Several years ago I wrote an article on how to charge just the right amount to cover the fees Square charges merchants. Today I wanted to donate to a controversial GoFundMe campaign an old friend of mine posted. I thought about donating exactly the right amount to afford him a 1 month bus pass, but I knew that to do that I'd have to account for whatever fees GoFundMe charges. I got this.

GoFundMe charges a flat 7.9% fee + 30¢ per donation as of this post, so let's say you want to give someone $100 but you want to cover the fees for them. How do you arrive at the correct donation?

You could add 7.9% + 30¢ to arrive at $108.20... um $109 (they only do whole dollar amounts), but when GoFundMe takes their cut your donee gets $100.09. That's super boring. Rounding to the nearest dollar really simplifies things! So let's pretend they take pennies so we can do some math.

We're looking for the value x such that x-x*7.9%-0.30=y where y is the amount you want to end up with. Simplify that using algebra and you get x=(y+0.30)/(1-7.9%) or rather x=(y+0.30)/92.1%. For you folks without a % on your calculator that's x=(y+0.30)/0.921.

It's easy enough to see how to generalize the solution, so instead here's a form to help you calculate the right amount.

$42

Pete vs. Phil?

No one is quite sure of the origins of Phil's name... but there are stories
that he was indeed originally called "Punxsutawney Pete" when the first
observations of Groundhog Day were held in the 1800s. One popular story is
that a newspaper reporter kept erroneously calling him "Phil," and that …

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Driving in the Snow

Published: Sat 12 January 2013
By Andrew Jorgensen

In Misc.

I don't like to drive in the snow. Here's why:

Winter of early 2011, snow started coming down lightly in the evening. Much later in the evening, now snowing hard, I finally started to make my way home from my friend's house. As I entered the freeway I flipped around …
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Slimmer Pants

Published: Sun 12 December 2010
By Andrew Jorgensen

In Misc.

No, this post isn't about how I lost 17 lbs over the last few months (more on that later maybe) it's about how I don't like to carry a lot of stuff in my pockets. It's kinda one of my pet peeves. At the same time I can't stand to …
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Pete vs. Phil?

Driving in the Snow

Slimmer Pants

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