just donate directly if you really want to donate. And research the charity before donating.

I rarely recognize the charities they sponsor, and I don't exactly trust McDonalds and Walmart to have the same values as me when they select charities. So no, I don't ever round up. I try to do my due diligence in researching, and I donate on my own.

There are a number of ineffective charities. I wouldn't donate without vetting.

Edit: Okay so the scam could roughly be like this. Legitimate company funnels donations to a charity run by CEO's spouse. Charity funnels 90% of funds to "overhead", 10% goes to specially selected recipients.

Most charities from cooperations are pretty much them getting your money and "donating" and then making it a tax right off benefiting them and only do it because it makes people think there "good" and want to help when it's just a scam for them to manipulate people and get more money.

Donate directly never through corporations. Always

Donations are more aligned with my beliefs when I can choose the charity.

And my country gives smol tax breaks for donations to charities. So I can get some cash back at tax time. I don't get those at the check out.

That's pretty much how it works. I don't know if it's really a should/shouldn't conversation per se. Money is still getting donated to the needy, it's just also kind of undercutting what the company should be doing in terms of taxes and stuff. And some people just can't get themselves to make the time to donate directly.

That said, 100%, if you can get yourself to make the time to donate directly to a cause, that is absolutely undeniably better than letting the company do the roundup thing and you should totally do that instead.

How are we defining "worth it?"

EDIT: THIS IS INCORRECT, the business cannot deduct your donations.~~Yes, the business can claim it as a deduction on their taxes. If it's a business you like, maybe that's a good thing, if it's not then that may be a bad thing. Does the money that goes to charity outweigh whatever harm may come from that company paying less in taxes? I don't know if there's any good way to objectively say that.~~

You don't really get much say in which charity that money goes to, it's just going to whatever charity that company has chosen to partner with. Some charities can be kind of sketchy, not all of them are on the up-and-up. If it's a cause you care about, you may be better off just donating directly yourself to a charity you trust.

Now your individual contributions doing this are really a drop in the bucket, let's say you go to a store and donate at checkout 3 times a week, and since you're rounding up to the nearest dollar, you're donating a max of $1 × 3x a week × 52 weeks a year = a maximum donation of $156 dollars a year donated by rounding, probably going to several different charities, and realistically you're probably donating about half of that unless you have some real OCD about your purchases being even dollar amounts, so probably about $78/year divided up among however many different charities the various places you shop at are involved with.

Now of course you're not the only person making those donations at any given store, each store is probably making hundreds or thousands of dollars in donations between all of their customers rounding up their checks.

Unless you're really struggling, you're probably not going to miss the maybe $100 or so that get siphoned off from you making these donations spread out over a whole year.

Can you Deduct those donations from your own taxes? I'm genuinely not sure, my gut says no (EDIT: you can), but let's say you can. Do you think that $100 or so + whatever other deductable expenses you have in a year are going to beat the standard deduction? If it does, then sure, feel free to save those receipts and try to add it all up, that sounds like more trouble than it's worth to me, but maybe it's worth it for your purposes, there's a lot of different tax situations I won't pretend to know for certain.

Are those charitable donations going to improve your life? That's hard to say, I don't know your life. EDIT to expand on this a bit Are you in a position where you're going to benefit directly from a charity? If you are you may need to reconsider making a donation because you may need that money yourself. Although there are cases where a charity may be able to make better use of money than an individual, for example being able to pool money from donations to buy things in bulk at a better price, but you'd have to know how that organization is ran and how the money is going to get used to determine whether you'll be able to benefit from that directly. Indirectly maybe you'll see some benefits but probably not immediately and it probably won't be immediately obvious. Maybe donating money now to a charity that supports youth sports leads to some kid taking up baseball who wouldn't have been able to afford to otherwise which in turn keeps him off the streets, gets him scholarships, etc. when otherwise he might have ended up in a gang or hooked on drugs or something and broken into your neighbors car 10 years down the line to steal some change which resulted in your insurance rates going up because your in a "high crime area" or something. Or maybe it will just give you a warm fuzzy feeling inside.

Nope, choose a charity or something else to donate to yourself.

Unless they ask if you want to round down, don't accept the offer.

That's not how it works. If you're making a donation through them, it's going to be listed on your receipt. You can use that receipt to declare the donation on your taxes.

My wife and I used to always do those round up things and make donations at the register. One day we decided to pick a couple charities in which we believed and make a couple donations a year to them on our own. I also started to volunteer at a food bank.