The most generous counties in South Carolina
March 8, 2019
A recent study by financial technology company SmartAsset set out to find where people are donating the most money. The study measured how much people donate as a percentage of their net income, and the proportion of people in a given county who made charitable donations.
To determine the amount that people donate as a percentage of their income, they first had to calculate people’s net income. To do this, they looked at tax return data and subtracted total taxes paid, mortgage interest, mortgage points and mortgage insurance payments from total income to get each county’s net income. They then divided each county’s total charitable donations by its total net income to see how much county residents are donating relative to their income.
Next, they took the total number of tax returns with charitable donations and divided them by the number of total tax returns for each county to get the proportion of people in each county who make charitable donations.
They then indexed and equally weighted the two factors to yield our most charitable counties score.
For a look at how the top counties in South Carolina ranked, check out the table below:
