Start small and step up your giving every year. The percentage you give this year matters far less than the direction that percentage is moving.
Start small and step up your giving every year. The percentage you give this year matters far less than the direction that percentage is moving.
Randy Alcorn makes the case in The Treasure Principle with a line built to unsettle comfortable math: "Tithing isn't the ceiling of giving; it's the floor." For families who grew up treating ten percent as the finish line, Alcorn reframes it as the starting block. The question is never whether you have arrived at the correct number. The question is whether the number is still growing.
Why a step-up rather than a leap? Because giving behaves like every other family money habit in this corpus: it compounds, and compounding rewards consistency over intensity. A family that jumps to a heroic percentage in a burst of conviction usually retreats the first year money gets tight, and the retreat teaches the children that generosity is a luxury for good years. A family that starts at two percent and adds one point every year barely feels any single step, yet within a decade it has built a giving culture most families never reach, and built it without a single crisis of willpower. The step-up also solves the problem that quietly kills generosity in growing households: lifestyle rises to absorb every raise. If your giving percentage is fixed by an annual decision that fires before the raise gets spent, generosity claims its share of your growth automatically instead of negotiating for leftovers. That is the same first-fruits ordering principle that runs through the stewardship tradition, applied not once but on a ratchet.
Here is the habit, once a year:
LegacyPot wires the step-up into your pots. Your giving pot carries its percentage, and once a year the app raises the question with the reminder: "Start where you are. A small first-fruits habit today becomes a generous family culture in ten years." Adjust the rate, and every future allocation follows it without another thought.
This week, write down what percentage of income your family actually gave last year, because the ratchet cannot start until you know the floor you are standing on.