We’ve all received heart-rending appeals for contributions to help our veterans deal with their their physical injuries or mental traumas. But if you’re on a lot of mailing lists, there are so many of these charities and non-profit organizations. Which ones deserve your money? If the charity is one of those classified as 501c3 by the IRS, you should be able to find it at CharityNavigator.com.

But it is not easy to get the IRS to hand out this classification, and there are lots more organizations sending out appeals. (Charity Navigator only lists approximately 50 who deal with veterans, but there are at least 300 total organizations.) Many of them are legitimate organizations, and deserve your considerations, but there are a bunch that should be avoided. Among those are ones that are outline scams, with most or all of the money going into the pockets of the scammers. (One frequent clue is the use of a large popular legimate one, with an extra suffix like “Foundation” or “Association”.) Those that are not complete scams may not be very desirable because too much of each donated dollar doesn’t go to benefit the veterans themselves, instead ending up in the pockets of the promoters or their sub-contractors. So what about the other 250-odd ones? WhyMenDieYoung is starting to build a database of them, and will announce its availability when it is complete enough to be useful. In the meantime, we will be posting useful news as we find it, along with our comments.